Melvin Howard Tormé was born in Chicago on September 13, 1925, into a Jewish family; his father, William, was an immigrant from Brest, in present-day Belarus. He was performing before he started school: at four he sang "You're Driving Me Crazy" with the Coon-Sanders Orchestra at the Blackhawk restaurant and was invited back to sing every Monday night for six months. From 1933 to 1941 he worked as a child actor on network radio serials, including The Romance of Helen Trent and Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy. He played drums in his grammar-school drum-and-bugle corps, absorbed jazz in a largely Black South Side neighborhood, wrote his first song at thirteen, and at sixteen saw his first published song, "Lament to Love," become a hit for bandleader Harry James.

In 1942 and 1943 he sang, drummed and arranged in a band led by Chico Marx, and in 1943 he made his film debut in Higher and Higher, Frank Sinatra's first picture. By 1944 he had formed the Mel-Tones, a vocal group modeled on Sinatra and the Pied Pipers whose members included Les Baxter and Ginny O'Connor. The group fronted Artie Shaw's orchestra on Musicraft sides in 1946, among them "I Got the Sun in the Morning," recorded in Hollywood on April 30, 1946, and made records of its own; its jazz-inflected close harmony is usually cited as a forerunner of The Hi-Lo's, The Four Freshmen and The Manhattan Transfer. Discharged from the Army in 1946, he began a solo career in 1947, and appearances at New York's Copacabana led the disc jockey Fred Robbins to dub him "the Velvet Fog," a nickname Tormé never liked. At Capitol from 1949 he had his only number one hit with "Careless Hands," and his extended composition California Suite became the label's first 12-inch LP.

The decisive jazz chapter began in 1955, when Tormé signed with Bethlehem Records and asked to work with the arranger Marty Paich, whose cool-jazz-influenced writing he admired. The Dek-tette was Tormé's idea, modeled on the tentette of Gerry Mulligan. The first album, Mel Tormé with the Marty Paich Dek-Tette, was recorded on January 20, 1956, with trumpeters Pete Candoli and Don Fagerquist, altoist Bud Shank, tenorist Bob Cooper, bassist Red Mitchell and drummer Mel Lewis, and opened with "Lulu's Back in Town." It was followed by Mel Tormé Sings Fred Astaire (recorded in Los Angeles in November 1956) and a remake of California Suite (recorded in Hollywood in March 1957), part of a run of Bethlehem albums with Paich-led groups. Between those sessions, Bethlehem's 1956 box set of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess cast him as Porgy opposite Frances Faye's Bess, with Russell Garcia conducting.

At Verve he made Mel Tormé Swings Shubert Alley (1960), with a Paich orchestra that included Art Pepper, Bill Perkins, Frank Rosolino, Stu Williamson and Mel Lewis, and the album is widely regarded as the Paich collaboration's peak. In Los Angeles in 1961 he recorded I Dig the Duke! I Dig the Count! with Johnny Mandel's arrangements and a band that included Shelly Manne, Jimmy Rowles and Teddy Edwards. His 1962 single "Comin' Home Baby," arranged by Claus Ogerman, reached number 13 in the United Kingdom, and the Atlantic album Comin' Home Baby!, arranged by Ogerman and Shorty Rogers, followed that year. Through the 1960s and 1970s he covered the pop songs of the day, rarely staying long with one label, and wrote songs and arrangements for The Judy Garland Show in 1963 and 1964 until a dispute ended the job, an episode he later turned into his first book, The Other Side of the Rainbow (1970).

A revival of vocal jazz in the 1970s restored his reputation as a jazz singer. He played as many as 200 dates a year, and in 1976 he won an Edison Award for best male singer and a DownBeat award for best male jazz singer. In January 1978 he recorded Together Again, for the First Time with Buddy Rich's big band in New York, with Hank Jones in the rhythm section and Phil Woods as a guest. From 1982 he recorded for Concord Jazz, where he did much of his best late work. The first of six albums with the pianist George Shearing, An Evening with George Shearing & Mel Tormé, was recorded live at the Peacock Court of San Francisco's Hotel Mark Hopkins on April 15, 1982, with bassist Brian Torff, and won the Grammy for best jazz vocal performance by a male singer at the 1983 ceremony; Top Drawer, recorded in San Francisco in March 1983 with bassist Don Thompson, won the same award a year later. Concord also issued Mel Tormé, Rob McConnell and the Boss Brass (1986) and its sequel Velvet & Brass (1995), a Marty Paich reunion on Reunion (1988), with Ken Peplowski, Jeff Hamilton and Gary Foster in the band, and its companion In Concert Tokyo (1989), the Cleo Laine and John Dankworth duet album Nothing Without You (1992), and A Tribute to Bing Crosby (1994). His later working trio was John Colianni, John Leitham and Donny Osborne, and Chuck Redd was the vibraphonist in his all-star quintet from 1991 to 1996.

Outside the studio he acted (nine guest appearances as himself on the sitcom Night Court, and a 1995 Seinfeld episode), wrote the autobiography It Wasn't All Velvet (1988), the Buddy Rich biography Traps, the Drum Wonder (1991), My Singing Teachers (1994) and the novel Wynner (1978), and composed more than 250 songs, among them "The Christmas Song," written with Bob Wells in the summer of 1945 and first recorded by Nat King Cole in June 1946. A stroke on August 8, 1996, ended his singing career; his last recorded concert, at the Disney Institute in Florida on July 23, 1996, was later released as An Evening with Mel Tormé. He received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in February 1999 and passed away on June 5, 1999, in Los Angeles, at the age of 73.

Tormé sang in a high, light voice, was also a working drummer, and arranged much of his own material, so that his vocal line often behaves like a horn chorus. He regarded Ella Fitzgerald as his idol, and an obituary essay by John Andrews pairs them: both were rooted in the swing era yet took in bebop, paraphrased ballad melodies with restraint, and, unlike Sinatra, would cut loose with scat choruses on up-tempo numbers. His records with Marty Paich, built on tuba pedal points, shout choruses and block-scored West Coast horns, are the high point of cool-school vocal jazz, and Mel Tormé Swings Shubert Alley made the Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings' core collection; the 1980s duets with Shearing show a second manner, a mainstream-swing and standards partnership in which the two men, in Shearing's words, breathed together. His own Mel-Tones helped establish the jazz vocal group that later groups developed, and Gerry Mulligan's tentette supplied the model for the Dek-tette. His career also included teen-idol pop in the late 1940s, Capitol hit records, 1960s pop covers and television work, which is why some reference works class him with traditional pop singers; the weight of his recorded body of work from 1955 onward, two best male jazz vocal Grammys, jazz-poll honors and four decades of club, festival and Concord Jazz dates place him squarely among the major jazz singers.