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Nat King Cole Trio
The Complete After Midnight Sessions
Essential Jazz Classics EJC 55405
IF, LIKE me, you grew up with the softly lucid voice of Nat “King” Cole singing When I Fall in Love or Unforgettable on the radio, you may not have known that this smooth pearl-toothed crooner, born in the cruel racist city of Montgomery, Alabama, in 1919, was also a master jazz pianist.
He grew up in Chicago and at 12 years old was church organist and choirboy. He made his prodigious recording debut in his brother’s band Eddie Cole’s Solid Swingers in 1936, moved west to Los Angeles and formed a commercially successful trio, making a succession of key recordings, including some with prime saxophonists Lester Young and Illinois Jacquet in the ’40s and others with the Jazz at the Philharmonic ensemble.
Cole recorded his After Midnight album in 1956, long after his rise to fame as a singer, when many of his erstwhile jazz admirers were calling on him to return to a jazz setting. With him are guitarist John Collins, bassist Charlie Harris and Lester’s brother Lee on drums. But in come famed horns Harry “Sweets” Edison, Basie’s pioneer trumpeter, who based his economy of notes on his old maestro’s piano playing; the Ellingtonian Puerto Rico-born trombonist Juan Tizol; the star altoist of the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra, Willie Smith; and the violin pioneer born in Portsmouth, Ohio, in 1909, Hezekiah “Stuff” Smith.
This was one of the last jazz-inspired sessions that Nat recorded. He sings, often winsomely, and picks some lesser-known ballads from the songbook which do powerful justice to both the crystalline clarity of his voice and the complex beauty of his pianism.
Edison is the guest soloist on the first five tracks and he backs Nat’s vocals with an instinctive empathy. On You Can Depend on Me and Sweet Lorraine he combines Nat’s sad-happy words with his muted obbligatos and colloquial breaks very much in the style in which he accompanied Billie Holiday in her postwar Columbia tracks, and on the faster It’s Only a Paper Moon and Route 66 he picks up the freedom and verve of Nat’s keyboard pace with an infectious joy.
Willie Smith’s moments come on You’re Looking at Me, where his pellucid notes match Nat’s transparent vocal, and the very sprightly I Was a Little Too Lonely, where his pristine solo and exchange with Collins’s deft guitar prelude a short but beautiful Cole piano excursion.
How many times over the decades did Juan Tizol’s trombone valves create the centre of his own renowned composition for the Ellington orchestra in the exotica of Caravan? He plays it here again with Nat, but it is in The Lonely One that his quasi-desolate tone finds union with Nat’s own melancholy vocal, and it continues through Blame It on My Youth, where Nat seems to be singing and, with a blues-sodden piano chorus, playing out his own life story.
But it is through the four Stuff Smith tracks that this session grows to its finest life and a very rare musical kinship. As soon as Smith’s bow starts sawing in Sometimes I’m Happy you know that Nat has found another musical brother, as his words blend into Stuff’s pulsating notes and then his violin talks to Nat’s piano in a fervent and loving colloquy.
Then there is the astonishing I Know That You Know, with Young’s opening flurry of brushes, Stuff’s searing chorus, Nat’s brief joyous solo, some impassioned exchanges between Nat and Stuff and the violinist’s final cascading cadences. When I Grow Too Old to Dream and Two Loves Have I carry on the fraternal sounds.
There’s a memorable tailpiece to these After Midnight sessions in four more tracks with the same quartet without the horns or vocals. Nat’s balladic touch is light and lovely in Don’t Blame Me and through It Could Happen to Me he skips along his notes. In I Surrender Dear his voice seems to be seeping from his keys, leaving you almost breathless with its softly created beauty. Truly a jewel of a record.
