Cole comes full circle

Natalie Cole titled her most recent album Leavin’, but it could just as easily have been titled Comin’ Home after an Unforgettable decade and a half.

Natalie Cole titled her most recent album Leavin’, but it could just as easily have been titled Comin’ Home after an Unforgettable decade and a half.
Released in the fall, Leavin’ found Cole returning to the R&B sound that made her a star in the mid-’70s, when This Will Be earned her the 1975 Grammy for best female R&B vocal performance; she also won that year’s Grammy for best new artist.

This Will Be broke Aretha Franklin’s eight-year hold on the R&B award — a Rolling Stone cover story at the time dubbed Cole the next Aretha — and Cole includes a cover of Franklin’s 1972 hit Day Dreaming on her new album.

But Leavin’, produced by Dallas Austin, is a cover album with range: Cole not only offers the Isley Brothers’ Don’t Say Goodnight (It’s Time for Love) and Des’ree’s You Gotta Be, but also Fiona Apple’s Criminal, Kate Bush’s The Man With the Child in His Eyes, Sting’s If I Ever Lose My Faith in You and Neil Young’s Old Man.

The title track, written by Shelby Lynne, metaphorically puts a little distance between the original R&B diva and the pop star Cole became in 1991 with the release of Unforgettable With Love, faithful interpretations of standards and pre-rock pop songs associated with her father, legendary crooner and pianist Nat ‘King’ Cole. The title track was a studio-created duet with her father, who died of lung cancer in 1965.

“When I did the Unforgettable record, that catapulted me into a whole different phase in my career, so for the last 17 years, that’s what I’ve been doing,’’ Cole says. “Leavin’ was my way of saying, ‘Been there, done enough of that, need some fresh meat.’ Being able to return to my roots, so to speak, with this record was a lot of fun and felt very liberating, it really did.’’

The return to familiar roots did force Cole to bust her own chops, and on Leavin’, she sounds a little freer, less restrained than on her standards-focused recordings. Cole says R&B and jazz “are far apart from one another when you actually sit down to perform it—your chops are totally different. In R&B, you can get away with being flat, being sharp; you have to have much more vibrato. With jazz, you cannot get away with being flat or sharp; you’ve got to be tone on tone. You don’t need as much power when you’re singing jazz.’’

“So I had to kind of retrain my voice to be able to flip back and forth and do both. I think it’s because I was doing R&B but was raised on jazz that I had that sensibility, and it was just a matter of executing vocally what I needed to do. But it does require something entirely different.’’

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As for choosing the material on Leavin’, Cole says she knew some artists’ work, while other songs were picked from 600 recommended by David Monk, a New Yorker whom Cole describes as “part publisher, part human jukebox”.

Cole compares picking songs to picking clothes. “In fashion, they talk about ‘That dress is wearing her, she’s not wearing the dress, it looks too perfect for her,’ which to me is not natural,” she says. “It should look like it was made exactly for me, and that’s kind of what I try to do with my music. If it doesn’t fit, I don’t force it. When it works, it takes on a life of its own and you’re comfortable right away. You shouldn’t have to labor so hard—it’s not nuclear science, doesn’t have to be that complicated.’’
-Richard Harrington (LAT-WP)