Here at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog, we careen willy-nilly between animation, classic movies, comedy, music we like, film history/silent films and old school showbiz. Nobody was better at combining old school showbiz at its very best with the virtuosity of jazz than vocalist, pianist and bandleader Nat King Cole (1919-1965).
We'll start today's 100th birthday tribute with the following BBC-TV special, An Evening With Nat King Cole, which demonstrates Cole's blazing genius as entertainer and pianist.
Nat King Cole first made his name in the late 1930's as a swinging jazz pianist in the tradition of Earl "Fatha" Hines and Teddy Wilson. Nat hired bassist Wesley Prince and guitarist Oscar Moore to be his first group. Paraphrasing "Old King Cole was a merry old soul," they were first The King Cole Swingsters. After changing the group name to the King Cole Trio, they began making radio transcriptions and recordings. The trio performed on radio on The Chesterfield Supper Club, Kraft Music Hall, Old Gold, The Orson Welles Almanac and Swing Soiree - and headlined their own program, King Cole Trio Time.
The first record of Nat's as powerhouse jazz pianist this writer heard was the great album of the first (and historic) Jazz At The Philharmonic concert on July 2, 1944. The all-star lineup included r&b "Texas tenor" Illinois Jacquet of "Flying Home" fame (who enters at 3:31 and gets into high note pyrotechnics 20 years before Pharoah Sanders at 5:00), followed by guitarist and guitar inventor extraordinaire Les Paul. Nat and Les have a ball trading riffs with each other.
Equally amazing: a 1946 record led by Count Basie Orchestra saxophonist and swing king Lester Young, with his trio. . . Nat King Cole and Buddy Rich!
The King Cole Trio, with either Oscar Moore or Irving Ashby on guitar and Johnny Miller on the acoustic bass, would become a very popular act and recording a series of 78s for Capitol Records.
Long lost air checks of the trio, broadcast live from the Hotel LaSalle's Circle Room in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on September 21-23 and 25, 1946, were found in 1999. Released by special arrangement with Ms. Cole and the Nat King Cole estate, with assists from Dan Morgenstern and the Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies, the resulting album demonstrates emphatically how The Nat King Cole Trio, in their ultra-cool way, changed the face of music. No doubt Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Sarah Vaughn and Mel Tormé were listening - and taking notes!
The trio appeared in Soundies and Snader Telescriptions in the 1940s and early 1950's.
Forgive the odd over-application of makeup on Mr. Cole in the following Snader Telescription, as the song's great and the trio, as usual, sounds fantastic.
For much of his career, Nat King Cole was a star who couldn't use the rest room or drinking fountain, stay at the same hotel, or live in the same neighborhood as his melanin-challenged Caucasian entertainment counterparts in the U.S.A. As Mr. Cole broke ground, he suffered physical attacks onstage and even the poisoning of the family dog by bigoted scumbags who didn't want his family as neighbors in Sunny California. While this was going on, he was (along with Hazel Scott) among the first African-Americans to host his own TV show.
On November 5, 1956, The Nat King Cole Show debuted on NBC. The shows are consistently outstanding and a high water mark for the musical variety format, and remain much sought after by music fans and it is tough to pick a single favorite episode from the series. Here's Nat, trading his signature tunes with those of that week's guest star, movie actress and musical comedy gal Betty Hutton.
Alas, affiliates in the Deep South states refused to show the series and NBC could not sell it to advertisers. The musical program began as a 15-minute series and at first had a sponsor (Carter Products, the makers of Arrid and Rise), but advertisers could not be found after it expanded in June, 1957 to a half hour format. The racism of the times (obvious in 1957 and, sadly, still all too evident in 2019) doomed The Nat King Cole Show. Nat's response: "Madison Avenue is afraid of the dark" - and indeed it was.
No national sponsor would touch the show. While there was a regional sponsor, Rheingold Beer, and guest stars Harry Belafonte, Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald, Eartha Kitt, Frankie Laine, Peggy Lee, and Mel Tormé (among others) agreed to appear free of charge, efforts to keep the show on the air eventually failed.
NBC made a "take it or leave it" offer. For the show to stay on the air, it had to be moved from its Tuesday night time slot to Saturday evenings at 7:00 p.m. by January 1958. Cole and his agent said no and that was it. The last episode aired on December 17, 1957.
If one was forced to select one particularly exceptional example of the series, arguably that would be the episode that featured a lineup of jazz greats unseen on American television and aired on October 15, 1957. Wouldn't see anything remotely like this again until Edie Adams' jazz-oriented variety show in 1964.
Nat could do acting and comedy in addition to music, so we'll finish today's post with one of his last TV appearances as guest star on The Jack Benny Program, which aired on January 21, 1964.
Thanks and cheers to the unforgettable Nat King Cole!
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