King (Cole) of Pop.

Mr. Hamill is author most recently of Why Sinatra Matters and Diego Rivera.

Nat King Cole, by Daniel Mark Epstein (Farrar, Straus, 433 pp., $27)

IN some ways, the story of Nat King Cole is as familiar as that of Faust. The turning point of the drama is a moral choice: whether to sell one's soul to the devil in exchange for earthly riches, fame, and power. Jazz purists believe that Cole made a deal with the devil, but if so the reasons are not made clear in this blurry biography by Daniel Mark Epstein.

The blur is not entirely Epstein's fault: Cole kept no diaries, apparently wrote few letters, and restricted his interviews to the usual banal blather about his career. The reader must search for motives between the lines. One motive is apparent from the bald facts of Cole's story: the permanent and multiple hungers that afflicted millions of Americans who went through the Depression. This generational imprint was compounded by the special situation of talented African Americans of the era. It wasn't enough to be rich; one had also to be accepted by the white majority.

The chronicle of Cole's passage to acceptance dominates this book, which is more a biography of the career than of the man. We learn that Nathaniel Adams Coles (the family name was spelled with an "s") was born on St. Patrick's Day, 1919, in Montgomery, Alabama. His father was a hard-working, righteous man who wanted to serve the Lord, and he soon took his family north to Chicago, where he became a preacher.

The family was not impoverished. Nat's older brother Eddie learned to play bass fiddle, an expensive instrument. There was an upright piano in the home, and family legend insisted that Nathaniel could play by ear when he was 4. The Coles boys had the good fortune to find the path to the band room of Wendell Phillips High School and the rigorous presence of Maj. N. Clark Smith, who insisted that his charges learn to read music and understand theory (other pupils included Lionel Hampton and bassist Milt Hinton). Eddie was soon playing bass with jazz bands in the local clubs. Nat was learning piano at home, and listening very hard.

What did he hear? Epstein can't resist hyperbole. He calls Chicago in 1935 "the jazz mecca of America at the very moment the music had achieved a peak of perfection it could not sustain or regain, ever." He further asserts that Chicago in Cole's youth was host to "the greatest gathering of musical genius America has ever known, in its most creative decade." This is a declaration of Epstein's taste, but for me it is simply not true. Prohibition Chicago was a temporary home to one authentic musical genius: Louis Armstrong, a central figure in the evolution of jazz, an extraordinarily creative musician who was also an entertainer. None of the others-including Cole's personal model, Earl (Fatha) Hines-could compare to those of Cole's own generation as they assembled in the 1940s in New York: Charlie Parker, John Birks Gillespie, Max Roach, Bud Powell, Lester Young, Kenny Clarke, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon, and later, Clifford Brown, Sonny Rollins, and John Coltrane. Riding high in this company was the most intimidating of all pianists, a baroque genius named Art Tatum. It is very likely that Cole made his fateful choice to abandon jazz for pop commerce because he knew he could never be as good as Tatum.

All of that comes later in this often irritating book. Epstein's wobbly narrative begins on a night in 1935, when the 35-year-old Earl Hines and the 16-year-old Nat Cole shared a stage at the Savoy Ballroom in Chicago. Billed as a "Battle of Rhythm," the show pitted Hines and his orchestra against "Nat Cole, Chicago's Young Maestro and his Rogues of Rhythm." Hines was Nat's hero, his "musical father." We are told what Cole was wearing, and what Hines was thinking. (There are times when this doesn't quite ring true, as when Epstein writes: "A woman leaned over and whispered in Earl's ear. Wasn't there something about this boy, anyway, a power lurking?") The scene is vividly drawn, but we must wait another 40 pages to read about its conclusion. Between the curtain raiser and the actual performance we travel through all of Cole's childhood and youth. In his description of Hines, we get another sample riff of Epstein's own ripe style:

"The gift of Hines's piano to an orchestra was a matter of atmosphere, musical weather. His speed and dynamic control enabled him to surround the ensemble, lay green grass under it, spread a clear sky over it with sunshine or stars, or blow like a hurricane through an out-chorus. The delicate high descants of his piano could make a light spring rainstorm; then he would descend in bass decrescendos to violent thunder." Epstein tries hard to persuade us of Hines's mastery: "He played furious torrents and thick forests of notes, eighths and sixteenths; he cut them up so fine you could hardly tell they were notes anymore and not fluid ideas, like the grains of millet in Zeno's paradox."

Ah, well: It is never easy to write about music.

The narrative traces Cole's first paying gigs, his journey beyond Chicago with a touring company of the Sissle-Blake musical Shuffle Along, his first marriage (to a dancer ten years his senior), and his decision to remain in California when the company went bust. Cole apparently first heard Tatum in Los Angeles, but Epstein makes little of this. The career, including the years when Cole paid his dues in cheap dives for five dollars a night, is of greater interest to him than the art. Cole's style owed much to Hines, and probably to Teddy Wilson; nobody else could sound like Tatum. By the end of 1937, Cole had formed his own group, with Wesley Prince on bass and Oscar Moore on guitar.

The King Cole Trio played jazz, but it also provided entertainment; the intention was to please an audience. Occasionally Cole took to the microphone as a vocalist. Cole's first version of "Sweet Lorraine" was recorded in 1939 and would become his theme song. The trio made hundreds of radio transcriptions (not sold to the public). Cole, described repeatedly as athletic, was 22 when the war started, and he and his wife had no children. He got his induction notice in February 1943, but failed his physical owing, a bit mysteriously, to "nervous hypertension."

During the war years, Cole became a star. He wrote and recorded for Capitol Records a bright, infectious, upbeat tune called "Straighten Up and Fly Right." According to Epstein, this simple lyric "elevates Cole to the ranks of storytellers, preachers, and poets whose images are so primal and rich in associations that they endure in the memory and become part of the living inventory of the collective unconscious."

In 1946, Cole was suddenly presented with his great choice. He was still playing in jazz concerts with some of the emerging giants, including Parker and Gillespie. But in June he recorded "The Christmas Song," by Bob Wells and Mel Torme, a lovely tune made lush with strings. By December it was number three on the national charts and more than a half-century later it remains a seasonal standard. Cole and his agents now saw the possibility that had eluded most African- American artists: the chance for a huge and enduring mainstream success. At the time, most black musicians were still being heard only on so-called "race" radio; the genius Tatum was forced to play in mobbed-up 52nd Street dives and their equivalents around the country. Perhaps aware of his own musical limitations, and still hungry from the Depression, Cole chose the path of popular success.

His personal life shifted with the choice. He divorced his wife, then met and later married a well-educated woman named Maria Ellington. The trio disintegrated, partly over money but also because of "artistic differences." In August 1947, Cole recorded the mystical ballad called "Nature Boy." It was a gigantic hit, but absolutely not jazz.

The rest of the story is one of earthly success. Cole recorded hit after hit. Sometimes the music was very good indeed; Nelson Riddle, who later did such marvelous work with Frank Sinatra, did many of the best arrangements, and there are a few brilliant tunes made with the Stan Kenton orchestra. But most of Cole's work in the 1950s was slathered with musical syrup, including heavenly choruses and anguished violins. He was singing what he thought the audience wanted to hear, not what he truly felt, and the strings served as a form of italics.

Soon Cole was accepted by the Hollywood establishment and its branch office in Las Vegas, where he played the main rooms, not the lounges. He hosted his own television show (which failed because sponsors refused to underwrite an African American). He filled movie parts. He sold millions of albums.

But there were troubles too: alimony troubles with his first wife, tax troubles, race troubles. His white neighbors tried hard to keep him out of a new house in Los Angeles's upscale Hancock Park. In Montgomery, racists assaulted him on a public stage. His mild response to the incident angered younger blacks already on their way to the militancy of the 1960s. Musical tastes were also changing with baffling speed. Most important was the arrival of rock 'n' roll in the mid 1950s, a rising wind that blew the saccharine formulas of Tin Pan Alley into oblivion.

By the early 1960s, there was a corrosive lack of conviction in the ballads. Unlike Sinatra, Cole just didn't seem to believe them anymore. The voice that had once sounded suave now sounded oily with the need for approval. The joyful buoyancy of the up-tempo tunes sounded forced. Cole wasn't expressing much that was important to him; he was just showing up to sing. He had some hit singles with wretched pseudo- country material: "Ramblin' Rose" and "Those Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days of Summer." He lost money gambling. He fell in love with a Swedish woman who later starred on Hee Haw. He smoked a million cigarettes.

At the peak of his success, someone occasionally would remember in print how good Nat Cole had been at the high American art of jazz. Usually such a reminder was accompanied with a sneer, feeding the legend of Cole as a sellout. But the accusation prompts another question: Just how good was Nat Cole, the jazzman? The honest answer is: We'll never know. The existing jazz recordings present us with a player who was very good indeed, but never astonishingly original. He was, as Somerset Maugham once said about himself, in the front row of the second rank.

Perhaps Cole knew this, and if so, might have deserved applause for his self-awareness. Around 1950, he seemed to give up on himself as an artist and choose to be rich and famous. According to Epstein, he would go for long periods without touching a piano. Occasionally, he talked about reviving the trio and going back on the road to play jazz. He never did. Instead, he settled for being a slightly hipper version of Johnny Mathis. That decision gave him the various kinds of acceptance that he needed more than art.

Cole died of lung cancer on February 15, 1965, about a month short of his 46th birthday. He was buried two days later from St. James Episcopal Church on Wilshire Boulevard. His family was there, including his 15-year-old daughter Natalie, the girl he called "Sweetie." She would go on to become an accomplished singer, and 26 years later her electronically produced duet with her father on "Unforgettable" would help bring Nat Cole a new audience. At 15, flown home from boarding school, she could see around her in the pews the faces of many musicians and some of the great names of Hollywood. They all agreed he had the voice of an angel. That he did.