Looking at the career of Stella Cole – whose third release, It’s Magic, is released by Decca Records US – from a distance, you might perceive a kind of disconnect, as Marshall McLuhan would say, between the medium and her message. McLuhan, who died in 1980, had never heard of the internet, YouTube, music streaming platforms – and neither did the vast majority of songwriters whose work she champions: Frank Loesser, Meredith Willson, Ray Noble, Sammy Cahn, or Jimmy Van Heusen.
Likewise, none of the great artists whose legacy she honors, like Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Nat “King” Cole, or Rosemary Clooney, would know what it meant to “go viral.” As it happens, this is how Stella Cole first got noticed by the music industry and, more importantly, the larger world beyond: by performing her own interpretations of classic American popular standards and using the internet to share them.
However, a closer look reveals that these iconic artists were no less keen to embrace new media: long-playing recordings, television, stereophonic sound – these were all new technologies in the 1940s and ‘50s. The idea of bringing classic American songs to new platforms hardly begins with the young Stella, yet she has accomplished that more resoundingly successfully than virtually any other artist working today.
Image credit: Marc Shea
