- published: 02 Jul 2015
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Cool is a style of modern jazz music that arose following the Second World War. It is characterized by its relaxed tempos and lighter tone, in contrast to the bebop style that preceded it. Cool jazz often employs formal arrangements and incorporates elements of classical music.
Broadly, "cool" refers to a number of post-war jazz styles employing a more subdued approach than that found in other contemporaneous jazz idioms. As Paul Tanner, Maurice Gerow, and David Megill suggest, "the tonal sonorities of these conservative players could be compared to pastel colors, while the solos of [Dizzy] Gillespie and his followers could be compared to fiery red colors." The term "cool" started being applied to this music around 1953, when Capitol Records released the album Classics in Jazz: Cool and Quiet.
Mark C. Gridley, writing for All Music Guide to Jazz, identifies four sub-categories, with considerable overlap, that encompass cool jazz:
Ted Gioia identifies cornetist Bix Beiderbecke and saxophonist Frankie Trumbauer as early progenitors of the cool aesthetic in jazz. Gioia cites Beiderbecke's softening of jazz's strong rhythmic impact in favor of maintaining melodic flow, while also employing complex techniques such as unusual harmonies and whole tone scales. Trumbauer, through "his smooth and seemingly effortless saxophone work," greatly affected tenor saxophonist Lester Young, who prefigured – and influenced – cool jazz more than any other musician.
Cool refers to a moderately low temperature. Alternatively, cool or COOL may refer to:
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in black communities in the Southern United States.
It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. Its African pedigree is evident in its use of blue notes, improvisation, polyrhythms, syncopation and the swung note. From its early development until the present day jazz has also incorporated music from American popular music.
As the music has developed and spread around the world it has drawn on many different national, regional and local musical cultures giving rise, since its early 20th century American beginnings, to many distinctive styles: New Orleans jazz dating from the early 1910s, big band swing, Kansas City jazz and Gypsy jazz from the 1930s and 1940s, bebop from the mid-1940s and on down through West Coast jazz, cool jazz, avant-garde jazz, Afro-Cuban jazz, modal jazz, free jazz, Latin jazz in various forms, soul jazz, jazz fusion and jazz rock, smooth jazz, jazz-funk, punk jazz, acid jazz, ethno jazz, jazz rap, cyber jazz, Indo jazz, M-Base, nu jazz, urban jazz and other ways of playing the music.