- Let’s Do Something
- Love Me Soone
- Jumpy Jitters
- Nothing Ever Happens
- Sentimental Blues
- What’cha Doin’ to My Heart
- I’m a Perfect Fool Over You
- Never Mind Baby
- Lovely Little Person
- Goin’ to Town with Honey
- Syncopated Lullaby
- Falling In & Out of Love
- Early Morning Blues
- Bedtime
- Honey Hush
- French Toast
- Vine Street Jump
- B Flat
- You Send Me
- Love Is My Alibi
- Gone With the Draft
- Pogo Stick Bounce
Nat ‘King’ Cole – piano/vocals
Oscar Moore – guitar
Wesley Prince – bass
Maxene Johnson – vocals, tracks 2,5,7,9
How Maxene Johnson came
to be singing with the Nat Cole Trio is
a mystery to me, she is not a jazz singer
by any stretch of the imagination and
her intonation is suspect on each track.
The good news is that there are only four
of them!
The trio is as usual
a very classy act, Oscar Moore is a fine
guitar player and he blends well with
Nat Cole’s immaculate piano playing. Wesley
Prince plays accurate bass lines and rounds
off the trio.
These recordings were
made to be used on broadcasts and the
ownership of them is unknown. The transcription
companies syndicated their recordings
to radio stations and it suited them to
use original compositions because they
owned the rights to them, although they
were never published. From the sound of
them, my guess would be that they are
mostly Nat Cole compositions.
Nat Cole was one of the
greatest pianists that the jazz world
ever produced and that was long before
he got into being an international recording
artiste. The trouble with this particular
selection of his work, is that although
musically it is well up to his high standards,
the tracks are rather similar and where
the trio really does start to take off,
for example ‘Pogo Stick Bounce’, the tracks
are very short.
Don Mather
CD Reviews
NAXOS JAZZ LEGENDS 8. 120705
