King of Pop. - Cole - Review - book reviews

National Review, Dec 31, 1999 by Pete Hamill

Mr. Hamill is author most recently of Why Sinatra Matters and Diego Rivera.

Nat King Cole, by Daniel Mark Epstein (Farrar, Straus, 433 pp., $27)

IN some ways, the story of Nat King Cole is as familiar as that of Faust. The turning point of the drama is a moral choice: whether to sell one's soul to the devil in exchange for earthly riches, fame, and power. Jazz purists believe that Cole made a deal with the devil, but if so the reasons are not made clear in this blurry biography by Daniel Mark Epstein.

The blur is not entirely Epstein's fault: Cole kept no diaries, apparently wrote few letters, and restricted his interviews to the usual banal blather about his career. The reader must search for motives between the lines. One motive is apparent from the bald facts of Cole's story: the permanent and multiple hungers that afflicted millions of Americans who went through the Depression. This generational imprint was compounded by the special situation of talented African Americans of the era. It wasn't enough to be rich; one had also to be accepted by the white majority.

The chronicle of Cole's passage to acceptance dominates this book, which is more a biography of the career than of the man. We learn that Nathaniel Adams Coles (the family name was spelled with an "s") was born on St. Patrick's Day, 1919, in Montgomery, Alabama. His father was a hard-working, righteous man who wanted to serve the Lord, and he soon took his family north to Chicago, where he became a preacher.

The family was not impoverished. Nat's older brother Eddie learned to play bass fiddle, an expensive instrument. There was an upright piano in the home, and family legend insisted that Nathaniel could play by ear when he was 4. The Coles boys had the good fortune to find the path to the band room of Wendell Phillips High School and the rigorous presence of Maj. N. Clark Smith, who insisted that his charges learn to read music and understand theory (other pupils included Lionel Hampton and bassist Milt Hinton). Eddie was soon playing bass with jazz bands in the local clubs. Nat was learning piano at home, and listening very hard.

What did he hear? Epstein can't resist hyperbole. He calls Chicago in 1935 "the jazz mecca of America at the very moment the music had achieved a peak of perfection it could not sustain or regain, ever." He further asserts that Chicago in Cole's youth was host to "the greatest gathering of musical genius America has ever known, in its most creative decade." This is a declaration of Epstein's taste, but for me it is simply not true. Prohibition Chicago was a temporary home to one authentic musical genius: Louis Armstrong, a central figure in the evolution of jazz, an extraordinarily creative musician who was also an entertainer. None of the others-including Cole's personal model, Earl (Fatha) Hines-could compare to those of Cole's own generation as they assembled in the 1940s in New York: Charlie Parker, John Birks Gillespie, Max Roach, Bud Powell, Lester Young, Kenny Clarke, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon, and later, Clifford Brown, Sonny Rollins, and John Coltrane. Riding high in this company was the most intimidating of all pianists, a baroque genius named Art Tatum. It is very likely that Cole made his fateful choice to abandon jazz for pop commerce because he knew he could never be as good as Tatum.

All of that comes later in this often irritating book. Epstein's wobbly narrative begins on a night in 1935, when the 35-year-old Earl Hines and the 16-year-old Nat Cole shared a stage at the Savoy Ballroom in Chicago. Billed as a "Battle of Rhythm," the show pitted Hines and his orchestra against "Nat Cole, Chicago's Young Maestro and his Rogues of Rhythm." Hines was Nat's hero, his "musical father." We are told what Cole was wearing, and what Hines was thinking. (There are times when this doesn't quite ring true, as when Epstein writes: "A woman leaned over and whispered in Earl's ear. Wasn't there something about this boy, anyway, a power lurking?") The scene is vividly drawn, but we must wait another 40 pages to read about its conclusion. Between the curtain raiser and the actual performance we travel through all of Cole's childhood and youth. In his description of Hines, we get another sample riff of Epstein's own ripe style:

"The gift of Hines's piano to an orchestra was a matter of atmosphere, musical weather. His speed and dynamic control enabled him to surround the ensemble, lay green grass under it, spread a clear sky over it with sunshine or stars, or blow like a hurricane through an out-chorus. The delicate high descants of his piano could make a light spring rainstorm; then he would descend in bass decrescendos to violent thunder." Epstein tries hard to persuade us of Hines's mastery: "He played furious torrents and thick forests of notes, eighths and sixteenths; he cut them up so fine you could hardly tell they were notes anymore and not fluid ideas, like the grains of millet in Zeno's paradox."

Ah, well: It is never easy to write about music.