The King has been dead for nearly a half century. Not that you’d know it with all the reissues, television specials and creepy rip offs from Nat Cole’s daughter over the last pair of decades. He’s funny that way. Cole has had more output over that period than many living jazzers, and he’s brought more surprises — this album (since reissued under the new title Big Band Cole) not least among them.
Two of only a few recordings by Cole with a big band, and one of the first by the Count Basie Orchestra with a guest vocalist, this is a great place to start in figuring Cole’s lasting allure. Not only did Capitol Records clean up the old tracks (most are now in stereo), they’ve revealed five numbers that also feature Stan Kenton and his band.
The surprise, still, is Cole. Not swamped by strings, unfettered by long-lost family members, he swings with (to us) new-found abandon. Growling, crooning, he manages to bridle the typically romping Basie band, which treats the proceedings with surprising restraint and taste.
Between 1942 and ’65, when Cole passed after a bout with lung cancer, he charted 100 Top 40 hits, and that included pop, R&B, jazz, even country. This album works as a bridge between his hot-footed trio work as a pianist and his later proto-Connick pop, with Cole setting the standard for ballroom bombast.
The tracks with the Kenton band are notably bawdy, a combination of Cole’s hushed-voiced baritone vibrato and horns played like flying glass: “Wow, I thought love was much softer than that,” Cole says, after breathlessly rendering “Orange Colored Sky” in sessions from 1950. “What a disturbing sound!”
King Cole, long short-sticked to others of his era since they lived longer, remains an underappreciated voice. This record illustrates why like few others, because he risks so much for those more accustomed to hearing him as a trio-based pianist or (more popularly) as a too-sweet crooner in front of some fiddles.
Welcome to the Club, instead, confirms for all time Cole’s unerring ear for phrasing, and his place as one of the jazz idiom’s most important vocalists, even with horns and drums and expectations crashing down all around him.
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A voice like silk, he was born 94 years ago, yesterday, March 18.