Take us with you, Nat

Sets tell us where to go while sitting still.

Have you ever been in an LA sound stage? They are huge huge huge … flat concrete floors with a big silver barn over top. They are tall and wide and dim.

That’s Nelson Riddle the arranger and orchestra conductor. You never see Riddle or the orchestra on the show - but they are clearly off to the side because Nat will thank Nelson Riddle and gesture towards them. So, here we are in a room big enough to accomodate a full orchestra you never see and good acoustics, I assume.

The set feels about the size of a typical theater set, or two.

Nat and occasionally the back-up singers hang out on the left, and then sometimes we pan right to a smaller band. When the show was 15 minutes you got Nat singing a couple songs alone, and then one with the singers and maybe one with a guest like Count Basie.

The photographer, Bruce Davidson, was on set this day.

His photos are cripser. We don’t just get to see the mics up in the corners, out of frame for TV. We get to see the set with all of the depth of th…