Article successfully added.

Nat 'King' Cole Eight Classic Albums Vol.3 (4-CD)

This article is deleted and can no longer be ordered!
Please inform me as soon as the product is available again.
Please enter the digits and letters in the following text field.

  • CDRGM095
  • 0.19
(Real Gone Music) 96 Tracks - 1952-1957 - Eight more classical albums by the legendary jazz... more

Nat 'King' Cole: Eight Classic Albums Vol.3 (4-CD)

(Real Gone Music) 96 Tracks - 1952-1957 - Eight more classical albums by the legendary jazz pianist and singer, who even had his own TV show. Includes the following records: Top Pops, Penthouse Serenade, Harvest Of Hits, The Piano Style of Nat King Cole, Unforgettable, Nat King Cole Sings For Two In Love, After Midnight and Just One Of Those Things!

Article properties: Nat 'King' Cole: Eight Classic Albums Vol.3 (4-CD)

Cole, Nat 'King' - Eight Classic Albums Vol.3 (4-CD) CD 1
01 Somewhere Along The Way Nat 'King' Cole
02 Walkin' My Baby Back Home Nat 'King' Cole
03 Faith Can Move Mountains Nat 'King' Cole
04 Funny (Not Much) Nat 'King' Cole
05 Hold My Hand Nat 'King' Cole
06 Teach Me Tonight Nat 'King' Cole
07 I'm Never Satisfied Nat 'King' Cole
08 Because You're Mine Nat 'King' Cole
09 The Ruby And The Pearl Nat 'King' Cole
10 A Weaver Of Dreams Nat 'King' Cole
11 Papa Loves Mambo Nat 'King' Cole
12 If I Give My Heart To You Nat 'King' Cole
13 Penthouse Serenade Nat 'King' Cole
14 Somebody Loves Me Nat 'King' Cole
15 Laura Nat 'King' Cole
16 Once In A Blue Moon Nat 'King' Cole
17 Polka Dots And Moonbeams Nat 'King' Cole
18 Down By The Old Mill Stream Nat 'King' Cole
19 If I Should Lose You Nat 'King' Cole
20 Rose Room Nat 'King' Cole
21 I Surrender Dear Nat 'King' Cole
22 It Could Happen To You Nat 'King' Cole
23 Don't Blame Me Nat 'King' Cole
24 Little Girl Nat 'King' Cole
Cole, Nat 'King' - Eight Classic Albums Vol.3 (4-CD) CD 2
01 Straighten Up And Fly Right Nat 'King' Cole
02 You Call It Madness (But I Call It Love) Nat 'King' Cole
03 (Get Your Kicks On) Route 66 Nat 'King' Cole
04 Lush Life Nat 'King' Cole
05 Ke-Mo, Ki-Mo (The Magic Song) Nat 'King' Cole
06 Gee Baby, Ain't I Good To You Nat 'King' Cole
07 The Frim Fram Sauce Nat 'King' Cole
08 Nature Boy Nat 'King' Cole
09 Love Walked In Nat 'King' Cole
10 My Heart Stood Still Nat 'King' Cole
11 Imagination Nat 'King' Cole
12 I Never Knew Nat 'King' Cole
13 Stella By Starlight Nat 'King' Cole
14 (What Can I Say) After I Say I'm Sorry Nat 'King' Cole
15 I Didn't Know What Time It Was Nat 'King' Cole
16 Taking A Chance On Love Nat 'King' Cole
17 April In Paris Nat 'King' Cole
18 I Want To Be Happy Nat 'King' Cole
19 I See Your Face Before Me Nat 'King' Cole
20 Just One Of Those Things Nat 'King' Cole
21 I Get A Kick Out Of You Nat 'King' Cole
22 If I Could Be With You (One Hour Tonight) Nat 'King' Cole
23 I Hear Music Nat 'King' Cole
24 Tea For Two Nat 'King' Cole
Cole, Nat 'King' - Eight Classic Albums Vol.3 (4-CD) CD 3
01 Unforgettable Nat 'King' Cole
02 A Portrait Of Jennie Nat 'King' Cole
03 What'll I Do Nat 'King' Cole
04 Lost April Nat 'King' Cole
05 Answer Me, My Love Nat 'King' Cole
06 Hajji Baba Nat 'King' Cole
07 Too Young Nat 'King' Cole
08 Mona Lisa Nat 'King' Cole
09 (I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons Nat 'King' Cole
10 Red Sails In The Sunset Nat 'King' Cole
11 Pretend Nat 'King' Cole
12 Make Her Mine Nat 'King' Cole
13 Love Is Here To Stay Nat 'King' Cole
14 A Handful Of Stars Nat 'King' Cole
15 This Can't Be Love Nat 'King' Cole
16 A Little Street Where Old Friends Meet Nat 'King' Cole
17 Autumn Leaves Nat 'King' Cole
18 Let's Fall In Love Nat 'King' Cole
19 There Goes My Heart Nat 'King' Cole
20 Dinner For One, Please James Nat 'King' Cole
21 Almost Like Being In Love Nat 'King' Cole
22 Tenderly Nat 'King' Cole
23 You Stepped Out Of A Dream Nat 'King' Cole
24 There Will Never Be Another You Nat 'King' Cole
Cole, Nat 'King' - Eight Classic Albums Vol.3 (4-CD) CD 4
01 Just You, Just Me Nat 'King' Cole
02 Sweet Lorraine Nat 'King' Cole
03 Sometimes I'm Happy Nat 'King' Cole
04 Caravan Nat 'King' Cole
05 It's Only A Paper Moon Nat 'King' Cole
06 You're Looking At Me Nat 'King' Cole
07 Lonely One Nat 'King' Cole
08 Don't Let It Go To Your Head Nat 'King' Cole
09 I Know That You Know Nat 'King' Cole
10 Blame It On My Youth Nat 'King' Cole
11 When I Grow Too Old To Dream Nat 'King' Cole
12 (Get Your Kicks On) Route 66 Nat 'King' Cole
13 When Your Lover Has Gone Nat 'King' Cole
14 A Cottage For Sale Nat 'King' Cole
15 Who's Sorry Now Nat 'King' Cole
16 Once In A While Nat 'King' Cole
17 These Foolish Things (Remind Me Of You) Nat 'King' Cole
18 Just For The Fun Of It Nat 'King' Cole
19 Don't Get Around Much Anymore Nat 'King' Cole
20 I Understand Nat 'King' Cole
21 Just One Of Those Things Nat 'King' Cole
22 The Song Is Ended (But The Melody Lingers On) Nat 'King' Cole
23 I Should Care Nat 'King' Cole
24 The Party's Over Nat 'King' Cole
Nat King Cole "Some performers - like myself - have to be loud and rambunctious. But Nat was... more
"Nat 'King' Cole"

Nat King Cole

"Some performers - like myself - have to be loud and rambunctious. But Nat was just Nat."
- Sammy Davis, Jr.


On December 20, 1954, a little more than a week before the start of the period covered by this box set, Nat King Cole and his musical director Nelson Riddle recorded A Blossom Fell. The song would be one of Cole's big hits of 1955; in 1956 it would become the lead track of his album 'Ballads Of The Day,' a popular compilation of successful singles. Empirical evidence suggests that Cole and his producer, Lee Gillette, regarded A Blossom Fell as one of the singer's all-time greatest hits. Cole would land more than a hundred songs on various hit charts over a 25-year period in his lifetime alone yet A Blossom Fell was one of the 36 songs they chose to re-record in stereo in 1961, for the retrospective album, 'The Nat King Cole Story.'

A Blossom Fell was in many ways, a typical Nat King Cole song. Like many of his hits in the '50s and '60s, it was a European import. Cole must surely hold the record, you should forgive the expression, for doing more foreign-born songs than any other American entertainer – with the possible exception of Louis Armstrong. In this particular case, the song came from England, where it had been written by three rather obscure authors named Harold Cornelius, Dominic John and Howard Barnes. (The only other fact I have been able to find out about them is that they also wrote one other song that Cole put on the charts: the 1955 Dreams Can Tell A Lie. This tune was neither anywhere near as good a song nor, correspondingly, nearly as big a hit as A Blossom Fell.)

For most of his career, not only did a significant portion of Cole's material come from outside the United States, a large percentage of his market resided there as well. Around the same time A Blossom Fell was released in America, Cole's disc also charted in the song's native country, where Cole's version climbed considerably higher than rival recordings by home-grown crooners, Dickie Valentine and Ronnie Hilton.

The song is also an archetypical Nat King Cole hit in that, with no disrespect intended to Mr. Valentine and Mr. Hilton, I doubt that anyone would remember this particular song – and many others - were it not for Cole. In a sense, this was the opposite of the traditional path into The Great American Songbook. In many cases, the original source of the great songs is irrelevant; only scholars and music nerds would care that All The Things You Are was introduced by a singer no one has ever heard of (even in 1939) in a show called 'Very Warm For May' that quickly flopped. A Blossom Fell is precisely the reverse scenario: we care about the song only because Nat Cole had a hit with it. We would have no reason to remember the song were it not for Cole; he not only put it on the map, he was the whole map.

Even though it has been recorded by a handful of other singers, the song's only cred comes from the Cole-Riddle hit recording. The Austrian jazz singer Simone Kopemajer recently included it on an album because, as she told me, she loved the Cole performance of it. To Frau Kopemajer, Blossom represents a slice of the Great American Songbook and of the Cole canon – I don't think she was aware that the song had actually originated in Europe.

But in contrast to All The Things You Are - which is, admittedly, an unfair standard of excellence to compare it to - A Blossom Fell is by no means a classic example of songwriting. The lyric pivots on two points, the first being the use of plants as a metaphor. Cole would sing other songs that used variations on this idea, most notably the famous Blue Gardenia (1953), the obscure Sweet William (1952), and the classic Autumn Leaves (which he would perform for the first of many times later in 1955).

The lyric also employs another time-honored conceit of songwriters: the idea that gypsies, being fortune-tellers, are a race of mystics who have the inside dope on fate. While many of the ethnic stereotypes of Tin Pan Alley had disappeared by the postwar era, the preconceived idea regarding gypsies was apparently alive and well. In songs like Golden Earrings and The Gypsy (and even Cole's own, earlier That Ain't Right), lovers evaluate their affairs based on tell-tale signs read by gypsies in tea leaves and crystal balls.

I have no idea if the tradition presented in A Blossom Fell is a genuine gypsy custom, or if it was invented wholly for the song. In fact, it's kind of an awkward idea, one of those concepts that's so goofy, I would almost like to think it really was part of the folklore of real-life Romany. According to the lyric, if two lovers are sitting beneath a tree, exchanging vows of affection, and a blossom happens to fall off a branch and touch the lips of one of the two lovers, it means he or she isn't telling the truth when he or she says he loves him or her.

It's an awkward idea to express in song, and make no mistake, it is very awkwardly expressed. The song opens, "A blossom fell / From off a tree / It settled softly / On the lips you turned to me." That's the A section, and the last two lines are very cumbersome. They make little sense when you read them in print, especially considering that even if this is a genuine gypsy tradition, it's certainly one that not many people would be familiar with. As the late Sammy Cahn once observed, it's a mortal sin for a lyricist to put something in a line that has to be explained: a songwriter's job is to make his point immediately understandable, and if it's deep and profound, like Cole Porter or Alan Jay Lerner, so much the better.

The most obvious point was that only a really top drawer vocal artist - a Cole, a Sinatra, a Clooney, a Holiday - could take a lyric like this and not only make it crystal clear, but sing it so compellingly that millions of listeners would want to rush out and buy the single. As he so often did, Cole compensates for any inadequacies a text might have - he puts over exactly what the lyricist wanted to say even on those frequent occasions where the lyric is lacking. The lyric needs help, and it gets it.

Arranger-conductor Nelson Riddle does the same for the melody: he opens with a glorious string flourish that actually suggests the wind blowing threw leaves and branches in a cherry orchard with blossoms falling all over the place. The secondary voice on Blossom is valve trombonist Juan Tizol, who appears frequently on Cole's sessions in the mid-'50s, most prominently on the 1956 album 'After Midnight.' (When Cole remade the arrangement in 1961, he took the chart slightly slower and replaced the valve trombone with the customary slide instrument.) Yet Riddle doesn't deserve all the credit; Cole, more than nearly all other pop singers, had a unique capacity for improving any melody, for emphasizing the parts of the tune that worked and minimizing its shortcomings. It's no insult to Sinatra to say that, for all his musical strengths (including a remarkable sense of timing), that he had to take a backseat to Cole in the realm of pure melody. The only major singers who compete with Cole in this respect were Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. But neither of those grand divas was the interpreter that Cole was.

Bing Crosby or Carmen McRae could have sung A Blossom Fell and put the meaning across, but Cole does something I don't feel any other singer could have possibly done with it, and that is to make us believe it. Cole sings it as if he was imparting wisdom gained from actual experience, and he makes the words and music sound unique to his idiom. As much as I love Sinatra, I somehow don't think he could convince me that he exists in this particular world - a stylistic universe where liars can be readily identified by the blossoms sticking to their prevaricatin' lips. I don't mean that at all disingenuously: Cole makes you believe it in the most literal and direct way. There never would have been any Watergate or Monica-gate in this world, because Nixon and Clinton would have had blossoms all over their faces.

Nat Cole is the kind of talent that's hard to fully fathom in the world of 21st century popular culture - where almost nothing means what it's supposed to mean. Everything in the millennial era would appear to be ironic or sarcastic, a series of codes where meaning is hidden and nothing is obvious. Yet Cole is precisely the opposite: when he sings about blossoms falling on the lips of liars, he doesn't mean it metaphorically, he isn't singing symbolically, he means exactly what he sings.

In fact, the song is precisely suited to Cole, not Sinatra or anyone else, great as they may be, simply because in this world that he creates, Cole himself would never have a blossom stuck to his own lips. If the song has any kind of symbolism at all, it's that which describes the singer himself.

That, in fact, is the central tenet of Cole's music. Sinatra, contrastingly, was about singing great songs with multiple levels of meaning - songs with deep gray areas between black and white, like Glad To Be Unhappy. Even when Sinatra sings something simple, he makes it deeper and more complicated, and adds in gradations of feeling - Johnny Hodges-like microtones and emotional glissandos in between points A and B. Cole, on the other hand is more direct. Sinatra can take a simple song and make it profound; Cole takes a complex song and makes it simple...

Nat King Cole 1955-1959 Vol.1 (11-CD)
Read more at: https://www.bear-family.de/cole-nat-king-1955-1959-vol.1-11-cd.html
Copyright © Bear Family Records

Review 0
Read, write and discuss reviews... more
Customer evaluation for "Eight Classic Albums Vol.3 (4-CD)"
Write an evaluation
Evaluations will be activated after verification.

The fields marked with * are required.

Weitere Artikel von Nat 'King' Cole
L-O-V-E The Complete Capitol Recordings 1960-1964 Vol.2 (11-CD Deluxe Box Set)
Nat 'King' Cole: L-O-V-E The Complete Capitol Recordings... Art-Nr.: BCD16717

Ready to ship today, delivery time** appr. 1-3 workdays

$226.28 * $214.97 *
When I Fall In Love (12inch Maxi Single)
Nat King Cole: When I Fall In Love (12inch Maxi Single) Art-Nr.: LP15975

Item has to be restocked

$16.92 * $11.26 *
Capitol Collector's Series - Cut Out (CD)
Nat 'King' Cole: Capitol Collector's Series - Cut Out (CD) Art-Nr.: CDP93590

Ready to ship today, delivery time** appr. 1-3 workdays

$16.92 * $9.00 *
Sweet Georgia Brown (2-LP)
Nat King Cole: Sweet Georgia Brown (2-LP) Art-Nr.: LP2516821

Ready to ship today, delivery time** appr. 1-3 workdays

$22.58 * $20.31 *
Music Ages EP Series
Nat 'King' Cole: Music Ages EP Series Art-Nr.: CD34114

only 1x still available
Ready to ship today, delivery time** appr. 1-3 workdays

$14.66 * $11.26 *
Eight Classic Albums (4-CD)
Nat 'King' Cole: Eight Classic Albums (4-CD) Art-Nr.: CDRGM035

This article is deleted and can no longer be ordered!

$20.31 $22.58
Eight Classic Albums Vol.2 (4-CD)
Nat 'King' Cole: Eight Classic Albums Vol.2 (4-CD) Art-Nr.: CDRGM066

This article is deleted and can no longer be ordered!

$56.53
Eight Classic Albums Vol.2 (4-CD)
Nat 'King' Cole: Eight Classic Albums Vol.2 (4-CD) Art-Nr.: CDRGM066

This article is deleted and can no longer be ordered!

$56.53
Eight Classic Albums (4-CD)
Nat 'King' Cole: Eight Classic Albums (4-CD) Art-Nr.: CDRGM035

This article is deleted and can no longer be ordered!

$20.31 $22.58