Torme's Career Has Led Him Down the Write Path : Jazz: The singer-songwriter, whose 'Great American Songbook' is coming to Anaheim, has also made hits as a biographer and novelist.

By BILL KOHLHAASE

Jan. 31, 1992 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

It may sound like a dream sequence out of “Night Court,” but it’s true: Bob Dylan really did show up one day late last year on the doorstep of another musical legend--Mel Torme.

The reason for this meeting of musicians from two distinctly different worlds? Dylan was there to discuss his purchase of the film rights to Torme’s latest book, “Traps, the Drum Wonder,” a biography of the jazz singer and arranger’s longtime friend, Buddy Rich.

“We had a long, long meeting,” Torme said last week during a phone interview from his home in Beverly Hills. “We ran a bunch of (film) footage of Buddy performing, trying to decide where to place the emphasis in the movie.”

And how did Torme, a.k.a. “The Velvet Fog,” get along with Dylan, a singer who might generously be called “The Sandpaper Frog”?

“I had never met him before, so I had a little trepidation when the guy came to the house. I didn’t know what Bob Dylan would be like. But he was great! Just wonderful! We had a good lunch together. He was very voluble, very well-spoken. I really like the guy.” And although the movie has a long ways to go before being made, Torme says Dylan seems “extremely interested” in doing it.

“Traps,” which has just moved into its third printing, is not the first book the singer-arranger has written. In addition to his 1988 autobiography, “It Wasn’t All Velvet,” Torme wrote “The Other Side of the Rainbow,” a 1970 account of his experiences with Judy Garland while he served as musical adviser on her 1963 CBS-TV variety show. Torme also has authored a novel, “Wynner” published in 1978.

The singer says he wrote about both Garland and Rich because of personal ties. “I think to just pull somebody out of the blue and sit down and write a book about them doesn’t work. In the case of Judy, I wrote all the (musical) material for her television show. That book isn’t a biography, but an eyewitness account of what went on day by day on the show.”

It was Buddy Rich himself who encouraged Torme to write about him. “Buddy and I were best friends on and off for over 40 years. He constantly said, ‘Hey man, I like the Garland book. Why don’t you write my biography?’ He didn’t badger me about it, but he mentioned it many times over the years.” “Finally, when I found out he was irreversibly ill, I went to him and said, “Maybe we’d better get started on this.” So we got under way, and it was rather tragic. I had one day with him--one day. We started on the first day of April, 1987, and he died the next day.”

These days, Torme, 66, has taken time off from writing a crime novel to prepare music for a nationwide tour, dubbed “The Great American Songbook,” with Maureen McGovern. The show reaches the Celebrity Theatre in Anaheim on Sunday.

“We didn’t want to do just another wonderful nostalgia show,” the singer said. “That would really bore me.”

Instead, the program will embrace the entire spectrum, past to near-present, of the American pop tune. “The thing I like about (the program) is that between Maureen, who has her own repertoire, and myself, virtually every phase of what we call the popular song will be represented.

“Of course we’ll be doing some older tunes. I’ll be doing some Cole Porter--I’ll do ‘You Make Me Feel So Young.’ But I’m also doing some (Burt) Bacharach, a tune by Neil Sedaka, a tune by Paul Williams.”

While he realizes that Sedaka, Bacharach and Williams may not represent the cutting edge of the current pop scene, Torme feels that theirs is the most recent material he can honestly do.

“I’m having trouble in this day and age finding absolutely current contemporary songs that I can sing with any credibility,” he said. “But certainly there are songs in the recent past that work very well for me.”

“When I set out to do the ‘Great American Songbook,’ I really did try to mine something out of the current crop of songs. But in an age of rap and heavy metal, there’s not a lot of attention paid to the so-called popular ballad or the pop rhythm tune. I can’t find anything.”

In addition to their individual sets, Torme and McGovern will combine their voices for a nearly 20-minute assortment of Rodgers and Hart tunes. Torme, who arranged the medley as well as many of the numbers he’ll perform without McGovern, said he spent more than a month writing out the parts for the 16-piece orchestra that will back them.

“Honest to God, I got up every morning at 6 a.m. to orchestrate this medley, working for maybe three or four hours every day. You know I’ve never studied music, and I’m extremely slow, just pedestrian, about writing out arrangements.”

Add to this a series of arrangements he’s writing for a Christmas album, which he’s scheduled to record this spring with the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra, and he has little time for his second career as an author. That’s another reason Torme is looking forward to his long U.S. tour with McGovern and “The Great American Songbook.”

“When I’m on the road, I read an awful lot of true crime accounts. I’m fascinated by aberrant behavior, not that I’m thrilled by it or like it, but it’s an interesting subject: why people do what they do.”

And, he says, there’ll be more time for writing--of the literary type. “Once we start the tour, I’m free of the bloody piano. I’ll be free to pursue my laptop computer keyboard again.”

Mel Torme and Maureen McGovern appear Sunday at 6 p.m. at the Celebrity Theatre, 201 E. Broadway, Anaheim. Tickets: $28. (714) 999-9536.