ABOUT A YEAR AGO, I was at Borders, looking for a Nat "King" Cole CD. Much to my astonishment, I found that Cole's CDs resided not in the jazz section where I looked first, but in "Easy Listening."
In fact, the CD I eventually found and bought, "After Midnight: The Complete Session" -- a 1956 recording of the Nat "King" Cole Trio -- is, no doubt, exceptionally easy to listen to; it has become one of my favorites since I first heard it a year ago. But it hardly deserves to be relegated to the bins of music that I associate mostly with watered down covers of tired standards, and showy or moody pieces meant to be ambient sound, not great works of artistry worthy of your careful attention.
In "After Midnight," Cole shows himself to be every bit the jazz musician. It's full of his acrobatic, crisply executed piano solos that only a master could pull off. And his voice, at that time well known for is smooth crooning in a soup of richly swelling strings and horns, is nimble, full of energy and experimental. Though he rarely strays from the melody line, the improvisation comes with his never-predictable phrasing.
Though I can't be sure this video clip of Cole singing one of his signature songs, "Route 66," includes the same personnel or was filmed at the same time as the record, the sound this group produces is almost identical to what you hear on "After Midnight." And in this clip of the song "Sweet Lorraine," (a song reputed to have moved him from just a piano player to a singer, too), Cole relinquishes his place at the piano for none other than the legendary Oscar Peterson (backed also by a Hall-of-Fame team of Coleman Hawkins on tenor, Ray Brown on bass and Herb Ellis on guitar). There is no mistaking Cole's vocal stylings as anything but jazz.
By 1956, most of the albums Nat Cole had put out and his performances on his own new network TV variety show (he was the first black performed to host one), were heavily orchestrated productions, designed to place his silky voice in the tradition of many of his contemporary crooners -- nearly all of them white and appealing to mostly white audiences.
The best example of this is perhaps is his rendition of Mel Torme's "The Christmas Song," (you know, "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire...."), which is perhaps his most well known legacy today. It's a gorgeous performance that always makes me stop and listen, even though I've heard it more times than I can count. But there's much less of the jazz singer in him here than there is in his trio recordings. The edge is gone, and there's very little in the build of the song that we can't predict, as it is so familiar to the pop vocal conventions of its day.
When you see the difference between Cole The Crooner and Cole The Jazz Stylist (and there's probably no better way to observe the difference when you see this version of him singing "Nature Boy" with bass and drums and this version with full orchestra), you've got to wonder whether he enjoyed being a crossover musician. He was casting behind the genre that was not only his musical foundation but also the -- how to say? -- more authentic expression of his identity as a black man. There's probably little doubt that a career as a pop crooner had to be far more lucrative than one of a jazz ensemble leader (although he had made a good living at that, so I understand). But was it worth what he left behind at many points in his career? That's not a judgment of Cole but of the times.
Maybe that's why he recorded "After Midnight," which brought him back to his roots. As Ralph Gleason points out in the record's liner notes, "This album was Nat Cole's first with his small group in some time. Long before he was known as a singer, Nat was one of the best of all jazz pianists, winner of [numerous top awards]." The King Cole Trio "set the pattern" for the now-commonplace "trios of piano, bas and guitar working in hotels and nightclubs all over the country," Gleason wrote, adding: "Until its success, no agency would book, and almost no nightclub would hire, such a small combination." This was the age of the big band.
One can't help but wonder, too, whether Sam Cooke, like Cole, felt similarly inauthentic performing the type of music he was most known for. There's no question that his hits -- such as "(What a) Wonderful World" (seen here with this curiously silly montage), "Everybody Likes to Cha Cha" (performed here on American Bandstand) and "You Send Me" (with some saccharine animation here) -- were cutting new paths for early rock and roll and decisive precursors to R&B acts that would emerge later in the 1960s.
But they were surely a departure from the rousing black gospel singing with which Cooke began his career. If anything, his performance persona appeared to have been whitened by producers, who likely feared that Cooke's "race music," as it was known in the '50s and early '60s, might not reach beyond black listeners. Yes, Elvis had already arrived on the scene to introduce whites to "race music," but that doesn't mean the scene had been fully transformed yet.
The most striking example I could find of this on YouTube was this performance by Cooke on "The Arthur Murray Party," a show that ran during the '50s that was about as whitebread as it comes (think Lawrence Welk). Cooke seems absolutely restrained -- straight-jacketed -- though he stands out as hipper than hip in a room of bright white men and women dressed in tuxedos and society gowns. It must have been an interesting evening.
When you listen, however, to the album "One Night Stand: Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963," you get a feel for who the real Sam Cooke might really have been. Recorded in Miami nearly two years before Cooke was killed in a dispute with a girlfriend in December of 1964, the concert sizzles with all the wonderful vocal histrionics and sharp verbal patter between songs that he was clearly not displaying in other venues.
Take, for example, this plaintive version of "Bring It on Home," (one of my favorite Cooke songs), or this cut of "Nothing Can Save This Love." They make his performance on "The Arthur Murray Party" look like Perry Como.
A New York Times reviewer took note of the album's surprisingly genuine sound when it appeared in 1985:
Most of the great soul singers, from Smokey Robinson to Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin to Al Green, have acknowledged Mr. Cooke as a primary influence, but most of his recordings were tailored for a broad pop audience. Until the release of ''One Night Stand,'' his only live album was ''Sam Cooke at the Copa,'' a set of sophisticated supper-club soul. Like so many performers who got their start on the gospel circuit, Mr. Cooke thrived on audience interaction, and the crowd at Miami's Harlem Square Club seems to have pushed him to the limit.
Critic Steve Leggett of the All Music Guide had this to say of the record:
Not only is this one of the greatest live soul albums ever released, it also reveals a rougher, rawer, and more immediate side to Sam Cooke that his singles only hinted at, good as they were.... Every track burns with an insistent, urgent feel, and although Cooke practically defines melisma on his single releases, here he reaches past that into deeper territory that finds him almost literally shoving and pushing each song forward with shouts, asides, and spoken interactions with the audience, which becomes as much a part of this set as any bandmember.... [W]hile he was a marvelously smooth, versatile, and urbane singer on his official pop recordings, here he explodes into one of the finest sets of raw secular gospel ever captured on tape.
Too bad we didn't have the chance to hear more of this side of Cooke during his relatively short career. And, while it's understandable -- but not quite forgivable -- that Border's would so wrongly categorize Nat Cole, it's a shame that his "easy listening" career overshadowed what was likely his greatest treasure and contribution to our culture. It seems that both Cole and Cooke were, in a manner of speaking, victims of their times, in spite of their great work and success. And, in a manner of speaking, so are all the rest of us.
Jeff
Great points you bring up about the early days of Sam Cooke's career.
It's important to note that when Sam left gospel, his intention was to target a crossover market. So while some of his appearances and performances may have looked strain (Lord knows he sounded like a fish out of water on some of his early pop songs!), it was all calculated.
I questioned Sam's brothers extensively on this period and they both agree that he went through an experimental phase in trying to effect the crossover. My uncle Charles, Sam's oldest brother, said he performed some of his Canadian concerts in a top hat and tails. It was hit and miss at one point, but when Sam relaxed and performed the songs he was comfortable with (mainly the ones he wrote), he came into his own in a big, big way.
Sam's extreme versatility is mind-boggling. Though his recording career spanned only 14 years, excellent performaces have been captured with Sam singing gospel live and in-studio, pop live and in-studio, and the supper club circuit live.
He was truly a great performer whose loss is only deepened when the previously-unknown factors in his death are brought to the forefront.
Erik Greene
Author, “Our Uncle Sam: The Sam Cooke Story From His Family's Perspective”
www.OurUncleSam.com
Posted by: Erik Greene | April 26, 2008 at 11:18 AM
Erik, that's fascinating. I'd love to hear more. I'll check out your site.
Jeff
Posted by: Jeff Weintraub | April 26, 2008 at 06:05 PM