An Evening with Nat "King" Cole (BBC-TV, 1963)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Cole documentary was followed by a 1963 BBC-TV telecast of an extraordinary performance by Cole himself from one of his British tours, given a tasteful colorization job and presented in that format: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OIimLXLNh0. Cole starts his performance singing his heart out on several ballads, including Victor Young’s “When I Fall in Love” and the standard “Unforgettable” (when Frank Sinatra, dressed surprisingly slovenly for him, said no one but Cole had recorded that song, he forgot about Dinah Washington – or Aretha Franklin, who made it the title track of her 1964 tribute album to Dinah). Then he brings on the members of his small group, including trumpeter Reunald (pronounced “Renald”) Jones and guitarist John Collins, and sits at the piano for jazz versions of “It’s Only a Paper Moon” and his star-making hit, “Sweet Lorraine.” Cole makes a few oddball jokes about the non-portability of his instrument (my favorite line was, “You know why they call it a grand piano? Because that’s how much it costs to ship it”), but it’s clear that the piano remained his musical first love even though his skill level deteriorated. One is tempted to weep at how much technique he had lost in his left hand over the years when he had concentrated so much on singing; he’d lost the speed and capability he can be seen in the Soundie (a sort of early music video meant to be watched on a visual jukebox) of the instrumental “Breezy and the Bass” in which Cole’s left hand is as fast as his right. (In the mid-1940’s Cole produced a session for Norman Granz featuring tenor saxophonist Lester Young and drummer Buddy Rich. Granz didn’t hire a bass player, but Cole’s left hand was so strong he didn’t need to.)

After the piano interlude (which I found the most fascinating and entertaining part of the show) Cole joked that he was going to make a major wardrobe change – in fact the only thing that looked different was the music-hall setting he walked in on and the straw hat, cane and what appeared to be an eight-string ukulele he was carrying (though when he pantomimed “playing” it the sound was really one or more banjo players in Ted Heath’s orchestra, which were backing him up). He did a few older songs, including a lovely ballad called “That Sunday in Summer,” before reverting to the music-hall atmosphere for his novelty hit “Those Hazy, Lazy, Crazy Days of Summer” and closing the show with an audience sing-along of his latest hit, “Ramblin’ Rose.” Therein hangs a tale: in addition to his other ventures, Cole was the first Black artist to do an entire album of country songs (he beat Ray Charles by about six months), and though various Black singers had made one-off singles of country songs before (including Leadbelly’s 1935 cover of Jimmie Rodgers’ 1928 song “Daddy and Home”) it was Cole, with his ceaseless exploration of new musical territory, who made a whole album of this material. (Ironically, while most of his famous records were made with white arrangers like Pete Rugolo and Nelson Riddle, for his country album he chose a Black one, Belford Hendricks.) The 1963 BBC program shows Cole at his most laid-back, with his patter full of self-deprecating humor and his performances magisterial, as befitted his name. It’s a welcome document of his art, and a slice of his life as well.