An unheard George Benson vocal from 2013 surfaces on a reissued Nat King Cole tribute

A George Benson performance that has never been released has come out of the vault, thirteen years after it was recorded.

The track is Almost Like Being In Love, cut during the sessions for Inspiration: A Tribute to Nat King Cole, the album Benson released in 2013. It has now surfaced on a remastered and expanded edition of that record on Candid Records, which SoulTracks previewed on 20 September.

The reissue adds three recordings from those sessions. Two of them, That Sunday, That Summer and Ramblin' Rose, already appeared on a 2021 deluxe edition. Almost Like Being In Love is the one nobody outside the sessions has heard until now.

The song is a Lerner and Loewe standard, from Brigadoon, and Nat King Cole's recording of it is one of the versions people carry around in their heads. Benson approaches it without trying to dislodge that, playing it with the easy charm that has always been his way into a standard rather than attempting a reinvention.

He is backed on it by the Henry Mancini Institute Orchestra, with an arrangement by Randy Waldman. That is a full orchestral setting rather than a small-group date, which is consistent with how the whole tribute was conceived.

Benson's connection to Cole runs deeper than a tribute record. He has spent more than half a century moving between jazz, pop and soul without being fully claimed by any of them, and Cole, a pianist who became a singer and was reclassified by the public in the process, is the most obvious model for that career. The 2013 album was Benson saying so directly.

No release date for the reissue has been given and no label campaign details have been published beyond the Candid remaster itself.

Reissues as they get dated are collected on the release calendar, and more jazz coverage sits on our genre hub.