Nat King Cole - The Touch Of Your Lips (2020) [Hi-Res]

If the front cover of the album, a close-up photograph of a young woman, her eyes closed, her red lips ready for a kiss, her cheek being brushed by a young man (both of them white, incidentally), didn't get the point across, the note on the back cover, beginning, "In the romantic mood of The Very Thought of You and Love Is the Thing...," surely did. Nat King Cole's first LP of 1961, The Touch of Your Lips, was another in a series of ballad collections devoted to the wonders of love. Arranger/conductor Ralph Carmichael supported Cole with a buoyant sea of strings and kept the tempos very slow, the better for the singer's rich tone to convey the bedroom ambience. This was music for the adults of 1961, adults who remembered many of these songs as swing standards of the 1930s and '40s when they were performed by the likes of Ray Noble (the title song and "You're Mine, You!"), Jimmy Dorsey ("I Remember You"), Glenn Miller ("A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square"), and Ozzie Nelson ("Lights Out"). Those were all bandleaders, of course, and Cole had little trouble putting his own stamp on songs sung earlier by band singers Al Bowlly, Bob Eberly, and Ray Eberle. But he also borrowed no less than three selections ("Poinciana [Song of the Tree]," "Sunday, Monday, or Always," "Only Forever") from the repertoire of Bing Crosby, and that was more of a challenge, one he did not entirely meet. Still, The Touch of Your Lips succeeded in taking its place alongside Cole's other effective ballad albums. ~ William Ruhlmann