Thanks. I remember him well and the history is really interesting.
Miriam
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From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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Subject: [blind-democracy] Honoring the 100TH birthday of Nat King Cole
From NPR comes a tribute to another hero in the painfully slow progress of
human relations in America.
Carl JarvisWeekend Edition Sunday
TOM VITALE
Nat 'King' Cole having a smoke while disembarking from a plane in 1963.
Evening Standard/Getty Images
Born 100 years ago today,
Nat King Cole
was one of the most popular and influential entertainers of the 20th century.
As an African American ballad singer and jazz musician, he topped the charts
year after year, sold more than 50 million records, pushed jazz piano in a new
direction and paved the way for later generations of performers.
"Nat King Cole's voice is really one of the great gifts of nature,"
Daniel Mark Epstein, author of the 1999 biography Nat King Cole, says.
"Remember, he
was never trained as a singer. And so, his voice is absolutely pure.
He's a baritone with absolutely perfect pitch. He sings the notes true and he
hits them right in the center."
Born Nathaniel Adams Coles in Montgomery, Ala., on March 17, 1919, the child
prodigy was later raised in Chicago. Cole's mother taught the him to play the
piano when he was four, and at 15, he dropped out of high school to lead his
own bands. His first recordings show the influence of his idol, Earl Hines.
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advertisement empty complementary information By the time he was 18, Cole was
married, living in Los Angeles and fronting a nightclub act with a name that
riffed on a nursery rhyme — the King Cole Trio — featuring guitar, bass and
piano, but not a lot of vocals.
The King Cole Trio had a huge influence, inspiring other jazz musicians like
Oscar Peterson and Ahmad Jamal to form similar trios. Epstein says if Cole
had never crooned a note, he would still be an important figure in jazz.
Nat King Cole: An Incandescent Voice
50 GREAT VOICES
Nat King Cole: An Incandescent Voice
"He really is, I would say, one of our top five greatest and most influential
jazz pianists," Epstein says.
Johnny Mathis,
the 83-year-old balladeer who grew up listening to Cole as his father's
favorite singer in the 1940s, later met and became friends with him after
moving to Beverly Hills in 1958.
"Nat King Cole was the God of popular music in our house," Mathis says with a
laugh. "That is the way that I fell in love with his music, is through his
piano playing, then of course, I occasionally listened to him singing — that
wasn't too bad either."
The
Nat King Cole Trio
had one hit after another, and its leader became wildly popular. In 1946, the
King Cole Trio landed a national radio show – the first of its kind to be
hosted by an African-American musician. Soon, Cole began to play less jazz and
sing more ballads .
Nat King Cole plays with his jazz orchestra on the stage of The Apollo Theater,
in Harlem, N.Y. in the 1950s.
Eric Schwab/AFP/Getty Images
By the 1950s, Cole's repertoire was mostly love songs backed by strings. He
told a Swiss television reporter he was simply giving his fans what they wanted.
"You see, it's not a case of my personal likes," Cole said in the interview. "I
try to please as many people as I possibly can and if I find the people like
certain things, I try to give them what they like. And that's good business
too, you see."
According to Epstein, Cole saw himself as an entertainer, not an activist. But
his April 10, 1956 performance in Alabama was a crucial moment in race
relations.
"He went down to the South to perform with an interracial band, which was
pretty bold and offensive to a lot of whites," Eptein explains.
"But then he
agreed to play for segregated audiences, which offended his black audience."
Cole agreed to play a 10 p.m. show at the Birmingham Municipal Auditorium for
black audiences, and an early show for white audiences, which attracted a group
of local white supremacists.
"The White Citizens Council of Alabama had this plot to kidnap Cole from the
theater, Eptein says. "The plot failed, but the hoodlums did storm the stage,
break up the performance. They knocked Nat Cole off the piano bench and injured
his back."
'The Nat King Cole Show': From The Small Screen To Your Computer Screen, Finally
THE RECORD
'The Nat King Cole Show': From The Small Screen To Your Computer Screen, Finally
A doctor treated Cole in his dressing room, and the singer returned to the
stage for the late show. The incident made national news, and seven months
later, Cole became the first major African-American musician to host a national
television variety show.
The Nat King Cole Show had a large audience, but no national sponsor would back
a show with a black host for fear of alienating Southern viewers. NBC was
losing money, and Cole canceled the weekly program after a little more than a
year. However, Epstein says Cole continued to reach a wide audience through
records that topped the charts. "That was the great gift of his charisma,"
Epstein says. "That there was so much passion in his voice and so much
intelligence, he was able to transcend the color barrier."
Cole didn't live long enough to see his career overshadowed by rock and roll. A
heavy smoker all his life, he was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1964 and went
into the studio for the last time in June of that year. Only 45 years old, Cole
died on Feb. 15, 1965.
"He was the nicest man you'd ever want to meet in your life," Mathis recalls of
his friend. "Just a very down-to-earth person who happened to be one of the
greatest musicians of all time. And he became, of course, a model for so many
people, especially someone like myself."
