Customer Reviews

Penthouse Serenade/The Piano Style of Nat King Cole

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The Nat King Cole you remember, when you first heard his
smooth as silk styling at the keyboard.
You will want to play it over and over because it brings
back fond memories. Worthy of your selection.

Nat King Cole was simultaneously an internationally known singer and a little-known, but excellent, jazz pianist. He started singing with his trio and then gradually developed into a pop vocalist. The present album represents a focus on the piano, after Cole had become very popular.

This disc contains two records (on a single disc). The first, Penthouse Serenade, is a trio recording, but it is not "jazzy" in his original style. The liner notes refer to this as a "more straight-ahead" style, with little improvisation. If you want to hear the melody of these songs played on piano, with little elaboration, this is the disc for you, but I found it to be simply uninteresting. It's as if the producer was afraid that people would turn the record off if Cole stopped playing the melody or used an interesting chord. Overall, it was listenable, but not compelling.

The second record, The Piano Style of Nat King Cole, features the piano in Nelson Riddle arrangements for strings or big band. The arrangements are fine, but Cole was apparently limited to playing a single line with the right hand, keeping close to the melody. As a result, it seems to have sucked his personality completely out of the music. In some cases, the melody is embellished with a kind of hippity-hoppity phrasing that made my skin crawl. Whereas Penthouse Serenade was simply dull, I'm afraid that I had to force myself to listen to the whole of the second record. Cole could in fact use both hands to play, and he had great phrasing and sense of harmony. None of that was permitted here, and the result is simply annoying. Had he sung these arrangements, I'm sure the result would have been much better.

Fans of Cole's real jazz recordings should stay far away from this disc and seek out his earlier trio work. It may work as background music or as nostalgia for Cole fans, but I'm afraid that it was designed for a commercial audience of many years ago, and now that that audience has changed, the music seems simply dated.