Straighten Up and Fly Right

Starred review from June 29, 2020
In this richly detailed biography, Friedwald (The Great Jazz and Pop Vocal Albums) tells the mesmerizing life story of singer and musician Nat King Cole (1919–1965). Friedwald covers Cole’s early life in Montgomery, Ala., and his move to Chicago, where he dropped out of high school at age 15 to pursue music, and his days in the late 1930s leading the Nat King Cole Trio, which featured Cole as bandleader and pianist—but not a vocalist until 1940, with his first hit “Sweet Lorraine.” Friedwald traces Cole’s solo career and his work with arranger and composer Nelson Riddle in the 1950s (“the first period of his great albums) and spellbindingly demonstrates Cole’s ability to reach across audiences and genres, from jazz to pop, with his 150 hits (including “Straighten Up and Fly Right,” “Mona Lisa,” and “The Christmas Song”). As Friedwald explains, Cole became a romantic figure as well as role model for African American listeners. Friedwald wonderfully captures Cole and his career with smooth and captivating prose in this definitive biography.

April 1, 2020

Music writer and concert producer Friedwald presents a celebratory biography of pianist and singer Nat King Cole (1919-65). Cole started his career as a teenage band leader, then formed the King Cole Trio with guitarist Oscar Moore and bassist Wesley Prince (who was later replaced by Johnny Miller); the group rose to fame during World War II. Eventually, Cole soared as an internationally acclaimed pop stylist and film star backed by orchestra leaders such as Nelson Riddle and Gordon Jenkins. The author also delves into Cole's heroic struggle against racial discrimination, his mastery of the machinations of the music business, and his personal life, including coverage of his relationships with his two wives, Nadine Robinson and Maria Hawkins Ellington, both parents, and his five children. The book ends with Cole's untimely death in 1965 from lung cancer. VERDICT Though needlessly exaggerating its subject's considerable accomplishments and sometimes mired in details, this well-researched, comprehensive work should became a standard biography along with Daniel Mark Epstein's Nat King Cole.--David P. Szatmary, formerly with Univ. of Washington, Seattle

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2020
The story of an African American superstar who brought jazz roots to the Great American Songbook. Music historian, journalist, and producer Friedwald offers an admiring and overwhelmingly thorough biography of Nathaniel Adams Coles (1919-1965), better known as Nat King Cole. Performing as a jazz pianist from the age of 18, Cole assembled a trio that included a guitarist and a bassist who, it turns out, gave the group its name: "I thought of 'Old King Cole was a merry old soul, ' you know, and that's what gave me the idea of calling him Nat King Cole." For the next decade, the King Cole Trio was "the most popular 'combo' of its era," not least because of Cole's singing. Although Cole attributed his success to luck, Friedwald makes much of the "superlative musical intelligence" that informed his savvy decisions about genre, songs, venues, arrangers, and record companies. In 1943, Cole decided to promote the catchy original song "Straighten Up and Fly Right," which became "a late swing-era anthem" after it was heard on radio and in the Trio's first recording with Capitol Records. That song "accelerated the Trio's ascent into the stratosphere" and catapulted Cole to fame. Choosing that particular song "was no accident," according to Friedwald, but a move made "with the tactical skill and ingenuity of the scientists at Los Alamos"; it "proved that he was the Robert Oppenheimer of pop music." Chronicling Cole's career year by year in dense detail, the author examines live and recorded performances, singles, albums, TV shows, and movies, analyzing music, lyrics, and arrangements. As far as Cole's personal life, he recounts racist incidents against Cole (he once was assaulted onstage in Alabama), his family (residents protested when he bought a house in a wealthy white neighborhood), and his property (a devastating IRS investigation, Cole thought, was racially motivated); portrays his second marriage as deeply loving--until it wasn't; and defends Cole's lack of involvement with his children as a consequence of being on the road. An effusive celebration of a multitalented performer.

COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.