POP MUSIC REVIEW : Cole Achieves an Artistry All Her Own

Natalie Cole just keeps getting better and better. Her performance at the Greek Theatre on Friday night was one of the highlights of the season.

Starting out in instant overdrive, she quickly spun into the musical fast lane with a superbly delivered set of rhythm tunes associated with her father, Nat Cole.

OK, no surprise there. “Unforgettable” made it clear two years ago that she could handle the Great American Song Book with style and panache.

But Cole didn’t just handle tunes such as “Route 66,” “Straighten Up and Fly Right” and “Paper Moon.” She made them her own--a startling accomplishment, given the power of her father’s memorable original interpretations.

No problem for Natalie. Singing with enormous confidence, scatting jazz lines with Ella Fitzgerald-like ease, kicking the time back and forth with her accompanying quartet and a driving big band, Cole brilliantly took charge of the tunes, blurring the line between pop music and jazz as she did so.

As if that wasn’t enough, she opened the second half of the show with a costume change, an added string section and a collection of gorgeous ballads: “Too Young,” “The Very Thought of You,” “As Time Goes By” and a perceptive reading of the often misread Billy Strayhorn standard “Lush Life.”

Finally, as an encore, she brought on a large, combined church choir and ripped through a high-spirited, foot-stomping pair of gospel-styled tunes.

Unforgettable? Yes, indeed--all of it. But not because Cole was grabbing anybody’s musical coattails. Unforgettable because she finally has achieved the kind of versatile artistry that surely would have made her father proud.