Nat King Cole Cole Español 31 Greatest Hits (2017)

Nat King Cole For a mild-mannered man whose music was always easy on the ear, Nat King Cole managed to be a figure of considerable controversy during his 30 years as a professional musician. From the late '40s to the mid-'60s, he was a massively successful pop singer who ranked with such contemporaries as Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, and Dean Martin. He shared with those peers a career that encompassed hit records, international touring, radio and television shows, and appearances in films. But unlike them, he had not emerged from a background as a band singer in the swing era. Instead, he had spent a decade as a celebrated jazz pianist, leading his own small group. Oddly, that was one source of controversy. For some reason, there seem to be more jazz critics than fans of traditional pop among music journalists, and Cole's transition from jazz to pop during a period when jazz itself was becoming less popular was seen as a betrayal. At the same time, as a prominent Black entertainer during an era of tumultuous change in racial relations in the U.S., he sometimes found himself out of favor with different, warring sides. His efforts at integration, which included suing hotels that refused to admit him and moving into a previously all-white neighborhood in Los Angeles, earned the enmity of racists; once, he was even physically attacked on-stage in Alabama.

Nat King Cole For a mild-mannered man whose music was always easy on the ear, Nat King Cole managed to be a figure of considerable controversy during his 30 years as a professional musician. From the late '40s to the mid-'60s, he was a massively successful pop singer who ranked with such contemporaries as Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, and Dean Martin. He shared with those peers a career that encompassed hit records, international touring, radio and television shows, and appearances in films. But unlike them, he had not emerged from a background as a band singer in the swing era. Instead, he had spent a decade as a celebrated jazz pianist, leading his own small group. Oddly, that was one source of controversy. For some reason, there seem to be more jazz critics than fans of traditional pop among music journalists, and Cole's transition from jazz to pop during a period when jazz itself was becoming less popular was seen as a betrayal. At the same time, as a prominent Black entertainer during an era of tumultuous change in racial relations in the U.S., he sometimes found himself out of favor with different, warring sides. His efforts at integration, which included suing hotels that refused to admit him and moving into a previously all-white neighborhood in Los Angeles, earned the enmity of racists; once, he was even physically attacked on-stage in Alabama.

John Lennon once said that if you were going to give another name to rock & roll you might as well call it Chuck Berry – a phrase that has been repeated to exhaustion precisely because it is no exaggeration. More than any other single musician, Berry defined the sound, style, and attitude of what rock & roll is, pushing guitars and cars to the forefront, constructing a world of soda shops and jukeboxes that resided just down the road a piece, finding an endless world within three chords.