Released in partnership with the Nat King Cole estate,
Resonance Records’ HITTIN’ THE RAMP: THE EARLY YEARS (1936-1943) is the first
large-scale collection of the pivotal early recordings (1936-1943) of Nat’s
29-year recording career. Most tracks are receiving their first official
release in this meticulously restored set of original live-to-disk recordings.
This definitive 7CD and limited-edition 10LP collection
draws upon a wide range of sources, including many newly-discovered tracks unearthed
for the first time from archives located all over the world, such as “Trompin”
(jukebox-only release for Cinematone, 1939), “What’cha Know Joe” (undocumented
radio performance, 1940 — now the earliest known recording of Nat “on the
air”), “The Romany Room is Jumpin’” (private recording, 1941) and “Beautiful
Moons Ago” (longer alternate take, 1943).
Sessions include Nat at age 17,
playing piano in his brother’s band in Chicago, 1936; the first King Cole Trio
recordings from 1938, made for radio broadcast only, for Standard
Transcriptions; further radio transcription sessions for Standard, Davis &
Schwegler, Keystone, plus his first (uncredited) session for MacGregor, with
vocalist Anita Boyer; the Ammor Records Session (Spring 1940 – the first commercial-release
sessions for the trio), the Decca Recordings (1940-41), the small-label
sessions for Excelsior and Premier labels (1943), many previously-uncirculating
Armed Forces Radio performances, and, with producer Norman Granz at the helm,
early jazz sessions with Lester Young (Granz historic, first session as a
producer) and Dexter Gordon, originally released on Philo and Mercury,
respectively.
Boasting an extensive 60+ page booklet with rare
photographs; essays by acclaimed author Will Friedwald and guitarist Nick Rossi
(with a special focus on Oscar Moore); interviews and testimonials from Johnny
Mathis, Tony Bennett, Quincy Jones, Harry Belafonte, John Pizzarelli, Freddy
Cole, Michael Feinstein and many others.
Hittin’ the Ramp features new remastering from original
source disks transferred for this set from a number of personal collections and
from the archives at University of California – Santa Barbara, The Institute
for Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, the the CU Boulder American Music
Research Center, and the Library of Congress.
Celebrate Nat King Cole’s centennial in 2019 with this
definitive early years multi-disc box set. This is the origin story of a great
artist just as he was just “hittin’ the ramp,” launching a distinctive style
that would quickly become famous the world over.
Resonance Records, the Los Angeles-based independent jazz
label noted for its historical releases, will issue its most ambitious release
to date, the seven-CD/10-LP Nat King Cole boxed set Hittin’ the Ramp: The Early
Years (1936-1943) on November 1, 2019.
Succeeding critically acclaimed Resonance archival
collections devoted to previously unheard recordings by Bill Evans, Wes
Montgomery, Sarah Vaughan, and other eminent jazz performers, Hittin’ the Ramp
offers the first in-depth survey of singer-pianist Cole’s work in the years
preceding his long hit-making tenure at Capitol Records.
“This is a really important project for Resonance,” says
Zev Feldman, label co-president and the set’s co-producer. “We’ve done some pretty
substantial packages over the years, such as our three-disc Eric Dolphy and
Jaco Pastorius sets with 100-page booklets, but this Nat King Cole box is truly
a definitive, king-sized set, clocking in at a staggering 10 LPs and seven CDs
worth of essential early Cole material with enhanced audio.”
The expansive collection — which includes several
previously unreleased studio sides, transcriptions, and private recordings — is
the first major overview of Cole’s earliest work to be produced in conjunction with
the musician’s estate.
“The Nat King Cole Estate is thrilled to be partnering with
Resonance Records on this exciting collection of early recordings that showcase
Nat’s extraordinary abilities as a jazz musician,” says Seth Berg of the Nat
King Cole Estate. “The family is especially grateful for Resonance’s unwavering
determination to preserve and present these pioneering recordings to the
world.”
The set’s co-producer, writer and historian Will Friedwald
– who received Grammy Award nominations for his work on Mosaic Records’
landmark 1992 box The Complete Capitol Recordings of the Nat King Cole Trio and
the 1989 album Nat “King” Cole and the “King” Cole Trio – points out in his
comprehensive notes to the collection that Cole’s deep and influential jazz
roots were often obscured by his towering reputation as a pop singer.
“At the height of his fame in the 1950s and ‘60s,” he
writes, “Nat King Cole (1919-1965) was primarily known as a popular singer —
the biggest-selling artist of his generation, no less — who occasionally played
piano. By that point, only a few older fans and critics remembered that he had
been one of the greatest pianists in the whole history of American music, a
true spiritual descendent of Earl ‘Fatha’ Hines and Art Tatum, and himself a
huge inspiration for Oscar Peterson, George Shearing, Erroll Garner, and many
others.”
Beyond Cole’s brilliance at the keyboard, the Resonance set
takes in his dazzling work as a vocalist, and includes a new interview with the
master pop singer Johnny Mathis, who discusses his debt to and friendship with
his great predecessor.
“As a young boy, studying the art of vocalizing, Nat was
everything I needed,” Mathis says. “All I did was listen and learn…And then I
want [people] to remember that he also, also, also played the piano. Please,
please, please remember that. Even as gigantic as a pianist as he was as a
vocalist.”
Co-produced by Zev Feldman, Will Friedwald, Seth Berg, Matt
Lutthans, and Jordan Taylor, and executive produced by Resonance co-president George
Klabin, Hittin’ the Ramp homes in on Cole’s prodigious early career, beginning
with the debut sides he recorded with his brother Eddie for Decca Records as a
17-year-old piano phenom in 1936.
The majority of the set’s nearly 200 tracks focus on the first
work by the King Cole Trio, the seminal combo that put Cole on the map with a
swinging combination of jazz, jive, and pop, with an emphasis on his simpatico
creative partnership with the trio’s longtime guitarist Oscar Moore.
In his notes for the collection, guitarist Nick Rossi notes
that Moore’s synthesis of such influences as George van Eps, Dick McDonough,
Django Reinhardt, and Charlie Christian led to his “groundbreaking style, one
which provided a template for how the guitar functions in a modern jazz
setting.”
Hittin’ the Ramp compiles Cole’s recordings – among them
the first versions of “Sweet Lorraine,” a staple of his ‘40s repertoire, and
the R&B and pop hit “Straighten Up and Fly Right” – with his trio and in
other studio settings (as sideman and accompanist) for Decca, Ammor, Excelsior,
Premier, Mercury, and Philo (including a celebrated session for the latter
label, founded by Norman Granz during the 1942 Musicians Union recording ban,
with saxophonist Lester Young).
It also contains dozens of transcriptions, mainly by the
trio, cut by Standard, Davis & Schwegler, and MacGregor for servicing to
radio stations, as well as wartime recordings produced for American servicemen
by the Armed Forces Radio Service.
The newly discovered selections include several
performances that were not known to exist before research for the boxed set
began. These include a privately recorded number, “The Romany Room is Jumping,”
a homage to the titular Washington, D.C., club that hosted Cole’s group; the
hitherto unheard Cinematone transcription “Trompin’”; and an unreleased 1940
trio rendering of Trummy Young’s “Whatcha’ Know Joe.”
“Although nothing on this package can be described as
‘common,’ these are some of the rarest Cole items known to exist,” Friedwald
writes.
He adds, “Just in time for his centennial, we cover this
quintessential American artist from his very first stirrings at the start of
the swing era to the very precipice of universal fame during World War Two,
with dozens of fascinating detours along the way. This, then, is the incredible
but true origin story of a sound and a career that would change the world.”
