The Unforgettable Nat "King" Cole (BBC-TV, 1989)

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

At around 9:20 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched a couple of YouTube video posts on the great singer and pianist Nat “King” Cole: a 1989 BBC documentary called The Unforgettable Nat “King” Cole and a 1963 telecast, also from the BBC, called An Evening with Nat “King” Cole. Nat “King” Cole had one of the most extraordinary careers in all show business: he started out as one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time and then went on to an even greater and more astonishing career as a vocalist. The only other talent from the jazz world I can think of who made a comparable transition from virtuoso instrumentalist to star singer is Louis Armstrong, and I’ve long held the theory that Armstrong and Cole approached singing very differently based on the instruments they had played before. Armstrong was a trumpet player and he sang the way a trumpet player would, bending and slurring his notes and extending his phrases. Cole was a piano player and he approached singing the way a pianist would, hitting each note cleanly and percussively. One thing that sets Cole apart from other male vocal stars – including his greatest white contemporaries, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra – is his excellent diction. Cole was sometimes lumped in with the crooners because of his smooth vocal style, but he never crooned: he sang each note crisply and distinctly the way he would if he were still playing piano.

In fact, the legend of Nat “King” Cole is that he was a piano player first and foremost, and he got dragged into a vocal career by record-company executives who took him aside and told him, “You know, Nat, they sell a lot better when you sing on them.” The legend of Cole the reluctant vocalist got thrown for a loop with the recent release of a seven-CD boxed set of all Cole’s recordings before he joined the Capitol label in 1945, including radio transcriptions as well as the handful of studio recordings he made pre-Capitol, and through most of these recordings the three members of the King Cole Trio sang in unison and gave the same bouncy mid-tempo treatment to everything, including songs sung better by other artists as ballads. I was disappointed by the set because I wanted to hear more jazz instrumentals as well as more vocals by Cole alone. Cole was the son of a Black minister who pastored a church in his native Montgomery, Alabama until his parents (a minister father and his wife, who played piano and directed the church choir in a manner common to Black as well as white religious couples) moved to Chicago when Nat was only four. Nat’s dad’s church was right around the corner from the famous Grand Terrace Ballroom, where Earl “Fatha” Hines led the band, and Cole would sneak over to the Grand Terrace to watch Hines rehearse. (In 1928 Hines and New Orleans clarinetist Jimmie Noone would record the song “Sweet Lorraine”; 17 years later the same song would become Cole’s first hit record.)

By the time Cole was a teenager he was leading a band of his own (his brother Freddy recalled being impressed by the green gabardine uniforms Cole had his band members wear) and he made his first records at 17 with a band led by his older brother, Eddie Cole. Cole got to record under his own name in 1940 for Decca, who dropped him after 16 sides, and he was reduced to recording for small labels like Exclusive, Excelsior and Atlas until Atlas sold his contract to Capitol, where he remained from 1945 until his death 20 years later. One other thing Cole had in common with Louis Armstrong besides their talents as both instrumentalists and singers is that they were the first dark-skinned Black entertainers to cross over to a white audience. The 1930’s were the days of the infamous “paper-bag test” at the Cotton Club: auditioners for the club’s chorus line would have a light-brown paper grocery bag to their faces, and if they were darker than the bag they wouldn’t get the job. It was also the era of internal racism within the Black community, in which lighter-skinned “high yellow” actors would get the leading roles in African-American “race” movies while their darker-skinned brethren would be relegated to the same roles as villains or comic relief that Black performers would play in white movies. (There are some rhythm-and-blues songs from the 1940’s in which the singers lament that they couldn’t hold on to a “high yellow” man but they had – and lost – a Black one.) Aside from Armstrong, the most important Black celebrities – including Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway and Ethel Waters, as well as earlier male singers like Herb Jeffries and Billy Eckstine – were identifiably Black but still light-skinned until Cole came along.

The documentary on Cole had some bits of “first-itis” (my term for the tendency of biographers in all media to say that the person they’re biographing was the first to do or be something even though other people had done it before), but for the most part it told the story honestly and well. It had its macabre aspects, including clips of Cole interviewed by Edward R. Murrow on his celebrity TV show Person to Person; the macabre aspect is you see Murrow and Cole smoking on stage when they were two of the most famous victims who died from smoking-related lung cancer. Also one thing that isn’t generally known about Nat “King” Cole hs he was one of the pioneers of what has come to be called “world music”: performing in Cuba just before the 1959 revolution, he saw the Cuban bands and decided to record an album with them, Cole Español, even though he didn’t know a word of Spanish or Portuguese at the time. (This had an ironic reflection in Cole’s recollection that he’d heard a singer in Switzerland who did a near-perfect copy of Cole’s record of “Route 66” and then went to meet the guy. It turned out the singer knew no English except what he’d picked up phonetically from Cole’s records.)