Nat King Cole - Jazz Pianist - Part 5

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“Cole was grateful to Norman. And Granz would continually acknowledge how Cole had helped launch his career as a producer, both of recordings and concerts, in which he became one of the few promoters to actually get rich from jazz — and without tipping anybody off along the way. In return, Granz gave Cole the chance to express an aspect of his artistry that might otherwise never have been documented, and his own legacy, along with that of the art of jazz piano in general, would have been so much poorer.”

- Will Friedwald, Straighten Up and Fly Right [2020]

“IN TERMS OF QUANTITY, Cole probably recorded less in pure jazz settings (apart from the Trio) than any other pianist of his stature; his jam session recordings are especially valuable, not only because of their scarcity but also because he seemed to be making history with every session. Keynote Records had been founded in 1940 as a politically driven operation that swung hard to the left (recording folk and anti-war protest songs), and was eventually re-focused as a jazz label by Harry Lim, the self-same "diminutive Javanese swing pundit" who had produced the live jam sessions with Cole and company at the Village Vanguard in 1941. Lim recorded two all-star sessions under the group name, "The Keynoters," a sextet in New York 1944 with Charlie Shavers up front, and then a quartet in Los Angeles on Saturday, February 16,1946, while the Trio was enjoying another run at the venue named after them, the King Cole Room, at the Trocadero. Cole's co-star was the alto sax star William McLeish "Willie" Smith, already famous for his earlier work with the beloved Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra, and, at this time, with Harry James, and later, Duke Ellington. Two dependable Angelinos made the rhythm section, bassist Red Callender and drummer Jackie Mills.

This date is all standards and no blues, although first-time listeners might not recognize "Airiness a la Nat," the latest but hardly the last of Cole's many contrafacts on the durable "I Got Rhythm" chord changes. Gershwin's tune is disguised, and, once again, so is the pianist, this being the session in which he was billed as "Lord Calvert." The name was given in quotes, as a kind of tip-off to the royal presence of the monarch who was actually playing.

The date is much more mellow than the Sunset or the Capitol International sessions, but no less wonderful. The absence of a strict 12-bar blues is no detriment to Smith, who invests "The Way You Look Tonight" with such a profound blues feeling that even Jerome Kern (no hot music fan he) would have had to approve. By the time Smith has played 16 bars, it's no less satisfying than a whole chorus, allowing Cole to take over in the bridge for the rest of the chorus, which feels like a complete solo unto itself. After this amazing single chorus, Smith returns and plays a 4-bar tag, ending with a lovely coda. "Airiness a la Nat" is very subdued jamming, but no less exciting—even though Cole was billed under a pseudonym, surely someone noticed that his name is in the song title. He plays a lot of signature phrases, and there's a lively trade at the end wherein Mills references "Salt Peanuts," another "Rhythm" variation.

“I Can't Believe That You're in Love with Me '' is a traditional jazz favorite from 1926 that Cole almost certainly learned as an aspiring musician in Chicago, rendered here in a highly copacetic mid-tempo. This date also includes several alternate takes, and here the second take, the one actually issued in 1946, is superior to the first, not issued until many years later. Sam Coslow's "My Old Flame," a ballad loved by alto players (there's a famous version by Charlie Parker) is another slow love song, which captures Cole and Smith both in a reminiscent mood. As with Young, the two principals are not thinking of the chords or even the melody; they're thinking about their old flames. Still, "The Way You Look Tonight" may be the standout here, for both Cole and Smith; as Dan Morgenstern observes, there's a "unique little glissando run" that Cole might have learned from Mary Lou Williams, while, at the same time, his playing here shows precisely what, in turn, Oscar Peterson learned from him.

Spring 1946 saw a renewed burst of jazz activity by Cole, some of which was actually done in full public view: for the only time, the actual Trio backed up several living legends of jazz. They had been making regular appearances on AFRS Jubilee since early in the war, and in April 1946, they appeared on one episode playing with Lester Young (Jubilee # 184) and another playing for three award-winning alto sax stars, old friends Benny Carter and Willie Smith and the nascent bebop genius, Charlie Parker (Jubilee #186). The one occasion when the King and the Bird played together was on this special broadcast for black servicemen, and it's also the only time that Cole ever played the jazz standard "Cherokee." Both of these shows feature some numbers where Buddy Rich joins in, and they were possibly both recorded on the same day—though that must have been an incredible occasion, when Cole, Parker, Smith, Carter, Rich, and Young were all in the NBC studio being used by the AFRS.

Around the same time, Cole made one final project with Norman Granz, a reunion studio date with Lester Young, and a pair of solo piano tracks, both of which were related to The Jazz Scene, a pioneering jazz anthology album eventually released in December 1949. Granz seems to have pulled the session together (we don't know the exact date, but it was probably early April) when the two principals were in town at the same time and so, once again, was Buddy Rich. Usually, union regulations called for four sides per session, but on this occasion, as everybody was playing so well—and would likely never get together again—Granz recorded eight tunes in one shot. The 1941 Pres-King date was a trio of tenor, piano, and bass, and here it was a slightly different trio of tenor, piano, and drums.

The 1946 repertoire consists of seven standards and a blues; some are fast, some are slow, but what's more notable than that is the way Young and Cole mix moods while sticking to specific tempos. Most of the faster numbers, like "I Want to Be Happy" (the one track by this group that was issued on the original Jazz Scene in 1949), "I've Found a New Baby," and "I Want to Be Happy" (the latter compliments "Tea for Two" from the 1942, date; both are from No, No, Nanette) have an undercurrent of melancholy even while swinging mightily. Likewise, the slower numbers, like the ancient ballad "Peg O' My Heart" and " The Man I Love," are never purely sad (and even less sentimental) but always have an element of whimsy. Young is simultaneously happy and sad, and his mid-tempo solos, like "Somebody Loves Me" and "Mean to Me," are even more accurately concocted cocktails of mixed moods.

"Back to the Land" (the tide apparently refers to the earthiness of the blues) is a highly eloquent blues, laconic and laid back, that also makes you want to laugh and cry at the same time—what Young might call "laughin' to keep from cryin'." "I Cover the Waterfront," the only track to survive in two takes, is the ballad masterpiece; Young's solo has a probing, searching quality that suggests he is indeed combing each and every dive along the waterfront, looking for the one he loves. Throughout, the King matches the Pres mood for mood, even in the majority of these numbers that fall in the emotional cracks between moods. "Somebody Loves Me" is also about searching, though in this case, Young and Cole are somewhat more optimistic, as if they fully expect to find that someone that they're both looking for. On the whole, the session includes some of Cole's freshest and most inspired playing; Pres motivates him to keep away from his signature licks, and we only hear faint hints of them here and there—he seems to hint at a few familiar phrases particularly on fast tempos and on tunes he has played many times before, like "New Baby." Even so, his playing is immediately identifiable as no one else but King Cole.

We don't know the actual order that the tracks were recorded in, but the date probably started with "Peg O' My Heart," since Rich isn't present— Nat later remembered that Buddy showed up late, so the two of them got going without him. That the song is so far outside of Cole's wheelhouse apparently necessitated an especially unique ballad performance from the pianist. This may have been a sentimental selection by Cole in honor of his friend Marvin Fisher, whose father, Fred Fisher, composed "Peg" in 1913. In the early postwar era, the hepcats and bopsters would have certainly considered this old-time cornball stuff, the title of a 1911 play that inspired a song the following year. But Cole and Young, not having anything like a familiar riff to fall back on, make it work on its own terms and seem gloriously believable—much like Sinatra later did with the prehistoric waltzes of his 1962, album All Alone.

"I Want to Be Happy" was originally issued on The Jazz Scene 78 album (and then a 10" LP) in 1949, with Cole credited as "Aye Guy" (apparently pronounced "A Guy"); other tracks were issued on Mercury and then Clef singles, and eventually Clef, Verve, and Norgran LPs, although Cole wouldn't be credited under his own name almost until the CD era. Even on the fast and swinging numbers, this is hardly a jam session; this is two master storytellers spinning yarns on the tenor saxophone and piano. Every note is loaded with meaning and melody, and the spaces between the notes are hardly empty but loaded with even more meaning than the notes themselves.

As a postscript, there are two unaccompanied piano solos that were first heard in 1994 when The Jazz Scene was released on CD. Neither the song titles nor the pianist were identified on the masters; it was presumed they were by Billy Strayhorn, who was believed to have done a session of his own for the album (in addition to having arranged a session with baritone saxophonist Harry Carney and a string section). Strayhorn's biographer, David Hajdu (who hadn't yet heard the recordings), volunteered two Strayhorn-style titles, and the tracks were released as "Halfway to Dawn" and "Tailspin" by Strayhorn on the finished CD package. Yet it was clear from the instant the set was released that this mystery pianist wasn't Strayhorn, as Hajdu agreed when he actually heard the tracks for the first time.

If one listens to "Halfway to Dawn" and "Tailspin" immediately after the eight Lester Young-Nat Cole titles from 1946, there's little doubt that the pianist here is Cole; he has Cole's general presence, Cole's crystalline touch, Cole's sense of timing. Of course, there's no absolutely perfect point of comparison, since Cole never recorded unaccompanied piano anywhere else. The pieces are stately and elegiac, with a pronounced Tatum influence; Professor Edward Green opined that "Halfway" sounds like a high-speed Tatum tour-de-force slowed down to something more like a tone poem.

Cole made one other jazz date, apart from the Trio, on March 16,1946, under the approving eye of Capitol Records. Here he served as a guest star with two of his favorite people: the superlative pop and jazz vocalist Jo Stafford, and her musical director and future husband Paul Weston. Both Cole and Herbie Haymer are prominent guests throughout: Cole opens the jazz and blues standard "Baby, Won't You Please Come Home" with an unmistakable piano intro, and he also makes substantial contributions to "Cindy," which sounds kind of like big-band bluegrass—it might be considered his first country and western (C&W) record, fifteen or so years before "Ramblin' Rose." "Riding on the Gravy Train" and "(I'll Be Home with You in) Apple Blossom Time," a 1910 oldie that was revived by the Andrews Sisters in 1941 as a major hit of the World War II era, are also worthy vehicles for the combination.

Stafford, Cole, and Haymer are all so marvelously in sync with each other that one wishes they'd done a whole album together, but we're lucky to have these four tracks. (One also wishes that Cole had sung a duet with Stafford on one of these tracks, although a black man and a white woman singing together was rarely if ever done at this point.) We don't know whose idea it was for Stafford to include Cole and the two other guest stars on the session, except that it encouraged Capitol's artists to think of themselves as a family. As with the International Jazzmen, Cole’s presence wasn't any kind of a secret; he was clearly credited on the original 78 labels. (And when the records were sold in music shops in black neighborhoods, Cole’s participation was actually advertised.). Stafford would return the favor seven months later when she became the first guest star on the premiere episode of the Trios new NBC radio series, King Cole Trio Time (sponsored by Wildroot Cream Oil), on October 19,1946.

This was less than two months before Nat met Maria, at which point forces were then set in motion that dictated that there would be no more jam sessions in his life, no more playing for scale, or whatever it was Harry Lim and Eddie Laguna were paying. It might be ironic that Granz gave Cole the money to obtain his divorce from Nadine—neither of them probably realized that this would be the end of their association (with the exception of a reunion on Cole's NBC TV show in 1957 and a European tour in 1960), and that the woman who would replace Nadine in Nat’s life would push him in a direction far removed from Norman.

There are just a couple of jazz leftovers from 1946 and '47. Throughout the peak years of the Trio at Capitol, 1943-1948, they routinely won the Metronome magazine poll for best small combo, and Cole participated in the annual "Metronome All-Stars'' sessions, two years in a row, in December 1946 and 1947. The 1946 date is mostly swing players, including old friends Charlie Shavers, Coleman Hawkins, and Buddy Rich, plus Lawrence Brown, Johnny Hodges, and Harry Carney, all from the Ellington band. One side of the issued disc features none other than Sinatra singing one of Cole s own most familiar numbers, "Sweet Lorraine," with prominent piano accompaniment (and intro) by Cole, the only time they officially worked together on a commercial recording. The flip side is a blues titled "Nat meets June," on which Cole sings a duet with June Christy of the Kenton band; it starts slow but goes into swing time after the vocal. The 1947 date is mostly more modern-oriented players, such as Dizzy Gillespie, Bill Harris, Flip Phillips, and Buddy DeFranco, in an octet setting on "Leap Here" and then the same soloists with the full Stan Kenton Orchestra on the flip side, "Metronome Riff." Cole doesn't sing on either but makes his presence known just the same.

"Nat Meets June" had, apparently, come together at the last minute. "That was kind of a fluke experience," said June Christy.

Up until that particular date, the Metronome All-Stars had always been just instrumentalists. I just happened to be in the theater when they were recording and somebody didn't show, one of the stars who was to have been on the recording date, and since I was available, someone suggested, "Why don't we have Nat and June do something together?" To me it was such a supreme pleasure because I had only been with the [Kenton] band for about a year, but I had been a fan of Nat for a long, long time before that. Naturally, we didn't have any music or anything and Nat says, "Well, let's just sing some blues." And I don't know if I can do it. And he says, "Sure you can!" He just made up the lyrics and I had such fun doing it. I just sat on the piano stool with him.

Perhaps the last recorded jam session that Cole officially took part in occurred in June 1947, and it was produced by another jazz impresario named "Norman." This was Gene Norman, who started a series of jazz concerts in southern California titled "Just Jazz," although unlike Granz, Norman was a much smoother, less abrasive character who also enjoyed a long career as a deejay and radio and TV host. Like Granz, he gradually transitioned into record production, launching the successful label GNP Crescendo, which celebrated its sixty-fifth birthday in 2019, and, unlike Granz's Verve Records, is still independent. Unlike Granz, Norman never took his "Just Jazz" concert on the road beyond the general Los Angeles area, but he did open his own club, the famous Crescendo on Sunset Strip. Cole participated in two known “Just Jazz concerts that were recorded and distributed via the AFRS, one in 1947 in Pasadena, in which they share the bill with a JATP-like group of swing all-stars, and another at the Shrine in LA in 1949, part of the Trios concert tour with Woody Herman's Second Herd.

The June 13, 1947, show at the Pasadena Concert opened with a set by the Trio, alas never issued commercially, followed by an all-star jam session wherein Cole, Moore, and Miller work with Charlie Shavers, Willie Smith, vibes pioneer Red Norvo, and, for the only time, future tenor star Stan Getz. Even more than Getz, the rarest soloist in this context is Oscar Moore, in his final months with the Trio. Three tunes have circulated, and they're all Cole perennials: "Body and Soul" opens with Shavers playing the melody in his usual expressive, plaintive fashion, giving the bridge (and its numerous key changes) over to Cole, before Smith then takes the last eight. Norvo solos first, revealing a much more contemplative approach than Hampton, and then Getz, who we might expect to sound more like Lester Young at this early stage but actually already sounds like Stan Getz. Then it's Cole's turn to solo, and while he uses block chords, there are none of his familiar quotes: no "Mountain King" here, for once.

There's an epic thirteen-minute "How High the Moon" that, at one point, was issued on four 78 RPM single sides, wherein everybody gets a few choruses, starting with Shavers, who builds gradually and logically to high notes at the very top end of the trumpets range. Cole's solo fades away and comes back, indicating some missing program, but it is a fully coherent statement, different from anything else he ever played on "Moon." Though he seems to be avoiding his quote technique, near the end he can't resist the urge to dance around the melody to "London Bridge." Shavers then leads the group on the ensemble "shout" chorus, which never quite states the famous "Moon" melody, but which sets up a chorus of drum breaks from Louis Bellson. In "I Got Rhythm," Cole and Miller solo together in a true duet, with both getting equal attention (this is essentially the routine they would develop into "Breezy and the Bass"); Shavers again heads for the stratosphere before the two saxes, Getz and Smith, solo like they're trying to tie the tune into knots, and we build a longer, bigger climactic break from Bellson. What Cole probably liked most about this show was that the horn men, in particular Shavers, all solo in an exuberant extroverted fashion but never resort to the flashy grandstanding that many observers, including Cole himself, found distasteful in the later JATP concerts.

Cole would continue to play piano (as we shall soon see, no less than four of his first albums were all piano-centric) but virtually never again in one of these jam session settings. It was perfectly appropriate that this part of his career should both begin and end with Norman Granz. The producer was, in fact, the opposite of Lionel Hampton in this one regard: where Hamp took credit for encouraging Cole to sing, Granz stated plainly, "Oddly, I never dug his singing, because I was so overwhelmed by his piano playing."

Now that's obviously an exaggeration. More likely, it was the overall excellent of Nat's singing—so easy to "dig"—that made Norman realize that this was the thing that would eventually take Nat away from being purely a jazz pianist—and eventually away from him. In a way, it was inevitable that Cole would part company with Granz, even as early as his first hits on Capitol. But if Norman professed not to like Nat’s later music, Cole likewise expressed his misgivings with the direction that the Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts were increasingly taking. "It started out alright. We had really good men on the early sessions. I got sound musicians like Lester Young, Buck Clayton, Charlie Parker, Lee Young, Willie Smith, and they all knew what they were doing. I used to insist on musicianship and good jazz. But later the hotheads took over and found they could get even better audience reaction by honking, high notes, and turning somersaults while playing."

It's significant that Cole blames (and declines to name) these "hothead" musicians for the excesses of JATP (he was hardly the only one to feel this way) rather than pointing the ringer at Granz himself; he was still grateful to Norman. And Granz would continually acknowledge how Cole had helped launch his career as a producer, both of recordings and concerts, in which he became one of the few promoters to actually get rich from jazz—and without tipping anybody off along the way. In return, Granz gave Cole the chance to express an aspect of his artistry that might otherwise never have been documented, and his own legacy, along with that of the art of jazz piano in general, would have been so much poorer.”