HEY, IT'S A LIVING:

After Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole is the best remembered of the singers who dominated American popular music between the end of the big-band era and the advent of rock 'n' roll. Chiefly known today as a performer of romantic ballads, he had a dark, grainy baritone voice with which he sang in a style at once intimate and unmannered. While Cole's reputation went into a temporary eclipse as a result of his early death--a lifelong chain smoker, he died of lung cancer in 1965, three decades before Sinatra gave his last public performance--he was restored to prominence in 1991 when his daughter Natalie, herself a talented pop singer, released a single of "Unforgettable" in which his original performance of the song, recorded 40 years earlier, was electronically superimposed on her own to create a "virtual duet." The record put Cole back in the limelight, and he has been there ever since.

Comparatively few of Cole's latter-day fans, however, know that he was more than a singer. In fact, he had started out as a jazz pianist of the highest distinction, the leader of the King Cole Trio, a "cocktail combo" (as such small groups were known in the '30s and '40s) that featured both his singing and his playing. To this day, singer-instrumentalists such as Diana Krall and John Pizzarelli continue to model their groups on the King Cole Trio's stylish, tightly routined records, and Cole's own brilliant playing left its mark on any number of younger pianists, among them Ahmad Jamal, Oscar Peterson, George Shearing, and Bill Evans, who called him "probably the most underrated jazz pianist in the history of jazz."

Had Cole continued to lead the trio, he would be generally acknowledged as one of the most important jazz pianists of the 20th century. But the ballads he sang with his trio were so enthusiastically received by the public that he started cutting vocal records accompanied by studio orchestras, and these proved even more successful than their jazz-oriented predecessors. As a result, the King Cole Trio disbanded in 1951, and it was as a pop singer, not a jazz instrumentalist, that Cole was known thereafter and to this day.

Incredibly, Cole's singing was as extraordinary as his playing. With the sole exception of Louis Armstrong, he is the only major jazz musician to have been identically distinguished and influential as both an instrumentalist and a vocalist. Moreover, his appeal, like that of Armstrong, crossed racial lines, and did so at a time when much of America was still segregated, a fact that led to his being assaulted on stage by a group of white supremacists during a concert he was giving in Birmingham in 1956. 

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