Jul 16, 2015 3 min read

For the last quarter-century, Natalie Cole has made her bones primarily as a jazz singer, topping the charts and earning an Album of the Year Grammy in 1992 for her album, “Unforgettable … With Love,” and following it with sets devoted to standards, Christmas songs and tunes rendered in Spanish.

Enjoy it while you can. The 65-year-old Cole is eager to strike out in a different direction.

“I’m sick of jazz,” Cole explained in a brief phone interview from her home in Los Angeles last week. “It’s enough already, people. I think I’m ready for something else. I’m the kind of artist who likes to try new things.”

That “new thing” is a country and blues album Cole has in the planning stages. She’s looking to write some new songs and start working on it in earnest next year. Before then, however, she will be continuing a live schedule that will take her as far afield as Kuala Lumpur and as close as The Meadows Racetrack & Casino in North Strabane Township this Saturday at 8 p.m.

Experimenting with different genres is something Cole has done before and, indeed, something her revered father, Nat King Cole, did in the course of his career. In the 1970s and 1980s, Cole had a string of soul and soft rock hits like “Our Love,” “I’ve Got Love on My Mind” and “Miss You Like Crazy,” before settling in to jazz with “Unforgettable.”

Barring an unforeseen development, “Unforgettable” will probably stand as the artistic and commercial zenith of Cole’s career. It was a tribute to her father through renditions of songs he made famous, along with a seamlessly melded electronic “duet” between Cole and her dad on the title song. She plowed the field even further with the 2009 sequel, “Still Unforgettable,” which had offerings from the Great American Songbook, and she did another electronic duet with her departed father on “Natalie Cole in Espanol” in 2013.

But even though these nods in her dad’s direction have yielded big dividends, Cole is one of the relatively few progeny of successful singers who has built an identity that isn’t almost entirely defined by – or overshadowed by – what her famous parent achieved. Few would dispute that Cole has had better luck over the course of her career than, say, Frank Sinatra Jr. or Julian Lennon.

“I think it’s because I’m a girl,” Cole explained. “If I had been a boy, it would have been really, really tough, but if it’s a girl, they go a little easier.”

She has also tried her hand at acting, making appearances on television series like “Touched by an Angel” and “I’ll Fly Away.” In an atypical move, she played herself in the 2001 made-for-television movie, “Livin’ for Love: The Natalie Cole Story,” for which she won an NAACP Image Award.

Playing herself is something that she would never do again, she explained, but Cole is open to other acting opportunities.

“I was thinking the other day I want to do something totally different than what I’ve done before,” she said.