MARVIN GAYE: A TRIBUTE TO THE GREAT NAT "KING" COLE (1965)
1) Nature Boy; 2) Ramblin'
Rose; 3) Too Young; 4) Pretend; 5) Straighten Up And Fly Right; 6) Mona Lisa;
7) Unforgettable; 8) To The Ends Of The Earth; 9) Sweet Lorraine; 10) It's Only
A Paper Moon; 11) Send For Me; 12) Calypso Blues.
General verdict: The album title
pretty much says all you need to know here.
Just as things were finally starting to look
good for Marvin in the LP department, his admired idol and mentor Nat
"King" Cole had to go and die (February 15, 1965) — and, as a loyal disciple,
Marvin simply had to honor his passing
with a tribute album, his fourth one in the «easy listening» department. An
understandable and admirable gesture, for sure, but it is quite clear that if
you are not a big fan of Nathaniel Adams Coles, you will have no use for these
covers, and if you are a big fan, why
in the hell would you listen to Marvin Gaye doing Nat "King" Cole
instead of listening to the real thing?
At the very least, this record has a couple of
things going for it. Most of the musical backing is provided by The Funk
Brothers, which is a big improvement after the syrupy orchestrations of Hello Broadway. And, also predictably,
the record has a jazzier and less Broadway-ish feel to it, though some of the
genre excourses are silly — like rounding out the title selection with ʽCalypso
Bluesʼ, for instance, so that you can ascertain for yourself that Mr. Gaye can
do the Jamaican accent thing just as naturally, and ridiculously, as Nat
himself.
On the other hand, this is quite expressly a
tribute, and a rather slavish one: Marvin tends to imitate, rather than
interpret, Cole on most of the tracks — and while on the overall scale Marvin
Gaye, as a soon-to-be artist with a big musical vision, scores much higher with
me than Nat King Cole, the consummate lounge entertainer, it is impossible for
a visionary artist to beat a master of lounge entertainment at his own game. He
simply does not have the appropriate seductive charms: the art of delicate
phrasing, the subtle touches of vocal modulation, the velvety-Vegasy charisma,
whatever. We may not count those as particularly great values in themselves,
but once the rules are selected, even if they are bad rules, the winner is he
who can follow them better than anybody else, and Marvin was never cut out for
that sort of thing.
He could also bring more diversity to the
proceedings — sappy ballads were not the only thing in Cole's repertoire, but
non-ballad material here is restricted to the playful jump blues of ʽStraighten
Up And Fly Rightʼ and ʽIt's Only A Paper Moonʼ, the Latin rhythms of ʽTo The
Ends Of The Earthʼ, and the abovementioned ʽCalypso Bluesʼ. Naturally, Marvin
does not play much piano, either, so if, for some reason, your introduction to
Nat happens to be via this album (a very
unlikely probability, but still), you will never know that the man was first
and foremost a great piano player, and a crooner only in the second place.
(Imagine Marvin Gaye doing A Tribute To
The Great Jimi Hendrix five years later?.. that's right, neither can I).
The good news is that we are finally done with
this shit. A Tribute would be Marvin's
last ever attempt to harness the
legacy of pop standards, Broadway show tunes, lounge jazz and Vegas glitz —
perhaps it is most appropriate to treat this as a certified last goodbye to
that whole sphere of business, set in the form of a farewell to one of his most
beloved teachers. From now on, it would be modern-and-improved R&B all the
way — not always great, not always truly cutting edge, but never looking back
on an age that the man so obviously loved, but whose spirit he could carry on
with just about the same level of passion and conviction as, say, Florence And
The Machine demonstrate these days when covering Fleetwood Mac.
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