Nat King Cole - the one and only thread

the greatest

I dig some of those early Ray Charles tunes where he just shamelessly cops Nat's vocal style.

Totally re-digging him. Little sly touches in all the small band stuff, very zen piano lines, and he sure knew how to sing the hell out of a song. Shame that he thought that cigarettes gave him his voice; turned out to be a very bad long-term strategy.

he is amazing. i've got one of those cheapo proper 4CD box sets and it is wonderful thorughout.

what happend to that first half of the century songs poll (1900-1950) that was discussed after Johnny Fever's 50's poll? Am I imaginging this?

Anyway, Nat King Cole would own that list (with Nature Boy and The Christmas Song at least) even if he was really at his peak later.

I wish this period of pop music was discussed more often. the rock-and-rol-is-the-beggining-of-great-pop-music paradigm is long dead but you wouldn't know it from studying "greatest songs/artist/albums/compilations" list that are being created all the time.

*list

*lists dammit!

Me on Nat's 20 Golden Greats: http://nobilliards.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/nat-king-cole-20-golden-greats.html.

I was just listening to the Trio's version of "You're the Cream in My Coffee" and lol'd at "Yer my Worcestershire, dear"

bedtime music this past week. works.

I was looking for Nat King Cole Christmas music as I usually around this time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCYApJtsyd0

The greatest voice ever

Stardust the greatest vocal performance ever

Centennial today so straighten up and fly right.

The trio recordings are some of my favorite jazz by anyone. They're overshadowed by his crooner stuff, which is obviously great too, but those '40s sides are just unimpeachable.

Yup

Thirded

Having grown up with his pop stuff (my parents had this big six-album collection drawn from his Capitol years), he symbolizes the sleepy-time '50s to me--the pre-rock 'n' roll '50s, which really stuck around until the late '60s, though relegated to the bottom half of the pop charts by then--better than Patti Page or Rosemary Clooney or anybody else. There's a great scene in Badlands that illustrates that well.

http://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/91Lg0Pd4RQL._SX425_.jpg

The collection I'm talking about:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/91Lg0Pd4RQL._SX425_.jpg

If you haven't seen Badlands:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Az6--30U0xw

A jazz podcast I listen to did a feature the other week on his trio recordings, which I had never heard - incredible stuff, couldn't believe I'd been missing out on them all these years, will definitely be digging into it. They mentioned that he made a few instrumental piano LPs in the 50s? Are those worth seeking out?

Standing on Yonge St. in Toronto (early '50s, I think).

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c17dc151aef1d1123479f51/5c1bef63c2241b9f1c37652d/5c4642ddcd83663a0964455b/1552508570976/Nat-King-Cole-CBC.jpeg?format=750w

xxxps to tipsy

Like the sound of that, all the 40's trio stuff I have of his has vox, any particular collection you'd recommend?

I’ll take mine with the oss and fay and shifafa on the side, please.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gk9uGPugXkc

this one always knocks me out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJqTZJTg-BM

this one is overwhelming

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaYLWSo4fYM

This guy is incredibly smooth

I gather there's probably not a canonical album, but is there a recommended compilation?

Anyone recommend a biography?

I think I first got into Nat via a CD of early recordings which I think came free with a newspaper, ha.

Later I had a very good LP called Trio Days which was all instrumentals from that period, there are lots of similar compilations around that can probably be picked up very cheap.

OTOH this youtube playlist has basically everything that was on the LP I had, nearly in the same order!

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_mc3F2vYWCpRA__fnevevPzPNmj_0nC3Yw

Could basically just listen to this forever

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Mix2gQj8Dk

This jazzed up Rachmaninov is so good:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM-FxdJgBW4

I've been playing The Very Thought of You while I work all day today. Jesus.

i only learned a couple years ago about his work as an instrumentalist, had always thought of him as purely a crooner, & cant believe i missed out on so much good stuff for so long

I didn't know about Cole's work as a pianist until a jazz teacher brought it up in class. I was floored when I got The Complete "After Midnight" Sessions (which has been reissued many times - there was an affordable SACD that sounded great, but it's now out-of-print and very expensive). A wonderful trio, and Cole really was a great jazz pianist.

Will Friedwald wrote a book on Cole - that may be worth checking out if want to explore his vocal records. I have a compilation somewhere that's great, but there have been so many that it's hard to recommend one without being more familiar with all of them.

Nat King Cole Sings / George Shearing Plays is one of my all time faves even without Nat on the keys. All of it just works.

thanks all, good recommendations.

that "The Man I Love" is wonderful

I have nothing to add except, yes, his piano playing and trio were top-notch and he is still great even when “just” singing.

damn, that Friedwald book is 651 pages

Prolific author, him.

Be warned, Friedwald hates rock music. But he's one of the best authorities on pre-rock pop music at the moment and certainly the most published who's still alive. (Gary Giddins is great too, though he's primarily a jazz critic and anything he writes on pre-rock pop is rooted in a jazz perspective - that would be mine as well, so that's no criticism against him.)

I was revisiting "The Christmas Song (Merry Christmas To You)" tonight - a rare straight up holiday record (or records, I should say) that's actually a truly great recording. Aside from "Nature Boy," it's arguably Cole's greatest vocal release.

Thing is, Cole has recorded multiple versions of this song. Not an unusual practice, especially when the transition from mono to stereo was involved, but what's really disappointing is that the version that gets the most play these days is the least enjoyable one. Capitol commissioned an animated video that they uploaded to social media and YouTube two years ago, and THAT is the version they used for it. (To date, it's got 13 million plays on YouTube alone.) Wikipedia says this is the definitive version, but I vehemently disagree. I'll explain why in a minute.

First, here's what's reportedly the first studio recording of this song ever. It was famously written on an unbearably hot summer day in 1945, and this recording session happened a year later, featuring a trio arrangement by Cole, accompanied only by Oscar Moore on guitar and Johnny Miller on bass. (I may have posted this upthread, but I actually think Cole's jazz trio recordings are the best records he's ever made. I do think he is a great vocalist, but for various reasons including the songs involved and the musicianship, I play those earlier records more often than his vocal records.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Isf42hchmD4

Great recording, but this version wasn't released until 1989 when it was accidentally included on one of Rhino Records' Christmas CD compilations. It was originally shelved because Cole decided to re-record it with more accompaniment: four strings, a harp, and drums. Capitol didn't like the idea because they thought it would alienate his core audience, but Cole prevailed. Recorded a little over two months later in August, it was released in November and became an enormous hit. For my money, this is the definitive version.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-RXKcc0sZs

Soon, magnetic tape would be introduced into the recording industry, and by 1953, Capitol probably wanted to reissue a version that sounded more "modern" in terms of sound quality. So Nelson Riddle (who was only a year into his run of era-defining recordings with Frank Sinatra) arranged the song for a full orchestra, and Cole recorded a new version on to analog tape:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlH9i6GN4yM

A great version as well, but Cole recorded yet another version 7 1/2 years later because by then STEREO had been introduced. This performance is the one most people hear today, and last year it was the one the Library of Congress selected for preservation. It's a really good performance, and I can see why people may prefer it....but the original mix is awful. It commits the same horrible sins as many of the earliest stereo records released by Capitol, RCA, Verve and others - it drowns everything, particularly the vocalist, in a shitload of echo, and I fucking hate that sound. It's so damn schmaltzy and it's probably why I never liked the record until I heard the 2013 remix presented below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fICNF8o2R-g

The first-generation three-track session tape does NOT have any of the compression, equalization and most importantly any of the echo that was added to the original stereo mix. When Analogue Productions reissued a large batch of Nat King Cole records in 2013, they hired Steve Hoffman and Kevin Gray to engineer them. A lot of ridiculous baggage attached to Hoffman, but to be fair, he usually does an amazing job with music of this vintage, and what he did here was make a new stereo mixdown from the original three-track, adding a much more tasteful and restrained level of equalization and echo to the recording. Night and day difference - I still prefer the original 1946 hit, but there's no denying that this 2013 mix of the 1961 recording is pretty stunning for its fidelity.

Sorry - for that last link, jump to 15:07. I tried to bake that timecode into the link, but it didn't work.

this instrumental album penthouse serenade is great

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdUJUdOdeH8

"What'll I Do"----King Cole Trio, Vocals, piano, bass, electric guitar, 1947:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXVWwJaF6pc

The best Irving Berlin song I've heard, this side of "Blue Skies," and it suits the early noir era.

my Dad was a giant Nat King Cole fan and I loved "Straighten Up & Fly Right" so much. The Trio is wonderful, just timeless music

Otm

Anybody familiar with Nat King Cole En Espanol? I (still!) only know this great left field tribute to it---from my 2012 P&J comments:

I'm totally infatuated with David Murray Cuban Ensemble Play Nat King Cole En Espanol(some of these songs are Portuguese too, maybe). According to the press sheet, Cole's original versions, replete with stiff phonetic phrasing of fluid melodies, were received with affectionate amusement by his Latin fans (recalling Airto Moreita on Brazilian response to Getz's bossa nova). But IKC and/or his producers chose songs of amazing potential--there's no sense of Murray imposing his own thing, and/or renovating from the ground up. Stuff, frequently new stuff, happens every second, imposing no impressions of hyperactivity or claustrophobia. He likes to feature different sections of his Ensemble on diff subsets and recurring approaches--the horns don't ride your ass into the ground or the wallpaper, the accordion doesn't perk you into terminal Starbucks. A Yoda-like tango singer pops up at just the right moments. Murray's string arrangements alone are worth the price of admission (and would be even if I had actually paid for this disc, no doubt. Sure as Stefani!

IKC? Ice King Cole, baby (maybe).

I discovered it because of its prominent usage on the soundtrack for WKW’s In The Mood For Love and it’s brilliant. I love chuckling at his pronunciation.

Key sauce
Key sauce
Key sauce

Invaluable radio show Night Lights listens to "Nat King Cole, Jazz Pianist"--from transcript:

...when Cole started out in the late 1930s, he thought of himself as a jazz pianist, and singing came as an afterthought, though it emerged early in the career of what came to be known as the Nat King Cole Trio--a swinging configuration of piano, guitar and bass and unison vocals that eventually morphed into a unit where Cole took the spotlight as primary singer...It wasn‘t a singer, though, but a pianist who made a deep impression on the young Nat King Cole, who was born on March 17, 1919 and grew up in Chicago. In 1957 he told DownBeat writer John Tynan that Earl Hines had been a key early role model:

It was his driving force that appealed to me. I first heard Hines in Chicago when I was a kid. He was regarded as the Louis Armstrong of piano players. His was a new, revolutionary kind of playing because he broke away from the eastern style. He broke that barrier, the barrier of what we called ‘stride piano,‘ where the left hand kept up a steady striding pattern.

... Pianist Bill Charlap has described Cole as "essentially a linear player (as opposed to a harmonic one)" but goes on to say that Cole‘s "linear language was a lot more streamlined and closer to the modern era" than his forebears Hines, Wilson and Tatum. "When I hear Nat," Charlap says, I hear foreshadowings especially of Oscar Peterson and the whole Detroit school, especially Tommy Flanagan and Hank Jones." As jazz critic Dan Morgenstern pointed out, you can hear how Cole influenced Peterson even in the short solo from this 1946 recording that Cole made under a pseudonym for the Keynote label.
...Decades later, reviewing a box-set reissue of the Cole trio‘s Capitol recordings, critic Gary Giddins wrote,

A few aspects of Cole‘s musicianship are immediately evident: the astonishing independence of voice and piano, for one--he rarely settles for mere pacing chords, preferring octaves and chromatic bass lines and subtly configured harmonies that complement and deepen the vocal interpretation. Then there is his wit and speed, lightning reflexes that hardly ever call attention to his technique but constantly spice his solos, interludes, intros, and codas. Then there is his lucidity and swing: on practically every one of those relatively rare occasions in which he performed with major jazz soloists, he stole the limelight. His solos are melodically sure, often sounding through-composed. His famous quote-heavy version of ‘Body and Soul,‘ of which there are several versions, is a spectacle of compression and relaxation… He had an individual sound on the piano, and a rare ability to shade that sound to the setting.

Lots of music here too, and btw if you see Video Missing on this transcript page, don't worry, you can stream the whole thing, also download it, if you have something like Chrome's Sound Pirate:
https://indianapublicmedia.org/nightlights/nat-king-cole-jazz-pianist.php

....