Birth of the Cool
The ideology born from oppression and uncertainty that shaped a culture and a style of music.
I play it cool
And dig all jive
That’s the reason
I stay alive
-Langston Hughes, from “Motto”
I. Introduction
Cool is an ideology; a survival mechanism; a way of life. Cool represents understatement and control of one’s emotions. Though the ideology has been present throughout the entire history of mankind, at no time or place has cool been more prevalent and necessary than in the Black American community spanning the times of slavery until the present day. Following World War II, an entire nation (and arguably all of humanity) was told to “keep cool.” Cool then gained national prominence, exemplified among artists such as Miles Davis, Jackson Pollock, Jack Kerouac, Marlon Brando, and others alienated from society. I will explore the origins of the ideology known as Cool, followed by its role in the Bebop and Cool Jazz eras.
II. Cool as an Ideology
The future of humanity seemed uncertain after the atrocities of World War II. Fascism, genocide, starvation, and war were no longer merely abstract ideas to most, instead they had become realities the world over. With the advent and use of the atomic bomb, the human race had witnessed perhaps a foreshadowing of how it would all end: a blinding white light giving way to a 60,000 foot tall mushroom cloud. Before the War, human extinction had always been perceived to rely on external threats, such as diseases or astral bodies. After World War II, however, total extinction was a phone call away.
In the United States, the year of 1949 was known as the year of the Great Heat and the year of the clampdown. That year, the Soviet Union had successfully detonated their first atomic bomb, constructed with the help of blueprints stolen from Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project, and Mao had marched into Beijing to found the People’s Republic of China. The American federal government started forcing its employees to take loyalty oaths. Later that year, Attorney General J. Howard McGrath warned the American public that “Communists are everywhere, in factories, offices, butcher stores, on street corners, in private businesses, and each carries within himself the germ of death for society.” A new war had started, a “Cold War” waged against Communism.
The first fully air-conditioned, fluorescent-lit office building opened in midtown Manhatten in 1949. The structure allowed more and more people to be packed into vertical human filing cases. Twenty miles from midtown, in the spinach and potato fields found in Hempstead, Long Island, William Levitt christened a collection of 17,000 newly constructed cookie cutter homes as “Levittown.” The year of 1949 witnessed unparalleled American economic expansion, yet Americans were increasingly encouraged to “hunker down, pull back, buckle up, and conform.” (Macadams 78).
Paranoia ran rampant through the minds of Americans. New York Times published an article in 1949 warning the citizens of major cities that if war was declared, their home and place of business would disappear in the next second. Collier’s published “Hiroshima U.S.A.” in 1950, detailing what a devastating nuclear attack on a U.S. city would be like. Alongside the story was an illustration of Manhattan incinerated by an atomic bomb. The same year, a poll showed 73 percent of Americans said they would turn in neighbors if they suspected them to be communists.
This new world produced a new style of living. Cool emerged, which “symbolized our culture’s increased striving for restraint” to better blend into the social fabric. (Stearns) “Be cool, man” and “cool it” were expressions of emotional control; to calm down; be less noticeable; not cause a scene. The ideology of being cool spread throughout the U.S. as relations with the Soviet Union grew worse. The ensuing Cold War following World War II promised mutually assured destruction (M.A.D.) by means of nuclear arms if either the U.S. or Soviet Union attacked the other with a nuclear weapon. Indeed, Americans had to live with the constant dark cloud of possible annihilation looming over their heads. America’s top choice of entertainment had “cooled down” from nightclubs, dance halls, amusement parks, etc. to television shows depicting simple suburban life such as “Leave It to Beaver,” portraying the iconic postwar American family. Fictional heroes of the time, like James Bond and Mike Hammer, remained cool and calm in the midst of gunfights and explosions.
III. Black Americans and Cool
Cool as an ideology and way of living had been inherent within the black community since the days of American slavery, and had contributed to earlier forms of jazz before Cool Jazz. Novelist, artist, and poet Clarence Majors puts forth that cool started when the first rebellious slave submerged their emotions in irony and choked back their rage. Dr. Richard Majors, psychologist and senior research associate at the Urban Institute in Washington, puts forth that “black cool is better understood as a complex system of coping mechanisms, a technique for black survival in America.” (Macadams 20) Marlene Kim Connors adds that Cool arose when male slaves were forced to maintain an outward calm composure while their wives and mothers were raped by white men. (Connors) Being cool meant, for African-American males, that he had harnessed his anger. Connor writes “A man’s ability to protect himself is at the very core of cool.” Cool, then, became the few ways in which the powerless could win over their oppressors. Being cool was the one thing that the white slaveowner couldn’t own. Cool could not be bought, it could only be earned by the oppressed, because at the core of cool was rebellion.
(It is interesting to note that the conclusion of absurdist philosophy may be to “play it cool” when cool is taken in this ideological context. Absurdism, developed formally by Albert Camus, posits that the universe is infinitely complex and it is thus absurd to believe there is any definite reason for anything. Every idea will have myriad ideas that contradict it. However, absurdism does not see suicide as a “solution” as existentialism does. Rather, absurdism sees rebellion as the ultimate solution; that in the face of the infinite unknown and complex one must derive their own meaning from life. In Camus’s seminal absurdist work The Myth of Sisyphus, Sisyphus is forced by the gods to spend his life rolling a large boulder to the top of a mountain every day. At the end of every day, upon reaching the summit, the boulder then rolls down the other side of the mountain. Decreed as punishment by the gods, Sisyphus instead finds meaning in his tedium, and is able to live a worthwhile life despite his “punishment”. Camus calls this pivotal concept rebellion, and is one of the postulates of absurdist philosophy. Here we see the aforementioned oppressed victor over the oppressor, harnessing a tool of revenge the oppressor could never possess. Here we see the power of cool inherent in Camus’s work and also its prevalence throughout history.)
Garry Goodrow, a white hipster actor in New York’s Living Theater in the 1950s says of cool, “to be cool was to be in charge, unphased by the bullshit of life. … The outward signs of cool had everything to do with an appearance of easy competence. … To be cool was to be not frantic, not overblown.” (Quoted from Macadams 20) Black Americans were seen to have the means to achieve cool, among “many beautiful, life-affirming things — like jazz, like relaxation, like general enjoyment of life outside the commercial pressure cooker. Any white who felt a healthy disgust for the ridiculous society around him gravitated in that direction.” Anyone alienated by society or disillusioned by society had the power to adopt cool. Thus, Black Americans have been the people most likely to adopt cool throughout America’s history.
Cool is not restricted to one race. The birth of cool took place in the shadows of the world, in cold-water flats and basements. Midcentury Americans were defined by their role in World War II, but cool didn’t take part in the victory celebrations. “Cool was too young, too weird, too black, too strung out, too alien to take part.” (Macadams 23)
IV. Bebop Rebellion
In January 1945, Jean-Paul Sartre, philosopher, novelist, playwright, hero of the intellectual underground and young France, climbed out of an American military transport plane onto the pavement of a New York airport. He had arrived from a freshly liberated Paris with a new idea: existentialism. Weathering the war, Sartre announced that God had died, and that all we can be sure of is that we (humans) exist, and thus we alone are responsible for our destinies. Sartre lectured throughout the East coast, garnering praise and countless articles from New York newspapers and magazines. Bebop trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and pianist Thelonious Monk picked up on Sartre’s Left Bank cafe-intellectual style, black beret, horn-rimmed glasses, the wee goatee. These were all ways of the two artists signifying that they were no longer to be seen as clowns and entertainers alone, but as artists.
Lester “Prez” Young was seated among a sea of band members. A longtime member of Count Basie’s Orchestra, Young was at the forefront of the swing era but had procured a style entirely his own. With his signature pork pie hat and saxophone tilted to a 45-degree angle, Young ushered in a reserved yet masterful approach to music: soft tone, sophisticated use of harmony, no flashes, no gimmicks, no note misplaced.
Charlie Parker was only nineteen when he boarded a freight train in Kansas City, headed to Chicago in the fall of 1939. He pawned his alto saxophone — his only possession — so that he could ride on a band bus from Chicago to New York City. When Parker was eleven, his father was stabbed to death by a hooker in a drunken brawl. The good news is that Parker had hardly known him. At the age of fifteen, Parker asked for an alto saxophone from his mother. His mother said Parker was a bright child, but that the only thing he would ever work at was music. During the prohibition-era mayoral reign of a musclebound liquor vendor named Tom Pendergast, African-American jazz bands were featured in Kansas City’s red-light district around the clock. For months and maybe years, Parker would wait for his mother to head off to work at night and then lie his way into the Club Reno or any other jazz club in the area. At the clubs, Parker basked in the talents of his saxophone heroes: Johnny Hodges, Coleman Hawkins, and, Parker’s favorite, Lester “Prez” Young. Parker married Rebecca Ruffin, a woman four years his senior, when he was fifteen, and soon thereafter fathered his first son. When Rebecca was three months pregnant, she found her husband in the bedroom with the blinds down, shooting heroin. Parker took the tie he had just used to raise a vein and wrapped it once more around his neck, kissed Rebecca goodnight, and said that he had to go to work.
While at a gig in Kansas City touring with Cab Calloway’s big band in 1940, Dizzy Gillespie learned of Charlie Parker from a local musician. Upon returning back to New York, Dizzy sought out Parker and was “astounded” by the talent of Parker, later stating, “Those other guys I had been playing with weren’t my colleagues. But, the moment I heard Charlie Parker, I said, there is my colleague.” (Quoted from Macadams 37)
John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie was born into a large and poor family in Cheraw, South Carolina in 1927. Gillespie’s mother was a homemaker and his father a bricklayer who would play piano in a weekend band. If Gillespie didn’t practice music, his father whipped him with a strap. By the age of fourteen, Gillespie was skilled enough as a trumpet player to receive a band scholarship to Laurinburg Technical Institute in North Carolina. Gillespie’s mother moved the family to Philadelphia after his father died in 1935. There, Gillespie started playing music for money. He moved to New York City with his trumpet in a paper sack when he was twenty.
Cab Calloway gave Gillespie steady employment in 1939. Calloway was not cool. He would chant “hi-de-hi-de-hi” and then cup his ear and the band would reply “hi-de-hi-de-ho.” Calloway’s band was successful, and was booked three years in advance at one point. Though the band was good, Gillespie grew tired of the act, specifically the part where Gillespie had to stand up in the trumpet section and sing “I’m Diz the Whiz, a swingin’ hip cat, swingin’ hip cat, I’m Diz the Wiz!” three hundred nights a year. Once Gillespie and Parker met up, they pushed each other to experiment. It was Gillespie’s experimentation with flatted fifth chords and odd-ball harmonies that caused Calloway to one night stop the music during a show to yell “I don’t want you [Gillespie] playing that Chinese music in my band!”
For most of 1942, Gillespie bounced from one band to the next while Parker primarily played after-hour club gigs. In 1943, the two finally had a chance to play together when they joined Earl “Fatha” Hines’s band. Hines says that while on tour, Parker and Gillespie would practice together constantly during the intermissions between the band’s four daily shows.
Henry Minton was a saxophone player and a community leader, and also the first African-American delegate to the American Federation of Musicians Local 802. Minton opened Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem. The club was a supper club with white linen tablecloths and flowers in small glass vases. The place mainly served as a hangout for Minton and his friends until 1940, when Minton hired Teddy Hill to be in charge of the club’s music. Hill hired drummer Kenny “Klook” Clarke to assemble a trio to play the after-hour jam sessions. The first player Clarke hired was piano player Thelonious Monk.
Thelonious Sphere Monk had grown up in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, learning to play the piano by listening to his older sister take lessons on the family’s upright piano. When Monk was 11, the piano teacher discovered it was Monk who truly had potential. Monk took lessons but found out no teacher was going to train him to play like the greats: Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, and especially James P. Johnson, a seminal stride pianist who lived near Monk. Monk would show up every Wednesday to amateur night at the Apollo Theater until he won so often he was barred from competing. By the time Monk was 20, he was the supreme chordal architect of his generation, creating classics “Round Midnight” and “Ruby, My Dear.” Late one night in 1941, Monk and Clarke went to Monroe’s Uptown House to listen to Charlie Parker. They were both flabbergasted by Parker’s ability to cascade through complex chord tones while crafting solos. Clarke and Monk pooled together some money to get Parker a place and steered him towards Minton’s.
When Miles Davis first arrived in New York in 1944, his first stop was Minton’s. To keep from getting dominated by the musicians of Minton’s, a musician did not have to possess just great skill and taste, but also be so well versed in music theory that they could play a song in almost any key. The pressure was intense. Davis recalls, “If you got up on the bandstand at Minton’s and couldn’t play, you were not only going to be embarrassed by people ignoring you or booing you, you might get your ass kicked.” Minton’s was an institute of higher learning, Miles states, “We was all trying to get our master’s degrees and Ph.D’s from Minton’s University of Bebop under the tutelage of Professors Bird and Diz.” (Macadams 44)
Bebop played host to the first generation of thoroughly schooled black musicians. Unlike countless predecessors, most beboppers could read music and understand music theory. The way bebop presented itself — with berets, goatees, and horn-rimmed glasses — showed the musicians’ rejection of their rural roots and also their affinity with the European cultural avant-garde. Beboppers refused to accept racism, poverty, or economic exploitation. The musicians heard of black soldiers dying for their country yet other black soldiers still coming home to a deeply racist and segregated society. Bebop was the music and the attitude was cool. Cool joined the aesthetic to the political, a militant act, a way of staying hidden from the radar of a dominant culture without losing the respect of their peers. “Before bebop there was cool, but it was individual cool. For the first time, at Minton’s, cool became an allegiance, a code that only those who knew could break into or share.” (Macadams 46).
Substance abuse was woven within the idea of cool for bebop musicians. Jazz historian Lincoln Collier estimates that as many as 75 percent of bebop musicians in the 1940s and 1950s used heroin. Poet Amiri Baraka called heroin addiction “one-upsmanship of the highest order,” arguing that the popularity of heroin among African-Americans derives from heroin’s ability to “transform the negroes’ normal separation from the mainstream into an advantage,” creating a clique in which only the most alienated are welcome. Junkies must be cool, because they cannot afford to draw attention. Red Rodney, a trumpeter who toured with Parker, said “heroin was our badge. Hipsters used heroin. Squares didn’t. Heroin gave us membership in a unique club and for this membership we gave up everything else in the world. Every ambition. Every desire. Everything.” Parker was the greatest saxophone player of the bebop era, and perhaps the greatest saxophone player of all time, but was also selfish, exacerbated by his heroin addiction. Though Parker always told people in the pursuit of cool not to do what he did, many musicians and others in the scene became junkies just to emulate Parker.
“For urban black people of his generation, Charlie was a genuine culture hero,” says Ross Russell (Macadams 56). “The revolutionary nature of his music was explicit. Implicit in his lifestyle was defiance of the white establishment.” A survival mechanism that had existed since slavery, cool in the form of studied indifference was the sole way hip African Americans could stifle rage at the same time that he or she was expressing it. Parker shaped jazz into a high class artform, and garnered attention as an intellectual and an uncompromising artist. Parker alongside other bebop musicians crafted the perception of the Black American as an equal and not an inferior.
V. Birth of the Cool
The nucleus of bebop starting to fall apart in the mid- to late-1940s. Many of the bad habits that helped perpetuate cool caught up with the bebop musicians. The wane in popularity of bebop was due to several reasons. First, the 1940s were immersed in swing, a style of music that survived primarily because it catered to the musical tastes of the public at large, providing music to dance to. Another cause of the decline was due to the dissemination of old and new African American music in urban areas, which largely capitalized on the musical tastes of southern migrants in midwestern and northeastern cities, their offspring who were primarily born in cities, and longtime urban dwellers. Thus, rhythm and blues, urban blues, and other genres began to compete for money from the new immigrants and their offspring. The new urban dwellers had more money to spend on entertainment and a wider variety of entertainment to choose from.
The media took an anti-Bebop stance, citing that the music was radical, political, and antisocial, which ultimately resulted in a rejection of both the music and its practitioners. The transformation that followed from bebop to Cool was additionally fueled by the impact that rhythm and blues had on the jazz of the 1940s and ’50s. During this time, gimmickry in the entertainment industry ran rampant, including outlandish outfits, the new dances. Bebop musician Walter G. Fuller, who worked with Gillespie, states, “And then came the so-called rhythm ‘n blues — they were doing dances, all kinds of gyrations — Elvis Presley and that kind of thing. That’s the beginning of that era. If you didn’t get out of there and dance, and run up and down, and get on your knees and play your horn…then you were through” (Gillespie and Fraser 1979: 360–361). The new gimmickry and emergence of new jazz and popular genres intensified the economic problems of many Bebop musicians.
The emergence of Cool was aided by the popular media’s systematic and persistent connection of Bebop with African American rebellion, alcohol, drugs, and Harlem. Bebop was associated with anti-war sentiment, the nationalistic dogma of Garveyites and followers of Islam, and thus was seen as an anti-status quo force. Couple this with the demise of 52nd street, and the stage for a new emergence of jazz was set.
With the desire for a new style of jazz evolving throughout the late 1940s, Cool Jazz was born. Most of its musicians, save Miles Davis, had no direct connection to Bebop; artists including Stan Getz, Lee Konitz, and Lennie Tristano had merely experimented with it. Cool Jazz evolved alongside the exponents of the new style. Several of the most prominent Cool artists can be traced back to the Claude Thornhill Band, which was rooted in the orchestral concepts of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn and then transformed and reimagined by Gil Evans, the arranger for Thornhill’s band. The band had played some Bebop-inspired tunes, but it was important in developing the Cool aesthetic due to its orchestration, instrumentation, articulation, phrasing, and encouragement of the arrangers to experiment. In 1942, Thornhill added to his band John Graas, a former member of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, who played the french horn. Jazz historian Eddie Meadows notes, “The combination of supple phrasing and the kaleidoscope of tone colors in the orchestrations of Evans and [Gerry] Mulligan created alternative to the Bebop aesthetic.” (Meadows 250). Davis, a member of Charlie Parker’s quintet/sextet, played bebop but had a significantly different style of playing when compared to Parker or Gillespie. Davis would play below Parker in the register, so that there were no misconceptions of Davis biting Parker’s style. The unique trumpet player’s focus on the middle and lower register was modeled from his experience playing behind the singer Eddie Randle.
Adapting one’s style to complement another performer was not widely adopted by Bebop horn players, who instead saw themselves as stars, measured by their ability to play fast scalar solos. Davis grew tired of Bebop’s fast tempos, disjunct melodies, contrafact-driven harmonies, and emphasis on technique rather than melody. The mutual openness to ideas and approaches and a reluctance to stagnate brought Miles Davis and Gil Evans together.
Evans arrived in New York in 1941 to work as an arranger for Claude Thornhill. Through Evans’s arranging and composing expertise, Thornhill’s band became known for combining the lower register of the woodwinds with the trombones, first pioneered by Duke Ellington, and also for Evans’s minimalist use of notes in his arrangements, which opened up the sound for melodies to be more pronounced. Evans heard the song “Donna Lee” and discussed with Parker the idea of adapting the song for Thornhill’s band. Parker told Evans that the tune was Davis’s. Evans and Davis met up and worked out a deal, “Donna Lee” by Davis in return for Thornhill’s arrangement of “Robin’s Nest”. The meeting resulted in the two exchanging musical ideas, at once forming a mutual admiration between the two. After the two had developed a musical relationship, Davis began sending Evans compositions to critique. Evans consistently told Davis that the pieces were “cluttered up with too many notes” (Carr 1982: 27).
Evans’s apartment in New York served as a meeting place where eclectic musical ideas were aired among musicians who were excited to learn and experiment. Musicians like Gillespie, Parker, Gerry Mulligan, Lee Konitz, Max Roach, George Russell, Blossom Dearie, John Lewis, and Johnny Carisi met frequently in a dark basement apartment on 55th street. They discussed music, argued, and sometimes even challenged each other musically. One thing in common among the musicians was their respect for Gil Evans. Davis wrote, “he taught us so much, about caring about people and about music, especially arranging music” (Troupe 1989 122–123). Evans was popular with the musicians of the area, and acted as a vehicle to forge both social and musical relationships. Evans was perceived by musicians as being fair and impartial. In 1948, Evans left Thornhill’s band, seeking a new musical challenge, and Davis left Parker’s quintet to expand his vision for a new style of jazz.
Davis’s new musical direction involved organizing a nine-piece group to perform Gil Evans arrangement. The instrumentation consisted of a trumpet, a trombone, a French horn, a tuba, alto and baritone saxophones, bass, drums, and a piano. Davis later said, “I said it had to be the voicing of a quartet, with soprano, alto, baritone, and bass voices. We had to have tenor, half-alto, and half-bass. … We also used the French horn for the alto voicings and the baritone sax for baritone voicings and bass tuba for bass voicings. I looked at the group like it was a choir a choir that was a quartet. … I wanted the instruments to sound like human voices and they did.” (Troupe 1989: 117–118). Davis, Evans, and Mulligan envisioned a small group that would take Thornhill’s aesthetic and play jazz in accordance with cool ideology: more subdued, with focus on tone. However, they could not record due to a wartime recording ban from January 1, 1948 to December 15, 1948. Once the ban was lifted, the band made three recordings in 1949–1950 that culminated in the 1949 Birth of the Cool recording under the leadership of Miles Davis,
It’s interesting to note that in the development of a new style of jazz that exemplified the core values of cool, more white musicians were involved in this new style than in Bebop. One of the reasons for less white involvement in Bebop (other than musicians Johnny Carisi, Red Rodney, Gerry Mulligan, and a few others) could have been Bebop’s association with African American Nationalism, Many white musicians may not have felt welcome or comfortable in the discussions or jam sessions where these social exchanges took place. Lack of significant communication and fellowship between black and white musicians was a critical factor regarding white involvement in Bebop. In contrast, interracial involvement in Cool Jazz appeared to have led to a deeper understanding and communication of the musical and social ideas within, leading to more black/white musical collaborators.
Birth of the Cool led to enthusiastic crowds and sold well, but there lingers a perception that the music was not well received. Although the album had positive effects on some musicians who used the style to establish new musical identities, the recording had a negative impact on bebop. Many critics failed to either recognize or admit the debt that Cool owed to the “ballad style of Parker, the sound concept of Lester Young, and the orchestration concepts of Duke Ellington.” (Meadows 293) Thus, in the mind of many reviewers, Birth of the Cool was heralded as an entirely new invention rather than a reinterpretation of earlier practices. Indeed, cool had been a survival mechanism of hundreds of thousands of (predominantly black) Americans before its teachings were translated into the musical style of Davis’s Birth of the Cool.
Just as Bebop musicians had used bebop to carve individualistic styles, Cool musicians developed individual ways of performing. Although many aspects and articulations of Cool can be traced back to players such as Lester Young and Bix Beiderbecke, artists such as Stan Getz, Lennie Tristano, Lee Konitz, Paul Desmond, and Chet Baker, all developed individual interpretations of Cool.
Stan Getz possessed a lyrical and extremely well-toned style of saxophone playing, reminiscent of Lester Young. However, Getz developed long improvisational articulations, often permeated with periods of silence as his career continued. Getz featured both conjunct and disjunct melodic lines, which was an atypical phenomenon among Cool musicians, as was “his use of motivic elision, which was often repeated and resolved.” (Meadows 339). Getz first achieved fame as one of the “Four Brothers” saxophone section in Woody Herman’s big band. The saxophonist went on to develop a unique style of Cool, articulated on Johnny Smith’s seminal Moonlight in Vermont and his foray into Latin-influenced music, articulated on Getz/Gilberto which features “The Girl From Ipanema.”
Lennie Tristano was known primarily as a teacher and pianist, who would be later regarded as one of the most creative and provocative musicians of the 1940s and 1950s. His influences included the locked hands concept of Milt Buckner, the subdued; laid-back rhythmic feel and cerebral sound of the Nat “King” Cole Trio, and the creative/technical abilities of Bud Powell, Art Tatum, and Teddy Wilson. Tristano was very critical of rhythm sections, opting for a section that functioned as a support to his playing. Beyond rhythm sections, Tristano favored controlled freedom, as evidenced in his use of multitracking technology. He developed individualism with his vast eighth-note runs permeated with on- and off-beat accents.
Lee Konitz, one of Lennie Tristano’s prized pupils, also developed a distinct individualistic style of playing. The uniqueness of his playing can be best distinguished when comparing his early improvisations to his later improvisations. Early in Konitz’s career, he used many vibratoless tones, slow to moderate tempos, and silence within phrases that were then generic to the Cool sound. In his later years, he was influenced by Parker, and started using lots of ii-V-I harmonic progressions, repeated notes, and sequences. Compared to the repeated notes of Gillespie and Parker, Konitz used longer periods of silence, slower tempos, and were usually placed in a smooth and cerebral manner. “Thus, Konitz’s individualism is the result of combining the generic musical language of both Bebop and Cool to produce articulations unique among Cool artists for the 1940s and 1950s.” (Meadows 339).
After World War II, Paul Desmond moved back to California and eventually joined Dave Brubeck’s trio following a brief bad history with Brubeck. Desmond was heavily influenced by the sound and articulations of Lee Konitz’s playing, yet went on to develop an unmistakable unique style of playing alto saxophone. Desmond’s remarkable playing is exemplified in the album Time Out by Dave Brubeck’s Quartet, among the group’s other recordings. The group experimented heavily with odd time signatures, including the 5/4 time of the group’s biggest hit “Take Five”. Desmond composed the hit, which would later become the biggest-selling jazz single ever. Brubeck’s group experimented with and popularized the West Coast’s cool jazz scene.
One could argue that as soon as Cool became “cool,” (as in popular) it lost much of its coolness. The commodification of cool did not extinguish the lasting power of the ideology, because cool can never truly be commodified; Cool commodified is merely commodified-cool; uncool. Thus, the nature of cool will last so long as there are oppressor-oppressed relationships among the human race.
VI. Conclusions
A nature in panic turned to the lasting power of cool to cope. The postulates of cool had been cultivated by slaves, the oppressed, and later jazz musicians and artists of the early 20th century. The rise of Cool Jazz was not an entirely new invention, but rather a reinterpretation of many styles that came before it. The evolution of Cool Jazz was unique, and provided a new palette from which the subdued and reserved jazz musician may express themselves.
VII. Bibliography
Connor, Marlene K. What Is Cool?: Understanding Black Manhood in America. New York: Crown, 1995. Print.
MacAdams, Lewis. Birth of the Cool: Beat, Bebop, and the American Avant-garde. New York: Free, 2001. Print.
Meadows, Eddie S. Bebop to Cool: Context, Ideology, and Musical Identity. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2003. Print.
Troupe, Quincy and Davis, Miles. Miles, the Autobiography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989. Print.
Vincent, Ted. Keep Cool: The Black Activists Who Built the Jazz Age. London: Pluto, 1995. Print.
VIII. Images
Davis Header: http://www.whosdatedwho.com/dating/miles-davis
Collier’s Hiroshima U.S.A.: http://public.media.smithsonianmag.com/legacy_blog/1950-aug-5-colliers-sm.jpg
Minton’s Playhouse: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minton%E2%80%99s_Playhouse
