When Frankie Met Nat, Part 2
The Frank Sinatra OLD GOLD SHOW, November 28, 1945
Super special thanks once again to the Frank Tank (Rob Waldman, Michael Kraus) and the Nat Pack (Jordan Taylor).
In 1945, the King Cole Trio made another step up the show business food chain when they played the Copacabana for the first time. Granted, it was the Copa Lounge - not the big room - but it launched a relationship between Cole and proprietor Jules Podell that would last for the rest of the artist’s lifetime.
The Copa booking happened at the instigation of Joel Herron, the pianist, composer, and bandleader, who was still a few years away from writing his best-known song, “I’m a Fool to Want You” (composed for and with Sinatra). Until recently, the Copa had booked name bands for dancing, but as with many clubs (including the Latin Quarter and the Persian Room at the Plaza), after the war they stressed listening to singers rather than dancing, and hired Herron as a semi-permanent conductor for their house band. Herron was enough of a jazz fan to be crazy about the King Cole Trio, and he recommended them for the lounge spot, apparently at the last minute, after another act cancelled. Nat King Cole, Oscar Moore, and Johnny Miller opened at the Copa on Friday, November 22; Joe E. Lewis was headlining in the main room. (More about the great Joe E. in a future substack)
The Trio found time to do other projects around the time of this run, among them recording and filming five Soundies (see Mark Cantor’s amazing book for very complete details) at Filmcraft Studios in the Bronx, on November 19.
Cole and co. had been booked to open at the Royal Theater in Baltimore on Thursday the 22nd but apparently they cancelled that gig so that they could stay at the Copa for a long run of three weeks until Thursday December 6.
The Copa gig made a major impression on the media, both Black and white. The New York Amsterdam News was very bullish on the engagement - it still was a big deal when a Black group played one of the very upscale “white time” rooms like the Copa. (They would not play the Paramount Theater in New York until almost a year later in the fall of 1946.) On November 17, the unnamed reporter wrote, “Because of his collegiate background, King Cole has brought a brand new conception of the Negro musician and orchestra leader to the front and the importance of this is seen in the adulation showered upon him by bobby-soxers as well as adults wherever he goes.” All of which may be true, but Cole hardly had a “collegiate background,” in fact, he had not quite finished high school.
On the 16th, columnist and songwriter (“Gone Fishin’” “Drop Me Off In Harlem”) Nick Kenny cheered fairly ecstatically as he offered the news that the Trio, who had already made several appearances with Bing Crosby on the Kraft Music Hall and Perry Como on the Chesterfield Supper Club, was going to guest star on Sinatra’s Old Gold show. “The King Cole Trio’s appearance on the Frank Sinatra Show is a must! The Cole boys are packing the Copa Lounge.”
That show took place on Wednesday, November 28. Although the tracks have been released on CD, surprisingly they’re not anywhere on YouTube. I’ll include them below.
That same night, Sinatra also had a big opening in a prestigious supper club - the Wedgewood Room at the Waldorf Astoria. (As Sinatra says in more than one program of the period, so named because “if they could wedge one more person in the room, they would.”) The singer must have hopped into a cab heading across town immediately after the broadcast.
As you can hear above, there’s some charming banter first - Sinatra sounds much more natural, he’s had considerably more practice at being “himself” on the radio, but while Cole is slightly stilted, he’s thoroughly adorable. “Frim Fram Sauce” was the Trio’s most successful disc of 1945, their biggest hit since “Straighten Up and Fly Right” the year previously; it also was one of the numbers that they had filmed for the Soundies corp. a few weeks previously.
For the second number, Sinatra joins the Trio on a longtime Cole signature, “I Found a New Baby.” Spencer Williams’s 1926 tune was already a jazz standard and a King Cole signature, which Cole played at the first Jazz at the Philharmonic concert and would record with both Dexter Gordon and Lester Young. The Cole Trio had only performed it as an instrumental, a two-a-half minute tour-de-force; numerous radio performances survive, although curiously they never recorded it for Capitol or elsewhere.
Sinatra gamely affixes himself to the Trio arrangement, although here it starts more slowly for Sinatra’s chorus. The Trio kicks it into double time for the instrumental break, and guitarist Oscar Moore and bassist Johnny Miller both get to solo. (In the middle of the bass segment, we heard Sinatra yelling approvingly, “ow!”). The piece slows down again in time for a few concluding lines from the singer, as he winds up with the last eight bars. But instead of singing the last line as written, he interjects a song from his own history, “Oh look at me now!”
Although the Trio had guested both with Crosby and Como, (as far as we can tell) Sinatra was the first big-time host to actually sing with the Trio. A few months later back in Hollywood, Sinatra would kick the excitement up another few notches when he and Cole would vocalize together for the first and only time in public.
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Very Special thanks to the fabulous Ms. Elizabeth Zimmer, for expert proofreading of this page, and scanning for typos, mistakes, and other assorted boo-boos!
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