Nat King Cole - the one and only thread

Nat King Cole Sings / George Shearing Plays is one of my all time faves even without Nat on the keys. All of it just works.

thanks all, good recommendations.

that "The Man I Love" is wonderful

I have nothing to add except, yes, his piano playing and trio were top-notch and he is still great even when “just” singing.

damn, that Friedwald book is 651 pages

Prolific author, him.

Be warned, Friedwald hates rock music. But he's one of the best authorities on pre-rock pop music at the moment and certainly the most published who's still alive. (Gary Giddins is great too, though he's primarily a jazz critic and anything he writes on pre-rock pop is rooted in a jazz perspective - that would be mine as well, so that's no criticism against him.)

I was revisiting "The Christmas Song (Merry Christmas To You)" tonight - a rare straight up holiday record (or records, I should say) that's actually a truly great recording. Aside from "Nature Boy," it's arguably Cole's greatest vocal release.

Thing is, Cole has recorded multiple versions of this song. Not an unusual practice, especially when the transition from mono to stereo was involved, but what's really disappointing is that the version that gets the most play these days is the least enjoyable one. Capitol commissioned an animated video that they uploaded to social media and YouTube two years ago, and THAT is the version they used for it. (To date, it's got 13 million plays on YouTube alone.) Wikipedia says this is the definitive version, but I vehemently disagree. I'll explain why in a minute.

First, here's what's reportedly the first studio recording of this song ever. It was famously written on an unbearably hot summer day in 1945, and this recording session happened a year later, featuring a trio arrangement by Cole, accompanied only by Oscar Moore on guitar and Johnny Miller on bass. (I may have posted this upthread, but I actually think Cole's jazz trio recordings are the best records he's ever made. I do think he is a great vocalist, but for various reasons including the songs involved and the musicianship, I play those earlier records more often than his vocal records.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Isf42hchmD4

Great recording, but this version wasn't released until 1989 when it was accidentally included on one of Rhino Records' Christmas CD compilations. It was originally shelved because Cole decided to re-record it with more accompaniment: four strings, a harp, and drums. Capitol didn't like the idea because they thought it would alienate his core audience, but Cole prevailed. Recorded a little over two months later in August, it was released in November and became an enormous hit. For my money, this is the definitive version.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-RXKcc0sZs

Soon, magnetic tape would be introduced into the recording industry, and by 1953, Capitol probably wanted to reissue a version that sounded more "modern" in terms of sound quality. So Nelson Riddle (who was only a year into his run of era-defining recordings with Frank Sinatra) arranged the song for a full orchestra, and Cole recorded a new version on to analog tape:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlH9i6GN4yM

A great version as well, but Cole recorded yet another version 7 1/2 years later because by then STEREO had been introduced. This performance is the one most people hear today, and last year it was the one the Library of Congress selected for preservation. It's a really good performance, and I can see why people may prefer it....but the original mix is awful. It commits the same horrible sins as many of the earliest stereo records released by Capitol, RCA, Verve and others - it drowns everything, particularly the vocalist, in a shitload of echo, and I fucking hate that sound. It's so damn schmaltzy and it's probably why I never liked the record until I heard the 2013 remix presented below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fICNF8o2R-g

The first-generation three-track session tape does NOT have any of the compression, equalization and most importantly any of the echo that was added to the original stereo mix. When Analogue Productions reissued a large batch of Nat King Cole records in 2013, they hired Steve Hoffman and Kevin Gray to engineer them. A lot of ridiculous baggage attached to Hoffman, but to be fair, he usually does an amazing job with music of this vintage, and what he did here was make a new stereo mixdown from the original three-track, adding a much more tasteful and restrained level of equalization and echo to the recording. Night and day difference - I still prefer the original 1946 hit, but there's no denying that this 2013 mix of the 1961 recording is pretty stunning for its fidelity.

Sorry - for that last link, jump to 15:07. I tried to bake that timecode into the link, but it didn't work.