KING HARVEST
HE WAS A SUPERSTAR. A beloved singer with over 100 hit records to his name, the world’s highest-selling recording artist between Bing Crosby and Elvis Presley, and the host of his own national television show. Today, a century after his birth and 54 years after his death, he remains a household name.
Yet even if you know all that about Nat King Cole, you only know half the story.
By the time “Straighten Up and Fly Right”—Cole’s breakthrough hit at the head of the King Cole Trio—reached Billboard’s pop Top 10 in the spring of 1944, the 25-year-old had already been a professional musician for a decade. In those early years, though, he was not primarily a singer, but a pianist … a brilliant one.
“Nat Cole is easily one of the greatest jazz pianists ever,” says author, music critic, and historian Will Friedwald. “On a par with Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson, and Bud Powell. And we know that he was an extremely influential piano player from the testimony of the players he influenced: George Shearing, Erroll Garner, and Oscar Peterson himself.”
Friedwald is a co-producer of Hittin’ the Ramp: The Early Years 1936-1943, a seven-CD/10-LP boxed set released November 1 on Resonance Records. The package is designed to put a new spotlight on that underappreciated side of Cole. “If you want to hear Nat in his purely jazz phase, then this is the period,” Friedwald says.
Many jazz fans are surely aware of Cole’s career as a pianist. (The man himself rarely discussed it; once he was
