Hep Records has just released a hitherto-unknown 1949 concert recording by the King Cole Trio. Seeing as how Nat Cole is not only one of the great vocal balladeers but my all-time favorite jazz pianist, it seemed logical to write a “Sightings” column for today’s Wall Street Journal taking note of the occasion–but I widened my field of fire to talk about other artists who, like Cole, are exceptionally good at more than one thing:
Sometimes it makes sense, or appears to at first glance, when talented artists choose to take up a second line of creative endeavor. Only on closer inspection does the extent and originality of their achievement become clearer. It may have seemed logical enough in 1971 that Clint Eastwood should have wanted to try his hand at directing “Play Misty for Me”–but who could have predicted that the hottest action star of the ’60s and ’70s would evolve into the auteur of such emotionally complex films as “A Perfect World” and “Letters from Iwo Jima”? Or that Edgar Degas, who in his lifetime exhibited only one sculpture, “The Little 14-Year-Old Dancer,” should have completed several dozen other three-dimensional works discovered after his death in 1917 that are now generally thought to be identical in quality and importance to his paintings?
I find it at once inspiring and frustrating to watch a genius pull a second rabbit out of his hat….
Read the whole thing here.
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Nat King Cole performs “Little Girl” in 1950 with Irving Ashby on guitar, Joe Comfort on bass, and Jack Costanzo on conga drum: