For the late soul and jazz diva Natalie Cole, who died on Thursday at the age of 65, her mortality was weighing on her mind as far back as 2012.
We sat next to each other in one of the many hidden majlises at Emirates Palace reserved for VIP guests – it was in early April, a few days before her Abu Dhabi Festival closing performance at the venue’s main auditorium.
She was looking radiant in a white-lacy ensemble emphasising her lithe figure.
While we did discuss her debut UAE performance, heavier issues weighed on her mind.
In February, she tragically lost her friend, the singer Whitney Houston, to an accidental drug overdose.
A month before that, her R&B elder Etta James passed away from leukaemia at the age of 73.
The news, she explained, triggered a bout of soul searching.
“I mean, Whitney Houston I knew very well,” she said.
“I have to say that I don’t know why I am still here. I think it just came to a point where I made a decision to do better with my life and health. And that is only by God’s grace because there are no guarantees.”
The fact she mentioned Houston was telling. Cole had her own struggles with substance abuse, all of which came to a head in 2008 when she was diagnosed with Hepatitis C before collapsing from a kidney failure, only to survive after a transplant.
She stated it was the wake-up call she needed to get her life back on track. The results were a string of acclaimed late career albums and successful tours – her Abu Dhabi show was a knockout.
The daughter of jazz legend and road hound Nat King Cole, she described her childhood as bereft of “family moments such as barbecues, going to the beach ... they were only on holidays”.
It was no wonder she initially refused to follow her father’s footsteps after his death in 1965, when she was 15.
Perhaps in a way to understand her upbringing, she elected to study child psychology at the University of Massachusetts. But it wasn't long for the hereditary music bug hit and she found herself in a recording studio to release her debut album, 1975's classic Inseperable.
Despite the acclaim, it wasn’t an easy entry into the business. As well as trying to emerge out of her father’s shadow, a feud broke out with fellow R&B diva Aretha Franklin – the latter was particularly irked at suggestions by the press that Cole was “the new Aretha”.
“The first time I saw Aretha was at an industry banquet,” Cole later told Franklin biographer David Ritz. “She gave me an icy stare and turned her back on me. It took me weeks to recover.”
Backed by the writing-producing team of Chuck Jackson and Marvin Yancy, she followed with such hits as Our Love and I've Got Love on My Mind, and by 1979 had a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
But her career faded in the early 1980s and she battled heroin, crack cocaine and alcohol addiction for many years. She spent six months in rehab in 1983. Her recovery began later in the decade with the album Everlasting and reached multiplatinum heights with her 1991 album, Unforgettable ... With Love.
Her voice was overlaid with her dad’s in the title cut, offering a delicate duet a quarter-century after his death. Although criticised by some as morbid, the album sold some 14 million copies and won six Grammys, including Album of the Year as well as Record and Song of the Year for the title track duet.
For Cole, the duet was a way to recconect with her father after years of trying to get away from him as an artist.
“It really taught me as a singer. Some of his own techniques, his phrasing, timing and arrangement were so different than any other singer at that time,” she said.
“Of course, my first wish was that he was still alive so we could have sung it together ... but this is the next best thing.”
More healing came in the later years. The cold war between Cole and Franklin eventually thawed. The latter was one of the first artists to pay tribute to Cole when her death was announced on Thursday “from continuing health issues”.
“I had to hold back the tears,” Franklin said in a statement. “She fought for so long. She was one of the greatest singers of our time. She represented the Cole legend of excellence and class quite well.”
Touring until her last days - she cancelled a New Year’s Eve performance in Disneyland due to ill health - Cole told me there is no separation between her real life persona and that on the record. To know her you got to play her tunes.
“I get hugs all the time from strangers,” she said. “I do believe that people can feel your persona when you perform live, but it is one of the nicest things if you can translate that on your records. I think people hear the warmth in my voice and the friendliness and they think: ‘Oh, she must be a very nice person’.”
sasaeed@thenational.ae
•Additional files by the Associated Press
