Nathaniel Adams Coles, known professionally as Nat King Cole, was an American singer, jazz pianist, and actor. Cole's career as a jazz and pop vocalist started in the late 1930s and spanned almost three decades, during which he found success and recorded over 100 songs that became hits on the pop charts.
real name: Nathaniel Adams Coles
labels: Capitol Records, Decca, Ammor
genres: jazz
awards: Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, star on Hollywood Walk of Fame, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Latin Grammy Hall of Fame
plays: piano, organ, guitar
member of: The King Cole Trio
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Nathaniel Adams Coles was born in Montgomery, Alabama, on March 17, 1919. He had three brothers: Eddie (1910–1970), Ike (1927–2001), and Freddy (1931–2020), and a half-sister, Joyce. Each of the Coles brothers pursued careers in music. When Cole was four years old, the family moved to Chicago, Illinois, where his father, Edward, became a Baptist minister. Cole learned to play the organ from his mother, Perlina (Adams) Coles, the church organist. His first performance was "Yes! We Have No Bananas" at the age of four. Cole began formal piano lessons at the age of 12, learning jazz, gospel, and classical music "from Johann Sebastian Bach to Sergei Rachmaninoff". As a youth, Cole joined the news delivery boys' "Bud Billiken Club" band for The...
When he was 15, Cole dropped out of high school to pursue a music career. After his brother Eddie, a bassist, came home from touring with Noble Sissle, they formed a sextet and recorded two singles for Decca in 1936 as Eddie Cole's Swingsters. They performed in a revival of the musical Shuffle Along. Nat Cole went on tour with the musical. In 1937, he married Nadine Robinson, who was a member of the cast. After the show ended in Los Angeles, Cole and Nadine settled there while he looked for work.
Are you them, or do you know them? The mail slot is open.
Stardust is a studio album by American singer Natalie Cole, released on September 24, 1996. Cole won the Grammy Award for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals for the song "When I Fall in Love", a duet with Nat King Cole, at the 39th Grammy Awards.
"L-O-V-E" is a song written by Bert Kaempfert and Milt Gabler, recorded by Nat King Cole for his 1965 studio album L-O-V-E.
The song was composed by Bert Kaempfert with lyrics by Milt Gabler, and produced by Lee Gillette. The trumpet solo was performed by Bobby Bryant. The song had previously appeared as an instrumental track on Kaempfert's album Blue Midnight (1964).
"Nature Boy" is a song first recorded by American jazz singer Nat King Cole. It was released on March 29, 1948, as a single by Capitol Records, and later appeared on the 1961 album The Nat King Cole Story.
It was written by eden ahbez as a tribute to Bill Pester, who practiced the Naturmensch and Lebensreform philosophies adopted by Ahbez. The lyrics of the song relate to a 1940s Los Angeles–based group called "Nature Boys", a subculture of proto-hippies of which Ahbez was a member.
In 1941, a 33-year-old George McGrew arrived in Los Angeles and began playing piano in the Eutropheon, a small health food store and raw food restaurant on Laurel Canyon Boulevard. The café was owned by John and Vera Richter, who followed a Naturmensch (nature person) and Lebensreform (life reform) philosophy influenced by the Wandervogel (Wandering Bird) movement in Germany. Their followers, known as "Nature Boys", wore long hair and beards and ate only raw fruits and vegetables. McGrew adopted the philosophy and chose the name "eden ahbez", writing and spelling his name with lower-case letters. It was there, while living in a cave near Palm Springs, that ahbez wrote "Nature Boy". Partly autobiographical, the song was a tribute to his...
Cole's recording, which took place on August 22, 1947, featured an orchestra conducted by Frank De Vol—the in-house arranger of Capitol Records. He used strings and flute as instrumentation in the song, to capture the "enchanting" vibe of the track. The first two measures of the song's melody parallel the melody of the second movement in composer Antonín Dvořák's Piano Quintet No. 2 (1887). Written as a pop ballad, "Nature Boy" follows an "A,B" format, with the primary three notes descending on a minor triad above the pickup note.
In 1948, a second "Petrillo ban" on music recording was enforced by American Federation of Musicians (AFM) in response to the Taft–Hartley Act. Capitol Records, desperate to release recorded material to help sustain profitability during the strike, released "Nature Boy" as a single on March 29, 1948, with catalog number 15054. Crestview Music, which owned the publishing rights to Cole's songs, sold the rights for "Nature Boy" to Burke-Van Heusen, who acted as distributor and selling agent. The record debuted on the Billboard pop charts of April 16, 1948, and stayed there for 15 weeks, ultimately peaking at number one. It also reached a peak of number two on the R&B charts. "Nature Boy" went on to sell a million copies in 1948 and Billboard...