#wesley prince

[2nd100yrs]

Oscar Moore, Nat King Cole, and Wesley Prince, N.Y July 1946

by William Gottlieb

[jazzbluesidiom]

Nat King Cole trio - Club Zazibar - NYC_July 1946

From left to right:  Oscar Moore (1915 - 1980), Wesley Prince (1907 - 1986) and Nat King Cole (1919 - 1965)

[onejazztrackaday]

Straighten Up and Fly Right – Nat King Cole

Nathaniel Adams Coles, or as he was known professionally, Nat King Cole, was born in Montgomery, Alabama in 1919. His father was a baptist minister and his mother the church organist. She taught him piano from a young age. “Mom was the only music teacher I ever had,” he once said — recalling that he played “Yes, We Have No Bananas” on a piano when he was 4.

After playing in a high school dance band, he went to California with a revue, “Shuffle Along,” that went broke in Long Beach in 1937. After the revue folded, Cole said he “played piano at almost every beer joint from San Diego to Bakersfield” until he got a job for a jazz quartet at the Swanee in Hollywood. The drummer for the quartet never showed up, and the Nat King Cole Trio was born. 

This combo of piano (Nat), guitar (Oscar Moore) and bass (Wesley Prince) with no drums became a model for small jazz ensembles that followed, including Ahmad Jamal. 

Even though Nat King Cole is remembered as one of the great crooners, he didn’t originally consider himself a singer. Apparently one night, a barfly is said to have ordered Cole to sing, “Sweet Lorraine”, to which Nat replied “we don’t sing”. The manager whispered that the man was a big spender, so the satin voice that was to capture a world of listeners made its debut.

Cole wrote Straighten Up and Fly Right in 1943. It was one of the trio’s most popular songs, reaching number one on the Harlem Hit Parade for ten nonconsecutive weeks, as well as making number nine in the mainstream pop charts.

Nat based the song on a black folk tale his father had used as a theme for one of his sermons. In the tale, a buzzard takes different animals for a joy ride. When he gets hungry, he throws them off on a dive and eats them for dinner. A monkey who had observed this trick goes for a ride; he wraps his tail around the buzzard's neck and gives the buzzard a big surprise by nearly choking him to death.

Sadly Nat died at the age of just 45 in 1965, after surgery to remove a cancerous lung.

– Bozzie 🎷

[tornandfrayed]

Portrait of Oscar Moore, Nat King Cole, and Wesley Prince at the Zanzibar in New York, N.Y., ca. July 1946 by William P.Gottlieb,