Nat King Cole The Christmas Song

Nat King Cole's flawless vocals combined with ever so sweet orchestrations and choral backings, provide a collection of standard Christmas carols, hymns and songs that gloriously captures the spirit of the season. Without fireworks, improvisations, catchy rhythms, or unusual variations, Cole sings songs full of love in his relaxed and unpretentious style. The orchestra and chorus under the direction of Ralph Carmichael are used to highlight Cole's vocal interpretations, instead of making their own statements, and the use of bells, bell lyre, flutes, and harp add depth to the background while adding emphasis to the lyrics. The title track, beautifully sung to an accompaniment of piano and strings, has always been Cole's biggest Christmas hit, it has remained a perinnial and is possibly his most widely heard record.

First issued in the '60s, this collection of musical Christmas cheer is packed full of the smoothly sung, sentimental favorites associated as much with Nat King Cole himself as with the season. The singer's performance of "The Christmas Song" is an unforgettable classic reprised here twice, once in an updated version that includes a contemporary vocal from his daughter, Natalie, and also in Cole's original 1946 recording. Other traditional religious favorites like "I Saw Three Ships" and "Away in a Manger" are also featured, in a setting that, with its well-arranged orchestral accompaniment, manages to sound both sophisticated and folksy.

In early May of 1946, the King Cole Trio, with guitarist Oscar Moore and bassist Johnny Miller, was appearing at The Trocadero in Hollywood. One night after the last set, a then 21-year-old Mel Torme came up to the bandstand and told Nat Cole that he had a new song that he was eager for him to hear. After the last few customers left, Mel sat down at the piano and performed “The Christmas Song” for Nat and the guys. Nat loved it immediately and he sat down at the piano and ran it down a couple of times. Years later, Nat told me that it was that very night that Oscar Moore played the “Jingle Bells” coda. Interestingly, Nat used this same ending every time he recorded the song.

De son vrai nom Nathaniel Adams Coles, Nat King Cole est un pianiste déterminant dans l’histoire du jazz avant de devenir un chanteur populaire considéré par tous, comme l’un des plus grands crooners de l’histoire de la musique américaine. Né le 17 mars 1919 à Montgomery (Alabama), Nat King Cole aura une vie personnelle très médiatisée, marquée par sa place d'artiste noir dans une société où la ségrégation raciale est importante. Mort le 15 février 1965 à Santa Monica (Californie), son nom est inscrit au Rock and Roll Hall of Fame en 2000 comme influence du genre rock durant le xxe siècle !

If you add up all the songs Nat King Cole placed in the various Billboard singles charts – including not only the pop and R&B charts, but also the adult contemporary and even country ones, as well as the lists of discs "bubbling under" the main pop chart – the total comes to a remarkable 123, and that's not including the many repeat appearances of "The Christmas Song (Merry Christmas to You)." The entries begin with "That Ain't Right," the King Cole Trio recording that entered the "Harlem Hit Parade" in the fall of 1942, and end with "Let Me Tell You, Babe," which dropped off the easy listening chart in the summer of 1966 more than two years after Cole's death; they range in popularity from "Straighten Up and Fly Right," which topped the black chart for ten weeks and the country chart for six while also placing in the pop Top Ten in 1944, to "Cappuccina," which spent one week bubbling under the pop chart at number 115 in 1961.

The Nat King Cole Story is a 1961 album by Nat King Cole. The album was a retrospective of Cole's recording career, designed to present many of his earlier hits in new recordings featuring stereo sound. Cole is accompanied on the re-recordings by many of the notable arrangers and bands that had appeared with him on the original records. At the 4th Grammy Awards, The Nat King Cole Story was nominated for the Grammy Award for Album of the Year.

Nat King Cole was a pretty fair jazz piano player, but it was his rich, warm, and smoothly elegant vocal style that made him into an icon. The standard single-disc edition contains 22 classic Cole performances, while this two-CD Deluxe edition adds 14 rare and/or previously unreleased tracks, including four never-before-heard vintage songs and previously unissued alternate takes of the Cole standards "Straighten Up And Fly Right", "Unforgettable", Mona Lisa", "The Christmas Song", and "(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons" taken from the Nat King Cole Story sessions. Also featured are "Ain't She Sweet" and "What to Do", recorded in 1954, both of which find Cole trading vocals with his daughters Carole and Natalie, whose cross-generational 1991 duet version of "Unforgettable" helped to introduce her father to a new generation of listeners.