Remember the Public

Nat "King" Cole is a confident soul with an explanation of his own for his steady popularity: "You've got to be elastic and change with the public's taste."

Currently, the public's taste for a schmalzy ballad called Too Young has put Crooner Cole's recording at the top of the bestselling heap. It's a success, says Cole, because he sings words, not notes. "I'm an interpreter of stories, and when I perform it's like I'm just sitting down at my piano and telling fairy stories." This is just as well, for whatever his voice is, it is not, as he is the first to admit, a true singing voice.

As Billy Eckstine once said, Cole "took a style and made a voice of it."

Cole's cozy recording of Too Young is backed by a lush concert orchestra, but he usually plays piano and vocalizes with his own King Cole Trio. In the Los Angeles nightclub where he is now playing, a thin overhead spotlight cuts through the smoky darkness to pick up Cole at the piano. He leans into the microphone and, breathing heavily, delivers such ballads as Sweet Lorraine and Embraceable You in a syrupy slur. By the time he finishes a set, including some fine feather-fingered piano-playing reminiscent of Earl ("Fatha") Hines, Cole's dark face is in a sweat. His audiences look & listen hard, never seem to get enough.

Cole, who was born 30-odd years ago in Montgomery, Ala., one of five children of a Baptist minister, has been banging piano most of his life. After his family moved to Waukegan, III., he began to bang out jazz Chicago-style, at 15 organized his own band. Known as the "Prince of the Ivories" (Idol Hines was "King"), Nat and his Rogues of Rhythm played dances, finally went on tour with a road show which folded in Los Angeles. There he switched to small combos, for several years was little known except to a small following of "pure jazz" fiends.

During the war, he wrote the tune that led to his tidy contract with Capitol Records: Straighten Up and Fly Right. He has been one of Capitol's main standbys ever since, selling 12 million records in seven years. Nat's jazz is "commercial" now, i.e., what the largest public wants to hear, instead of the old "pure" Chicago stuff. He has a ready answer for the jazz critics who deplore his switch to commercial: "Critics don't buy records--they get 'em free."

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