Music

Today in Jazz

Nat "King" Cole, Piano/Singer, 1917, Montgomery, AL

Nat's family moved to Chicago when he was 4.  By the age of 12 he was playing the organ in the church where his father was pastor.  His three brothers, Eddie, Fred, and Isaac were also jazz musicians.  It was during his high school years that Nat really developed his interest in music, especially  jazz.  In 1936, with his brother Eddie's band, Nat made his first recording.  His first major influence was Earl Hines, and later with his own group, he often played Hine's arrangements. Cole left Chicago in 1936 to lead a band in a revival of Eubie Blake's revue Shuffle Along. After settling in Los Angeles in 1937 he formed a group with Oscar Moore and Wesley Prince which performed at clubs in Hollywood.  During this period he became known as Nat "King" Cole. The instrumentation of the group was so effective that Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson, and Ahmad Jamal later formed the same type of trios of their own.  During the mid '40s Cole made some of his most influential recordings with Lester Young and Red Callender.  Among these recordings were the masterpieces, "Body and Soul", "Indiana", "I Can't Get Started", and "Tea For Two".  The King Cole Trio sometimes sang in unison on their early recordings, but in 1943 Nat had a national hit with "Straighten Up And Fly Right".  This recording launched his career as a popular singer.  From this point he gradually appeared less often with his trio.  He began performing in concerts, and recording with Jazz At The Philharmonic as well as  with studio orchestras. He recorded  "The Christmas Song" with one of these studio orchestras.   Cole was one of the first black jazz artists to have his own radio show (1948-9), and by the early '50s he was internationally famous.  He toured widely, performed in concert halls, and appeared in several films.  By the mid '50s he had his own weekly television show.  It was Cole's work as a pianist, however, that is of the greatest musical significance.  He developed the intricate right-hand style initiated by Hines and the sparse, rhythmic left-hand style of Count Basie.  His influence on other jazz pianists was enormous.  Although he was very popular as a singer, his place in the history of jazz piano is secure.  Nat "King" Cole died in 1965.

Paul Horn, Clarinet, 1930, New York, NY

As a young child Paul studied the piano, taking up the clarinet when he was 12 years old.  He also studied flute at Oberlin College, graduating in1952.  In 1953 he received his master's degree from the Manhattan School of Music.   He then joined the Sauter-Finegan orchestra as a tenor- sax soloist.  From 1956 to 1958 he was with Chico Hamilton and then began working in the film studios in Hollywood.  He gained national recognition while working with Lalo Schifrin on Jazz On The Mass Texts.  After studying in India, Paul became a teacher of transcendental meditation.  He later recorded unaccompanied flute solos in the Taj Mahal at Agra, India.  He also played in the Great Pyramid of Cheops, near Cairo. In 1970 he moved to an island near Victoria, British Columbia, where he formed his own quintet and had a weekly television show.  During the early '80s he toured China and the USSR and managed his own recording company.  His experiments have included recording the sounds made by killer whales as an accompaniment to his playing.  Although such innovations have earned him many admirers, critics have generally not been enthusiastic.  He refers to his work as "universal" music.

Grover Mitchell, Saxophone, 1930, Whatley, AL

March 2010

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