cool jazz

a restrained, fluid modern-jazz style of the 1950s, marked by intricate harmonic structures, de-emphasized dynamics, and carefully controlled phrasing and ensemble playing, often with a slight lagging behind the beat. Also called West Coast jazz. Cf. bop¹, hard bop, modern jazz, progressive jazz.

[1945-50]

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▪ music

      a style of jazz that emerged in the United States during the late 1940s. The term cool derives from what journalists perceived as an understated or subdued feeling in the music of Miles Davis (Davis, Miles), The Modern Jazz Quartet, Gerry Mulligan, Lennie Tristano, and others. Tone colours tended toward pastels, vibratos were slow or nonexistent, and drummers played softer and less interactively than in bop, hard bop, and other modern styles that coexisted with cool. There was also a renewed interest in contrapuntal collective improvisation among melody instruments. Within the style, however, there is considerable variety in emotional range, level of intricacy, and instrumentation. For example, the term cool describes the intricate, intense music of New York-based pianist Lennie Tristano as well as the tuneful and light-hearted music of Los Angeles-based saxophonist Dave Pell.

      Much recording activity and publicity surrounded a community of white jazz musicians, including Gerry Mulligan, Dave Brubeck, Shorty Rogers, and others, who were based in California during the early and middle 1950s; thus the label West Coast jazz was applied despite the fact that most of its performers were not born there and some remained there only briefly. Neither black nor white disciples of tenor saxophonist Lester Young (Young, Lester), who exerted enormous influence on the cool style, and trumpeter Miles Davis, himself a pioneer of cool, for example, were necessarily more plentiful in any particular region than disciples of the “hot” modern style of saxophonist Charlie Parker or trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. Thus, while white saxophonists Gerry Mulligan and Art Pepper were making names for themselves in Los Angeles in the so-called West Coast style, leading black saxophonists Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray (both influenced by Parker) were playing in the same city, neither being called West Coast-style players; at the same time, in Boston, white saxophonist John LaPorta and trumpeter Herb Pomeroy were playing very much in the cool style that was considered West Coast.

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