Borough Of Manhattan Comminity College
199 Chambers St, New York, NY 10007
Scenes through the Cinema Lens event
Born in March, 1919, Nat King Cole had an especially intriguing career. Starting out as a rhythm and blues performer with a trickster’s manner, Cole crossed over to a white audience with “Straighten Up and Fly Right” in 1943 and then cemented his connection to white America with “The Christmas Song” (1946). We’ll see his appearances in several dramatic films as well as segments from The Nat King Cole Show (1956-57), the first series on network television to star an African American.
“Scenes Through the Cinema Lens” is curated and hosted by Krin Gabbard, who teaches in the Jazz Studies program at Columbia University. In 2014 he retired from Stony Brook University where he had, since 1981, taught classical literature, film studies, and literary theory. His books include Psychiatry and the Cinema (1987), Jammin’ at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema (1996), Black Magic: White Hollywood and African American Culture (2004), Hotter Than That: The Trumpet, Jazz, and American Culture (2008), and Better Git It in Your Soul: An Interpretive Biography of Charles Mingus (2016). At Columbia he teaches courses on jazz and American culture.