The Complete After Midnight Sessions
"After Midnight" is the witching hour of music - the time when the old songs bring back the old memories and the time when musicians relax, play the tunes they like and in general settle into what they like to call "a good groove".
Sometimes - if you're lucky - you can capture this mood on record. The actual time of day (or night) that the recording takes place doesn't matter much. If the atmosphere is right, the participants sympathetic to one another, and the choice of tunes felicitous, three in the afternoon can be "After Midnight" in mood.
It was like that for this album. Capitol's new Tower Studios set the scene and all the conditions were right. At every session the prevailing atmosphere was "After Midnight" all the way.
This album is Nat Cole's first with his small group in some time. Long before he was known as a singer. Nat was one of the best of all jazz pianists, winner of Esquire Awards in 1946 and 1947, and top man in the Metronome poll in 1947, '48, and '49. The "King" Cole Trio won numerous honors too in capturing the Down Beat poll from 1944 to 1947 and the Metronome poll from 1945 to '48.
The Trio is an historic group in the saga of jazz and popular music in America. It is common today to see trios of piano, bass and guitar working in hotels and night clubs all over the country. Did you ever stop to consider that the "King" Cole Trio set the pattern for these groups? Until its success, no agency would book, and almost no night club would hire, such a small combination. When Nat first went looking an agent he was told time and again the group was too small. "You've got an awkward combination there," they'd tell him, but Nat kept on. "I knew the didn't what they were talking about," he says, and history has proved him right.
The "King" Cole Trio's story has also been interwound with that of Capitol Records. They made their first Capitol discs in 1943, when the company was a healthy youngster. Their second disc, Straighten Up and Fly Right, was an instant and tremendous hit. Since that time Nat "King" Cole (born Nathaniel Coles in Montgomery, Ala., in 1919, son of a Baptist preacher) has become one of the top names in the entertainment business and one of the biggest selling recording artists of all time. One of the great jazz piano players when he began the trio, Nat has now become one of the great ballad singers of our day - known throughout the world. And he is still a great pianist: witness his work in this album.
Nat is accompanied here by his regular group - guitarist John Collins, a veteran of the Art Tatum and Dizzy Gillespie groups and also an Esquire New Star winner; bassist Charlie Harris, who played with Lionel Hampton before joining Nat; and drummer Lee (Leonidas) Young, brother of the great Lester, who has worked extensively in motion picture studio orchestras and is also a veteran of the Lionel Hampton band. On Caravan and Lonely One, Jack Costanzo sits in on bongos.
A guest soloist joining the group on each tune is an arrangement that adds a little extra spice to the album - just as visiting musicians might drop by at a club after midnight and play a tune with the group. This particular sequence of guests stars fits especially well with the voice and music of Nat Cole.
(Notes by Ralph J. Gleason, editor of "The Rhythm Section," San Francisco Chronicle; and Down Beat columnist)
Little needs to be added to Ralph Gleason's notes to the original release of this album, but it is this: while After Midnight was widely recognized as a true classic at the time of its release, the added perspective that only time makes possible has shown us what it really is - one of those rare, perfect things that all too infrequently come our way. An inspired idea to begin with, in execution it so fired the imaginations of all involved that they gladly gave it their best, and often more than that, with the result that the transcendent totality of its individual parts wound up exceeding their fondest expectations.
The choice of guest soloists could not have been happier, for each of the four was among the leading players of his instrument who, in addition, shared with Cole and his trio members a deep commitment to, and acknowledged excellence in the performance of that bracing, accessible form of jazz known as Swing. And as the recorded minutes of these one-time meetings reveal, the results were as special as they were spectacular. Listen, and you'll marvel at what you hear: totally, authentically honest and direct and always resourcefully imaginative music-making of the highest calibers - ungimmicked, uncontrived, unaltered by overdubbing, splicing or any other after-the-fact editing - exactly as each grouping of five musicians, united in common cause, created it in the studio on these memorable August and September nights of 1956.
Of the principals three, sadly, are no longer with us - Cole, Juan Tizol and Stuff Smith - and as this album so forcibly reminds us, music is much the poorer for the loss of their distinctive, richly satisfying artistry. All were true originals, you see. However, the magic they created when Capitol brought them together for these informal, inspired sessions lives on in the recordings they left us which have been collected here, along with five additional selections - What Is There To Say, You Can Depend On Me, I Was A Little Too Lonely, Two Loves Have I and Candy - recorded for, but not issued in the original LP release of this enduringly classic Nat Cole album. This along with the superior sound quality digital technology permits, makes the compact-disc release of The Complete "After Midnight" Sessions a special event indeed, one to be welcomed by jazz listeners as well as Cole fans who,nin light of his supple, wholly swinging and unerringly economical jazz piano mastery, might have their appreciation of his music deepened even further. This is music that knows neither time nor allegiance to any camp or school but which, rather, in the utter perfection of its achievement, establishes its own incomparable standards.
