If you think you owe somebody one, don’t be surprised if they bend you out of your way for the payback. David Was gave Mel Tormé a rave review sometime in 1982; Tormé got in touch and suggested working together. I’m not sure how much attention he devoted to the lyrics on the first Was (Not Was) album but those on the second, Born To Laugh At Tornadoes, were sufficiently warped to darn at least one of Paul Haines’ socks. The album has never appeared on CD; some say this was down to Tormé’s reticence to let the world hear “Zaz Turned Blue,” but the track did appear carefully hidden away at the tail end of a posthumous 4CD box set.
The key is that Tormé sings it straight. The song is a light-verging-on-terminal vignette, perched midway between Carver and Coupland, about this kid Zaz who indulges with wrestling-hold-as-psychoasphyxiation-turn-on one night in the park (“Steve squeezed his neck/He figured…what the heck?”) but then collapses (“Zaz turned blue…what were we supposed to do?”) following which he joins the Marines – “at the age of eighteen” Tormé intones with Tom Clay-ish solemnity - fights, or maybe doesn’t fight, for a bit, then comes back to hang out, shoot pool and wear a silly grin on his chin. A typical Was (Not Was) scenario, in other words.
But Tormé and his pianist Mike Renzi don’t treat it like chapter 439 of “Out Come The Freaks”; the Velvet Fog applies his most tender compassion to the song, treats it as though it were “It Was A Very Good Year” or “None But The Lonely Heart”; his tenor soft, tactile, arching to noble when required, the melody played slowly and delicately. With his final, undemonstrably extended “blue,” into which he indeed seems to vanish into the blue of the air, Tormé turns the song into a starkly lush elegia; for what, it’s not quite certain, but he defies both himself and his listener to drop the straight face; he clearly had some idea of the cumulative absurdity of what he was singing, and in turn what does that tell us about Pavlovian responses to emotional signifiers related to the grain of a voice? He started out in 1946 as one of Artie Shaw’s bluffingly bright harmony singers wondering “What Is This Thing Called Love?” and in the intermediate lifetime he continually sought to supersede the notion of voice as direct expression of words; he was Art Pepper without the horn and without the drug hassles. “Zaz Turned Blue”’s implication might yet turn out to be: was that all there was?
The key is that Tormé sings it straight. The song is a light-verging-on-terminal vignette, perched midway between Carver and Coupland, about this kid Zaz who indulges with wrestling-hold-as-psychoasphyxiation-turn-on one night in the park (“Steve squeezed his neck/He figured…what the heck?”) but then collapses (“Zaz turned blue…what were we supposed to do?”) following which he joins the Marines – “at the age of eighteen” Tormé intones with Tom Clay-ish solemnity - fights, or maybe doesn’t fight, for a bit, then comes back to hang out, shoot pool and wear a silly grin on his chin. A typical Was (Not Was) scenario, in other words.
But Tormé and his pianist Mike Renzi don’t treat it like chapter 439 of “Out Come The Freaks”; the Velvet Fog applies his most tender compassion to the song, treats it as though it were “It Was A Very Good Year” or “None But The Lonely Heart”; his tenor soft, tactile, arching to noble when required, the melody played slowly and delicately. With his final, undemonstrably extended “blue,” into which he indeed seems to vanish into the blue of the air, Tormé turns the song into a starkly lush elegia; for what, it’s not quite certain, but he defies both himself and his listener to drop the straight face; he clearly had some idea of the cumulative absurdity of what he was singing, and in turn what does that tell us about Pavlovian responses to emotional signifiers related to the grain of a voice? He started out in 1946 as one of Artie Shaw’s bluffingly bright harmony singers wondering “What Is This Thing Called Love?” and in the intermediate lifetime he continually sought to supersede the notion of voice as direct expression of words; he was Art Pepper without the horn and without the drug hassles. “Zaz Turned Blue”’s implication might yet turn out to be: was that all there was?
