Nat King Cole

Nat King Cole (1919-1965) was born in Montgomery, Alabama and raised in Chicago. In 1939 he formed the King Cole Trio with guitarist Oscar Moore and bassist Wesley Prince, and left out the drummer. That absence is the point: with no kit to keep time, piano and guitar had to swing on their own, and Cole voiced the two so closely that they often read as a single instrument.

He was a linear player rather than a thundering one. Where Tatum filled every corner, Cole left air, placing clean, syncopated phrases exactly where they told most. Oscar Peterson modelled his early style on him outright, and the debt runs on through Hank Jones, Tommy Flanagan, Ahmad Jamal and Bill Evans. Then Straighten Up and Fly Right charted in 1943, the singing took over, and the pianist was gradually filed behind the voice.

Television gave some of it back. The Nat King Cole Show ran on NBC from November 1956, the first nationally broadcast American programme hosted by a Black performer, and Cole played as well as sang on it. No national sponsor would take it. He ended it himself in December 1957 with a line that outlived the show: Madison Avenue is afraid of the dark. He died in 1965, aged 45.