Some great material recorded by Nat King Cole before his Capitol years is being assembled for a new box set from Resonance Records due in November. Nat King Cole’s Early Years Are Getting the Archival Treatment
If its the Trio boxset youre refering to then I am glad to see a reissue. The Mosaic is costly now. Fingers crossed that the mastering will be good on this set.
I agree it’s great to have this stuff available again however that article makes it sound like this the first time those tracks have been released together.
No. Those were Capitol recordings. The Nat King Cole Trio - The Complete Capitol Recordings Of The Nat King Cole Trio
Looks like @jtaylor and @MLutthans were involved with producing this set. Nice! This is from Resonance Records’s website: “Co-produced by Zev Feldman, Will Friedwald, Seth Berg, Matt Lutthans, and Jordan Taylor, and executive produced by Resonance co-president George Klabin, Hittin’ the Ramp homes in on Cole’s prodigious early career, beginning with the debut sides he recorded with his brother Eddie for Decca Records as a 17-year-old piano phenom in 1936.”
YESSSSS!!!!! @MLutthans begins to show off his expertise for all of us to share!!!!! Congrats my friend and I am already "standing in line" to buy .
I did the mastering; LPs first at Cohearent Audio in June, then the CDs, fine-tuning things as much as humanly possible without crossing any lines into over-processing. (Please, do not think of the CDs as an afterthought! They are not "loud mastered," they are not overly processed, and they were mastered separately from the LP mastering. I think they sound terrific.) Credit where credit is 110% due: this project would not have happened without @jtaylor. From day one, while I was probably driving him crazy and pestering him with questions, he was helping me keep my sanity, and I literally could not have had a better working partner than Jordan Taylor. There has hardly been a day in the last several months when we have not texted, e-mailed, PMd, or called regarding this project, often multiple times a day, and I know that he has also been working with other aspects of the set that had nothing to do with the audio content, so "Thank you, Jordan!"
Thank you Mssrs Lutthan and Taylor. Really looking forward to this smarty conceived and compiled set.
There is a very, very small amount of overlap between the Resonance set and the Mosaic set. It's something like ten tracks or so. This is because the Mosaic set began with the first tracks that Capitol OWNED, which were actually pre-Capitol tracks for which Capitol later bought the masters, while the new Resonance set goes up to (but not including) the first session RECORDED BY Capitol. The overlap is "Vom, Vim, Veedle" through "My Lips Remember Your Kisses" on little labels like Excelsior and Premier. Funny thing we discovered while working on this set: The version of "My Lips Remember Your Kisses" in the Mosaic set is an alternate -- it's not the original 78 version. We have both versions in the new set, both of which I newly transferred from original 78 RPM disks. (The alternate version, which exists as a white-label test pressing, wins the award for coming the farthest distance, being safely shipped from Australia to the Seattle area for transfer.)
This is the best news I've heard all week. Day one purchase for me, and there are very few releases I can say that about these days.
Oh my. My money spending is already through the roof. Aye carumba. November and December are already looking tough and it’s only July!
This might be the best news I've heard all year. Wow, we are getting a Nat King Cole CD box set of largely unreleased material. More importantly, our very own @MLutthans was intimately involved in this legacy project and just knowing his expertise and dedication to preserving this type of iconic music makes me that much more excited about the whole box set. This wonderful looking release will be an automatic purchase for me as well.
Very kind (and appreciated) words, but to reiterate: Jordan Taylor, Jordan Taylor, Jordan Taylor. His input and vast knowledge are all over this set.