1957 was a banner year for Nat King Cole with three great albums, each different. He began the year with “After Midnight”, a reunion of the King Cole Trio and his jazz roots with Nat once again on the keyboard. Then came “Love Is the Thing”, his first collaboration with Gordon Jenkins, which was #1 for eight weeks and included his masterful versions of “Stardust” and “When I Fall In Love”. “Just One of Those things’, released around the Holidays, contrasted Jenkins’ strings with Billy May’s swing and took a look at what’s left behind when love has gone.

Billy May tampered down his arrangements here. Usually very boisterous and blazing, here, likely because of the material, the brassy bursts only occur during the openings and instrumental interludes and once Nat begins to sing, the accompaniment is usually the reeds with muted brass, bass and piano. Songs reflecting on love’s loss do not lend themselves to the full swing treatment that May gave to Sinatra’s “Come Fly With Me” around this same time. In fact, most performers would have gone for a full string treatment of this material.

That would have been acceptable, but Cole and May’s counterintuitive approach allows the album to not get too sunk in despair. “When Your Lover Is Gone” is almost existentially bleak with the lines, “Like faded flowers life can’t mean anything” but the swing arrangement allows the singer a bit of defiance. “A Cottage For Sale” is introduced with a bit of dissonance from the brass then settles into a melancholy feeling and not the despair of other classic versions like Sinatra’s on “No One Cares”, both being valid.

Cole coincidentally included the old 1920’s song “Who’s Sorry Now” just months before Connie Francis revived it as a hit so big it jump-started her career. Nat is happier and more full of schadenfreude than Connie. The moods vary. This is not an album of nothing but regret. In “Once In a While” the singer is content if his former lover will just think of him on occasion. “These Foolish Things” could be nostalgia for a former love, but is equally just a love song. (In fact the lyricist’s wife, Hermione Gingold, said it was about her, but he said it was about a youthful romance). In Mabel Wayne’s “I Understand” the singer is so accepting as to almost seem not to care though room is left for a rekindling of the romance.

Other highlights include Duke Ellington’s “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” with a xylophone in the m, both accepting yet rueful. The title tune is the most typically hot Billy May arrangement here and Nat swings along with it with great aplomb. Nat King Cole didn’t do “Songbook” albums by one composer, but if he had, I wish he had done a Cole Porter album. As much as he could be tender and sincere, he could also be elegant and sophisticated as he is here, so perfect for Porter. “I Should Care” had its origins in an Esther Williams movie but became a jazz standard anyway and here Cole does it as a leisurely paced ballad..

“The Party’s Over” from “Bells Are Ringing” ended the original album and like much of the rest of the material could be done in a very bleak fashion, say, like Nat’s version of “The End of a Love Affair” but here he is less crushed and more accepting of the fact and ready to go on. I like the whole approach of this album whose gentle swing style is a nice alternative to the way these songs were usually sung, though that way is certainly valid. Still, it’s nice to hear someone who isn’t totally destroyed by losing a lover.