ssh tunnel without having mysql service running

So I have a MySQL database that can only be connected from a Linux server. The server itself doesn’t have a mysql service running, but I can still connect to the database using mysql -u username -p'password' -h serverIP -P portNumber somehow (I don’t know how, since the service is not running).

So with the above, I thought I could use MySQL workbench from my Windows machine and use Standard TCP/IP over SSH. So I put in all the credentials, but it fails with the message error reading initial communication packet. Does this mean it requires mysql service in the Linux machine to run?