Off on A Cashmere Cloud

By JAY COCKS

Even though this is a state occasion, let us, for the present, forswear all the obligatory cries of acclamation. None of this "the king lives!" stuff. And no "once and future king" either. They may be true, but they sound a little stiff somehow, something his music never was. So -- taking a cue from the music itself -- let's just salute the memory of Nat King Cole with one bright "flash!," a loud "bam!" and a reverent but resounding "alakazam!"

You may recognize that little refrain from a 1950 killer hit of Cole's called Orange Colored Sky. If not, it isn't too late to catch up and catch on. In fact, now is just the time. Cole is more emphatically present now than at any time since his death in 1965. His daughter Natalie reprised his Unforgettable earlier this year, laid in her dad's voice for a posthumous duet and grabbed herself a No. 1 album. A new Cole biography was published this spring. Every time PBS has a time slot to fill or needs to kick off a fund raiser, it seems to air a show from Cole's '50s TV variety series.

And most important (flash! bam!), the intrepid Mosaic Records has just released The Complete Capitol Recordings of The Nat King Cole Trio: 18 CDs or 27 LPs, with a total of 349 cuts and about 17 hours of music. Great American music comes in lots of styles, but whatever the sound, it doesn't get much greater than this. Any one of the tunes in this collection can swing you off on a cashmere cloud.

Yes, Cole was that good. He could sing up there with Sinatra, Billy Eckstine, Tony Bennett; "one of our four or five most awe-inspiring and most popular mainstream vocalists" is the way Will Friedwald sums it up in his kinetic and knowledgeable essays accompanying the set. Along with that considerable distinction, Cole was also a superb keyboard man, mightily influenced by the great Earl Hines and able to hold his own against -- if not precisely surpass -- his mentor and the likes of Art Tatum. When he became a pop superstar, he gradually shed the bass and guitar that had been the foundation of his trio sound. But he never lost his jazz roots.

Well, almost never. Hit tunes from late in his career like Those Lazy-Hazy- Crazy Days of Summer and Ramblin' Rose stretched his credentials pretty thin and are nowhere to be found on Mosaic. Neither are such excellent songs as Mona Lisa, a 1950 smash that was also the first Cole side to have no trio inflection whatsoever. The Mosaic set is for jazz fans, not nostalgists, and at $270 it is not an impulse purchase. (It is available only by mail or phone order from Mosaic: 203-327-7111.)

Producer Michael Cuscuna tried to include only tunes "where Nat is on piano, the trio style is evident and hopefully there is some jazz content." Even such a flexible standard becomes a little restrictive by the early '50s, < when Cole turned more and more toward often wonderfully arranged orchestrations by Nelson Riddle, Billy May, Pete Rugolo and others. One of the Mosaic set's standout cuts is Cole's benchmark version, arranged by Rugolo, of Billy Strayhorn's great ballad of fantasy, loneliness and longing, Lush Life. There is also Nature Boy -- no getting away from that -- and such toothsome novelties as four duets with Johnny Mercer, including the memorably titled Save the Bones for Henry Jones ('Cause Henry Don't Eat No Meat).

Mercer, a cool-hand songwriter as well as a canny businessman, had first seen Cole playing a date at a Los Angeles steak joint in the late '30s and almost a half-decade later, signed him up for his fledgling Capitol Records. Cole was, even then, a sure jazz spirit and a first-rate singer. Born Nathaniel Adams Coles in Montgomery, Ala., in 1919, he had moved with his clergyman father and family to Chicago in 1923 and started to play professionally while he was still a teenager. Guitarist Oscar Moore and bass player Wesley Prince joined him in 1937 -- a club owner had suggested to Cole that he form a trio -- and "for seven years," as the front man himself later remembered, "we knocked ourselves out." Cole had begun to sing, he later recalled, "to break the monotony," and by the time they joined Mercer's new label the trio had gone about as far in jazz and show biz as a black outfit could in those days.

It was the driving, airy invention of the trio sound, first defined by such pre-Capitol hits as Sweet Lorraine, that staked their reputation. But it was Cole's singing that made them a stellar attraction. "The vocals," Cole said simply, "caught on." There were several shifts in trio personnel over the years (Irving Ashby, for example, took over the guitar when Moore departed in 1947), and the group became a quartet in 1949 with the addition of drummer Joe Costanzo. But through it all, Cole was the guiding spirit and main draw.

This helped him get his TV show in 1956 -- he was the first major black entertainer to have a regular network program -- but didn't do a whole lot for him in the jazz community, which had been buffeted by bop and the restless experimentation of Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane. Cole began to look like a silken technician who'd sold his soul. One of the best things about this Mosaic set is that it helps to correct that impression and shows Cole for the artist he was. He wasn't corrupted by the mainstream. He used jazz to enrich and renew it, and left behind a lasting legacy. Very like a king.