Rocky Cole (August10, 1920 - October 3, 1999) was an American jazz pianist and singer.
Rocky Cole was born “Rocky Coluccio” in 1920, and his career as a solo singer was relatively brief. However, his life as a musician was much more substantial. For one, Cole was an accomplished pianist, and throughout the 1960s, he was pianist and music director for Patti Page.
But his career stretched back well into the 1940s. He was a pianist and occasional vocalist with the Sam Donahue Swing Seven and guitarist Alvino Rey and His Orchestra and. You can even hear him singing on their 1946 top 10 hit “Cement Mixer,” a cover of a Slim Gaillard song.This recording from 1946 is right at the beginning of the scat singing crazy, putting Rocky Cole (or “Coluccio”) right on the cutting edge along with other white-male scat singers like Dave Lambert and Buddy Stewart. Rocky also recorded with Tommy Dorsey and his Clambake Seven in 1950 and the Ronnie ScottQuartet in 1953.
Here’s “Will You Still Be Mine” from above LP
Rocky Cole was equipped with something rare, a refreshingly different originality. His piano playing was always inventive and exuberant, in a captivating way, and although his voice wasn’t particularly elegant, filled with a rich, resonant vibrato, or exuding sticky sentimentality, it was no less magnetic. His unique delivery set him apart, but then, everything Rocky did musically was characterized by his individualistic styling.
In 1960, Smooth & Rocky was Rocky Cole’s debut album and he wisely surrounded himself with an orchestra of adroit and gifted musicians arranged by Al Cohn, which features the unforgettable sound of the ‘four brothers’ –three tenor and one baritone saxes, which first came into prominence in the famed Woody Herman Third Herd aggregation. This ‘four brothers’ sound is made up here of Al Cohn, Zoot Sims and Frankie Socolow playing tenor sax and Steve Pearlow on baritone sax. In these recordings a new sound was created with the the highly effective sax section, along with Rocky’s voice and piano styling.
During July 1966 Rocky headed up the third annual Savoy Jazz Festival on the banks of the Mohawk River at Rome, New York. And that dear music lovers is all I can muster regarding Rocky Cole. One more snippet of information from a google book search informs me that he was still arranging and conducting the orchestra for Patti Paige during October 1970 at the Fremont Hotel in Las Vegas.
Rocky Cole died in Framingham, Massachusetts on October 3, 1999 (aged 79) and was buried in Saint John’s Cemetery, Rome, Oneida County, New York.
(Scant and scattered information edited from Indiana Public media, Fresh Sound records, Find a Grave & DAHR)