1966 · Album
An Orchestral Portrait of Nat "King" Cole
Recorded 1966 · Capitol Records · Arranger: Nelson Riddle
Riddle's Farewell to a Lost Friend
A composer honoring a singer he'd shaped, one year after Cole's death, with no Cole voice to anchor it.
Nelson Riddle made An Orchestral Portrait of Nat "King" Cole (1966) in the year after Cole died, working from arrangements he'd already crafted for Cole's own albums. Without Cole's voice, the record became something different — a memorial built from Riddle's orchestrations, performed by session musicians playing through music that had lived in Cole's presence. It's a strange enterprise: honoring someone by recording his sound without him in the room.
Riddle had arranged several of Cole's albums before this, so he knew the material inside out. What's unusual here is that the arrangements exist independent of their original purpose — they're not accompaniments anymore, just orchestrations hanging in air. Some work fine as instrumental pieces. Others feel thin, like they're waiting for a voice that won't come. Riddle was a skilled arranger, and the craft is visible throughout, but a Cole ballad without Cole is mostly an artifact of their working relationship, not a statement in itself.
This isn't essential listening. It has value for dedicated Cole fans and musicians interested in Riddle's work, but it doesn't stand on its own the way Cole's own recordings do. AllMusic reviewer Al Campbell noted it's respectable enough for traditional pop fans aware of it, but there's no getting around the central absence — this is a ghost of a collaboration, nothing more.
Where next?
More by Nelson Riddle
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