Skip to main content

Natalie Cole VibeZ

Forty-four tracks tracing a career that began in defiance of a famous name and ended by embracing it. Natalie Cole died on the last day of 2015, aged sixty-five.

Natalie-Cole-white-shirt

OneLove

Natalie Cole (1950–2015)

Natalie Cole spent the first half of her career deliberately not being her father's daughter. She arrived in 1975 with hard, gospel-inflected soul records produced in Chicago, won Best New Artist at the Grammys, and was frequently compared to Aretha Franklin rather than to Nat King Cole.

The second half is one of the more remarkable reinventions in popular music. After years of addiction and commercial decline, she released Unforgettable... with Love in 1991 — an album of her father's repertoire, including a duet constructed from his 1951 recording. It won seven Grammys and sold millions, and it recast her as a jazz and standards singer for the rest of her life.

She died on 31 December 2015, and this playlist was posted a fortnight later.

What to listen for

"This Will Be (An Everlasting Love)" is the debut single and still the most joyful thing here — a genuinely hard soul record that announced a serious singer.

"Inseparable" and "I've Got Love On My Mind" are the other seventies peaks, and "Sophisticated Lady" is the one soul collectors prize.

"Our Love" and "La Costa" are the deep cuts from that era and show how much range she had before the reinvention.

"Walkin' My Baby Back Home" is the duet with her father — constructed from a recording made when she was an infant — and it is a strange and moving piece of technology.

"Stardust", "When I Fall In Love" and "Good Morning Heartache" are the standards, and the last is the Billie Holiday song, sung with real understanding of what it is about.

"Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" live is the outlier and a reminder of how loose she could be on stage.

"Dindi" is the Jobim, and "When I Fall In Love" in Spanish comes from her late Latin album.

Go deeper

Inseparable (1975) is the soul album and Unforgettable... with Love (1991) is the one that rewrote her career. Both are worth hearing in full and they sound like two different artists.

Then go to Nat King Cole — not the Christmas records, but After Midnight (1957), where he is a working jazz pianist as much as a singer.

How to hear the two halves: play an early Chicago soul single straight into one of the standards recordings and they sound like different artists, because in every meaningful sense they were. Very few singers get a second career at all; fewer still get one that wins seven Grammys and recasts the whole first act in retrospect.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Monty Alexander VibeZ

There is a moment on almost every Monty Alexander record where the jazz piano trio stops behaving like a jazz piano trio and starts behaving like a Kingston sound system. That moment is the whole point. Fifty tracks deep, this is the sound of a man who never asked permission to be two things at once. The pianist who brought Kingston to the Carnegie stage Monty Alexander was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1944, and by his teens he was already gigging around the island — close enough to the birth of ska and rocksteady to have absorbed it in his bones rather than learned it from records. He moved to the United States in 1961, and the origin story that follows is the kind that sounds invented: Frank Sinatra heard him playing in a Miami club, and Jilly Rizzo, Sinatra's friend and club owner, put him behind the piano at Jilly's in New York. From there Alexander fell in with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown, two of the most demanding rhythm partners in the music, and never really ...
Post a Comment
Read more

GuiltyBeatZ VibeZ

If you have danced to anything out of Accra in the last ten years, you have probably danced to GuiltyBeatz without knowing his name. Forty-seven tracks of a producer's fingerprints — and the fingerprints turn out to be the melody. The Ghanaian producer who made Afrobeats swing Ronald Banful, who records as GuiltyBeatz, is a Ghanaian producer and DJ whose sound sits at the crossroads where Ghanaian highlife, Nigerian Afrobeats, amapiano and UK dance music all meet. He came up producing for Mr Eazi — the Banku Music partnership is where a lot of listeners first heard him — and his breakout as a name in his own right came with "Akwaaba," the 2018 track with Mr Eazi, Patapaa and Pappy Kojo that spawned a dance craze and became one of the defining African club records of its year. His reputation went global when he worked on Beyoncé's The Lion King: The Gift , but the more interesting story is the consistency. A GuiltyBeatz beat is usually ide...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kashif VibeZ

Kashif is the reason a lot of 1980s R&B sounds the way it does — and the reason you can hear the difference between a synth bassline played by someone who understood bass and one programmed by someone who didn't. This is a producer's playlist, and the producer is everywhere. The architect of the synthesized soul record Kashif was born Michael Jones in Brooklyn in 1956, raised in foster care, and taught himself music young enough that by his teens he was touring with B.T. Express. What he did next reshaped a decade. In the early 1980s, as a producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, he was among the first to build R&B records around programmed synthesizers — the Minimoog bass, the Linn drum machine, the Fairlight — without letting them sound cold. That distinction matters. Plenty of producers adopted the new gear; Kashif made it groove . His basslines are played with the phrasing of a funk bassist, full of slides and ghost notes, which is why rec...
Post a Comment
Read more