Cole Continues a Career Transition

Natalie Cole’s multifaceted career has been moving more and more deeply into jazz territory over the past few years. Curiously, her passage is a kind of inversion of the career of her father, Nat King Cole, in the sense that he transited from the jazz world into the pop arena. Although Natalie Cole has never completely abandoned the pop and R&B; stylings of her earlier career, she has displayed consistently greater ease with the elements of jazz in each of her recent appearances.

Wednesday night’s performance at the Hollywood Bowl was no exception. Accompanied by a large ensemble consisting of a big jazz band, a string section, French horns and three backup singers, Cole entranced an audience of more than 12,000 with a program ranging from songs associated with her father to a trio of tunes from her upcoming Verve album, “Ask a Woman Who Knows.”

Her very first offering, “I Haven’t Got Anything Better to Do” (first recorded by Dinah Washington), is the opening track on the CD, her first new album in three years. Well suited to Cole’s elegant, interpretive manner, it flowed with an undercurrent of rhythmic swing that would characterize much of the evening’s music.

More familiar items--”Teach Me Tonight,” “Let’s Face the Music and Dance,” “Paper Moon,” “Stardust” among them--ranged from hard-edged vocal-with-big-band jazz to intimate balladry. And, predictably, there was the now-obligatory rendering of “Unforgettable,” synchronized to a duet with a big screen video projection of her father.

The most impressive moments of the evening, however, were not the more obvious ones. Although it may have appeared as though Cole’s jazz talents were best displayed in her vigorous, up-tempo scatting, the contrary was the case. There was no denying the gritty sense of swing present in her vocalized forays into her upper register. But both the abrasiveness of her sound in these passages, as well as her tendency to rely on repetitive riffing, diminished her believability in this area.

She was far more effective in numbers such as Michael Franks’ “Tell Me All About It” (also on the new album) and the Gus Kahn and Walter Donaldson standard, “My Baby Just Cares for Me”--songs in which she balanced her impressive, storytelling qualities with poised, beautifully articulated phrasing.

Other, different aspects of Cole’s versatility surfaced with an incendiary rendering of Leiber & Stoller’s “I’m a Woman” and crisply rhythmic interpretations (with her backup singers) of Lambert, Hendricks & Ross versions of a pair of Count Basie pieces, “It’s Sand, Man” and “Two for the Blues.” Impressive work from a performer who is slowly maturing into an engaging, jazz-oriented artist.

Pianist Joe Sample, whose trio opened the evening with a typically vigorous, groove-driven set, also joined Cole on two of the songs from her new album.