Nat King Cole - Rarities '2022

Tracks list

Tracklist:

01. Lester Leaps In (Live at Philharmonic Hall, Los Angeles, 1944)
02. Back To The Land
03. I Cover The Waterfront (12" Version)
04. Somebody Loves Me
05. Back To The Land
06. I Want To Be Happy
07. I Cover The Waterfront (Master Take)
08. Peg O' My Heart
09. I've Found A New Baby
10. Mean To Me
11. The Man I Love
12. Rosetta
13. Tea For Two (Live at Philharmonic Hall, Los Angeles, 1944)
14. Blues (Live at Philharmonic Hall, Los Angeles, 1944)
15. Body And Soul (Live at Philharmonic Hall, Los Angeles, 1944)
16. Sweet Lorraine (Live at Philharmonic Hall, Los Angeles, 1944)
17. The Man I Love (Live at Philharmonic Hall, Los Angeles, 1944)
18. I've Found A New Baby (Live at Philharmonic Hall, Los Angeles, 1944)
19. Rosetta (Live at Philharmonic Hall, Los Angeles, 1944)
20. Bugle Call Rag (Live at Philharmonic Hall, Los Angeles, 1944)
21. One O'Clock Jump (Live at Philharmonic Hall, Los Angeles, 1944)
22. Oh, Lady Be Good! (Live at Philharmonic Hall, Los Angeles, 1944)


 moreSuch controversies do not obscure his real talent as a performer,
however. The dismay of jazz fans at his abandonment of the genre must be
measured against his accomplishments as a jazz musician. An heir of Earl Hines,
whom he studied closely as a child in Chicago, Cole was an influence on such
followers as Oscar Peterson, and his trio, emerging in the dying days of the
swing era, helped lead the way in small-band jazz. The rage felt by jazz fans as
he moved primarily to pop singing is not unlike the anger folk music fans felt
when Bob Dylan turned to rock in the mid-'60s; in both cases, it was all the
more acute because fans felt that one of their leaders -- not just another
musician -- was joining the enemy. Less well-remembered, however, are Cole's
accomplishments during and after that transition. His rich, husky voice and
careful enunciation, and the warmth, intimacy, and good humor of his approach to
singing, allowed him to succeed with both ballads and novelties -- so much so
that he scored over 100 pop chart singles and more than two-dozen chart albums
over a period of 20 years, enough to rank him behind only Sinatra as the most
successful pop singer of his generation.

Nat King Cole was born Nathaniel Adams Coles in Montgomery, Alabama, on March
17, 1919. (In his early years of music-making, he dispensed with the "s" at the
end of his name.) As a Black child born to a poor family in the American South
at the time, he did not have a birth certificate; his March 17 birthday was
recalled because it was also St. Patrick's Day. He listed conflicting years of
birth on legal documents during his lifetime; most sources give the year as
1917. (Biographer Daniel Mark Epstein's consulted the 1920 census to determine
that the Coles household had a male infant at that time, and confirmed the birth
year as 1919.) Coles' father was a butcher who aspired to the Baptist ministry,
and when Cole was four the family moved to Chicago, where his father eventually
succeeded in becoming a preacher.

Like his older brother Eddie, who became a bass player, Cole showed an early
interest in music. He was taught piano by his mother as a child and later took
lessons. Also like his brother, he turned professional early; by his teens, he
was leading a band called either the Royal Dukes or the Rogues of Rhythm, and he
dropped out of high school at 15 to go into music full-time. The following year,
Eddie, who had been touring with Noble Sissle's band, returned to Chicago and
the brothers organized their own sextet. On July 28, 1936, as Eddie Cole's
Swingsters, they recorded two singles for Decca Records, Nat King Cole's
recording debut. That fall, they were hired to perform in a revival of the
all-Black Broadway musical revue Shuffle Along. Unlike his brother, Cole
remained with the show when it went on tour, in part because his girlfriend,
dancer Nadine Robinson, stayed with it as well. The two married in Michigan on
January 27, 1937, even though Cole was only 17. The tour made its way around the
country, finally closing in Los Angeles in May. Cole and his wife remained
there, living at first with her aunt while Cole sought employment as a musician.
He briefly led a big band, then played solo piano in clubs.

While performing at The Café Century during the summer of 1937, Cole was
approached by the manager of The Swanee Inn, who invited him to put together a
small band to play in the club. With guitarist Oscar Moore and bassist Wesley
Prince, the act debuted that fall, drawing upon the children's nursery rhyme
("Old King Cole was a merry old soul...") for the name the King Cole Swingsters,
later simply the King Cole Trio. The group gradually built up a following, with
Cole emerging as a singer as well as a pianist. By September 1938, they had
begun making radio transcriptions not originally intended for commercial
release, though they have since been issued. In 1939 and 1940, they made
occasional recordings for small labels and did radio work while expanding their
live performances to include appearances across the country. In late 1940 they
signed with Decca. Their 1941 recording of Cole's composition "That Ain't Right"
hit number one on Billboard's Harlem Hit Parade (i.e., R&B) chart on January 30,
1943, Cole's first successful record. By that point, Prince had left the group
to work for the war effort and was replaced by Johnny Miller.

The King Cole Trio's contract with Decca expired before "That Ain't Right"
became a hit. Their next single, "All for You," was recorded for the tiny
Excelsior label in October 1942. After its initial release, it was purchased by
Capitol Records and reissued. On November 20, 1943, it became the group's second
number one hit on the Harlem Hit Parade. It also crossed over to the pop chart.
With that accomplishment, Capitol signed Cole directly. The trio's first Capitol
session produced both the Cole composition "Straighten Up and Fly Right," which
topped the Black chart on April 29, 1944, and stayed there for ten weeks; it
spent six weeks at the top of the folk (i.e., country) chart, and reached the
Top Ten of the pop chart. "Gee Baby, Ain't I Good to You" topped the Black chart
on October 21 and also crossed over to the pop chart.

The trio placed another four titles in the Black chart during 1944, and Capitol
released their debut album, The King Cole Trio that fall. The collection of four
78-rpm discs contained eight tracks, only three of them featuring Cole vocals.
When Billboard instituted its first album chart on March 24, 1945, The King Cole
Trio was ranked at number one, a position it held for 12 weeks. At the same
time, big-band swing music was declining in popularity, and many jazz fans were
beginning to turn to the emerging style of bebop, a development that, whatever
its artistic significance, spelled the end of jazz as a broadly popular style of
music.

The King Cole Trio -- and particularly the singer/pianist then known as "King
Cole" -- on the other hand, were going in exactly the opposite direction, as
their success on records, and at clubs and theaters around the country, led to
appearances in films and on radio. After numerous guest-star stints on Bing
Crosby's Kraft Music Hall radio series, the trio, along with pianist Eddy
Duchin, were hired to host the show's summer replacement program for 13 weeks.
During that run, on August 17, The King Cole Trio, Vol. 2, another set of four
78s, hit number one. Over the next five days, the trio recorded two songs that
would add to their pop success. Mel Tormé and Robert Wells' "The Christmas
Song (Merry Christmas to You)" (better known by its opening line, "Chestnuts
roasting on an open fire"), recorded August 19, was Cole's first disc to feature
strings. "(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons," though it only featured the
trio, demonstrated that Cole was more than capable of handling a straight
romantic ballad, not just the uptempo novelties with which he and the group had
succeeded up until this point.

"(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons" became Cole's first number one pop single
on December 28, 1946; "The Christmas Song (Merry Christmas to You)" peaked at
number three, going on to become a holiday perennial and million seller. While
these hits were developing, the trio went from its summer replacement berth to
its own network radio series, King Cole Trio Time, a 15-minute Saturday
afternoon program that debuted on October 19, 1946, and ran until April 1948.
The group's recording schedule during the first half of 1947 was relatively
light, but the pace picked up considerably in anticipation of the musicians'
strike called for January 1, 1948. On August 22, 1947, with an orchestral
backing, Cole recorded "Nature Boy," an unusual philosophical ballad. Released
March 29, 1948 and credited to "King Cole," it hit number one for the first of
eight weeks on May 8, becoming a gold record.

Oscar Moore, the trio's original guitarist, left the group in October 1947 after
ten years and was replaced by Irving Ashby. In March 1948, Cole divorced his
wife and married singer Marie Ellington. Among the couple's children was Natalie
Cole, who became a singer herself. Bass player Johnny Miller quit the trio in
August 1948 and was replaced by Joe Comfort. In February 1949, Cole added
percussionist Jack Costanzo to the group, which was thereafter billed as "Nat
King Cole & the Trio." As of the spring of 1950, Cole's recordings were being
credited simply to "Nat King Cole." On July 8 of that year, his recording of the
wistful movie theme "Mona Lisa," featuring a string chart arranged by Nelson
Riddle, became Cole's third number one pop hit and gold record.

That September, he traveled to Europe for his first international tour,
beginning a pattern that would find him giving concerts almost continually in a
combination of top nightclubs in major cities and concert halls around the U.S.,
with occasional trips to Europe, the Far East, and Latin America, and extended
stays at Las Vegas casinos. In these appearances, he stood for most of the show,
only occasional sitting down to play a number or two at the piano. Ashby and
Comfort left the group in 1951, and an announcement was made that the trio
officially dissolved, but that simply meant that Cole would be billed as a solo
act. In practice, he continued to carry a guitarist, John Collins, and a
bassist, Charles Harris, along with Costanzo (until he left in 1953 and was
replaced by drummer Lee Young), while often augmenting them with an orchestra.

Cole scored his fourth number one pop hit and gold record with "Too Young,"
which topped the charts on June 23, 1951. His recording of "Unforgettable"
peaked at number 12 on February 2, 1952, but it went on to become one of his
better-remembered recordings; in 1991, a version of the song by Natalie Cole
with the Nat King Cole recording dubbed onto it became a gold record and won the
Grammy Award for Record of the Year. With his 1952 LP Penthouse Serenade, Cole
showed that he was not yet ready to dispense with his jazz chops entirely. The
disc was an instrumental collection that spent one week at number ten in the
album chart in October. Meanwhile, he was also looking for new challenges,
taking on small acting roles in the films The Blue Gardenia and Small Town Girl,
and the television drama Song for a Banjo in 1953. His 1953 album Nat King Cole
Sings for Two in Love, arranged and conducted by Nelson Riddle, was a Top Ten
hit in early 1954 that pre-dated similar "concept" albums by Frank Sinatra.

Although Cole did not score a number one hit in 1953 ("Pretend" peaked at number
two), his seven chart entries were enough to rank him among the ten most
successful singles artists of the year. His five chart singles in 1954, among
them the gold-selling Top Ten hit "Answer Me, My Love," allowed him to repeat
this ranking the following year, and he did the same thing in 1955 with another
eight chart entries, including the Top Ten hits "Darling Je Vous Aime Beaucoup,"
"A Blossom Fell," and "If I May." Nine more chart entries allowed him to remain
among the most successful singles artists in 1956, even though none of them
reached the Top Ten, and he maintained his rank for the fifth straight year in
1957, reaching the Top Ten (and the top of the R&B chart) with "Send for Me."
Though he managed one more Top Ten hit, "Looking Back," in 1958, the rise of
rock & roll diminished his success on the singles chart. Meanwhile, he returned
to a jazz approach on his 1957 LP After Midnight, which saw his backup group
collaborate with jazz musicians Harry "Sweets" Edison, Stuff Smith, Willie
Smith, and Juan Tizol. It was a modest commercial success, quickly followed by
the ballad album Love Is the Thing, arranged and conducted by Gordon Jenkins,
which hit number one for the first of eight weeks on May 27, 1957, and was
eventually certified platinum.

Meanwhile, in the fall of 1956, Cole became the first Black host of a network
television series when The Nat King Cole Show debuted as a 15-minute weekly
program on November 5. The show was expanded to a half-hour in July 1957 and ran
until December of that year, though it never attracted a national sponsor that
might have made it an ongoing success. Cole attributed advertisers' reticence to
racism. He returned to his acting career during 1957, appearing in Istanbul and
China Gate, and got his most substantial role in 1958 playing blues musician
W.C. Handy in a film biography, St. Louis Blues. His last acting role was in
Night of the Quarter Moon in 1959. In 1960, he turned his attention to the
theater, putting together a musical revue intended for Broadway. The songs were
by Dotty Wayne and Ray Rasch, and the album Cole made of them, Wild Is Love,
became his first Top Ten LP in three years. The corresponding stage show, I'm
with You, was not as successful, opening what was intended to be a pre-Broadway
tour in Denver on October 17, 1960, but closing in Detroit on November 26. Cole,
however, salvaged the concept of the show for a stage production he called
Sights and Sounds: The Merry World of Nat King Cole, featuring a group of
dancers and singers, with whom he toured regularly from 1961 to 1964.

Cole returned to the Top Ten of the singles chart for the first time in four
years with the country-tinged "Ramblin' Rose" in 1962; his album of the same
name also reached the Top Ten and was eventually was certified platinum. "Those
Lazy-Hazy-Crazy Days of Summer" became his last Top Ten hit in the summer of
1963. In December 1964, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. Two months later, he
died of it at the age of 45.

After his death, Cole continued to appeal to the two almost mutually exclusive
audiences who had appreciated him during his life. Jazz fans continued to
treasure his recordings of the 1930s and '40s and to dismiss the non-jazz
recordings he had made later. (In 1994, German discographer Klaus Teubig
compiled Straighten Up and Fly Right: A Chronology and Discography of Nat "King"
Cole, which pointedly cut off in the early '50s.) Pop fans clamored for reissues
of Cole's '50s and '60s music, awarding gold record status to compilations that
Capitol continued to assemble, without worrying much about the singer's talent
as a piano player. (And, as his recordings fell into the public domain in
Europe, where there is a 50-year copyright limit, a spate of low-quality
reissues flooded the market.) But the ongoing debate was only a testament to
Cole's ongoing attraction for music lovers, which, in the decades following his
untimely end, showed no signs of abating. ~ William Ruhlmann

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