Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Cool jazz/West Coast jazz
The bandleader does not play a solo. For most of the five-and-a-half minutes of the song, he alternates between two simple chords. Likewise, the bassist eschews the typical insistent thump-thump-thump-thump rhythm for a series very simple three note patterns. The music is unhurried. The saxophonist’s playing is fluid and varied without feeling busy. His understated playing and the soft-spoken round sound invite sustained attention. The drummer begins the song with a swing feel in full support of the band, before launching into a solo that lasts for over 2 minutes and is characterized just as much by silence as it is by accented drum hits. The song is an original tune written by one of the band members, and it is not in the typical 4/4 time signature.
Everybody is not playing bebop.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmDDOFXSgAs
In many ways, the story of bebop is the story of a musical arms race that ends with the mutually-assured destruction of the style. An iconoclastic performance aesthetic appended to otherwise conventional music, bebop could not grow in perpetuity. Musicians trying to upstage one another with even faster playing and more complicated chord substitutions necessarily resulted in music that was opaque for many listeners, and lacking in enough degrees of creative freedom or players.
Cool jazz extends a warm welcome to anyone who may feel like they are on the outside looking in at bebop.
Cool jazz is style of doing, not out-doing. The idea of musicians competing to out-cool each other, out-relax one another, or out-invite the listener in to the music is as silly as it sounds. It is a genre in which artists are too busy using the musical space in painterly ways to worry so much about gate-keeping. As such, it is also a style not bound by too many rules. Fast tempos (
) can be cool. Block chords can provide a characteristic feel of cool jazz CONCORDE (
) on the piano, but Gerry Mulligan’s and Chet Baker’s piano-less quartet is every bit as cool (
). Speaking of Chet Baker, his performing is cool jazz whether he plays the trumpet or sings (
).
Because it is not too rigid, whether music is cool jazz or not is fairly subjective. Much of Miles Davis’s playing on music that others might identify as belonging to Hard Bop (
), or Modal Jazz (
https://youtu.be/F3W_alUuFkA?t=17) sounds awfully cool, and even a seasoned jazz veteran might be hard pressed to explain why it can’t be both cool
and modal
. That particular distinction seems neither important nor helpful. Dividing 1950s jazz by region, however, does suggest more concrete divisions, and a West Coast vs. East Coast vs. other places will yield some interesting food for thought.
One sound, three ways
Developed by Milt Buckner more-less-simultaneously with bebop (here’s Robbins Nest from 1947:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUPNsC7ata8, “block chords” or “locked hands” is a style of piano playing that favors clusters of notes in close proximity that travel up and down the keyboard together. Here’s a quick video on the mechanics of the basic use of block chords:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0K2uvD2S7I
Although you don’t hear much of this style in bebop, the sound and feel of block chords lend themselves well to cool jazz. Here are a few examples of cool-sounding block chords in the wild:
Although the songs above share certain “cool” atmospheric qualities, critics tended to dismiss one of these performers (Ahmad Jamal) as merely light cocktail entertainment, while assigning Red Garland (If I Were a Bell) to “hard bop.” Why?
Cool Jazz, Hard Bop, Cocktail Music
The label you earned seems to be primarily determined by your ethnicity and geographic location. White artists tend to be associated with cool jazz, as do musicians operating on the West Coast of the united states. In fact, Cool Jazz and West Coast Jazz are sometimes used interchangeably. Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan, Art Pepper, Stan Getz, and Dave Brubeck are all associated with cool jazz and were primarily active in California. What about Bill Evans? His playing uses block chords and is fully of “cool” elements; is he cool jazz? Since Evans was mainly active in New York, he does not tend to be lumped into the Cool Jazz genre. In the 1950s, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco were areas in which there were active live jazz scenes and record labels who recorded and distributed the music of the jazz players in that area. New York had Blue Note, Riverside, Prestige, and Columbia records, while Verve, Fantasy, Contemporary, and Pacific Jazz records were all located in California. Based in Chicago, Ahmad Jamal never saw wide notoriety (in spite of Miles Davis’s efforts to bring him into the greater public spotlight) and wasn’t associated with one of the regional record labels. Had he been based in either California or New York, he probably would have been perceived as part of a movement and not a cocktail pianist.
One final thought on cool jazz: these boundaries and distinctions seemed to matter more to critics and record company executives than they did to the musicians themselves. Ahmad Jamal’s piano playing in the 1950s sounds heavily-inspired by Buckner and Shearing (two white artists), and Miles Davis famously used Red Garland in his “first great quintet” because Garland knew how to sound like Ahmad Jamal. Along with Art Blakey and Max Roach, Miles’s first quintet was important in defining the Hard Bop sound. Hard Bop is a genre typically associated with black musicians from New York, but the sound Miles wanted out of Garland can be traced back to a white man from England (Shearing).
Ultimately, drawing firm distinctions between styles is unimportant. Take, for example, Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16OoypHXcps
Here, Art Pepper (cool jazz) is backed by 3/5 of Miles’s First Great Quintet (Philly Joe Jones, Paul Chambers, and Red Garland). It’s a lovely, East-meets-West album. So is it cool jazz or hard bop? Whatever you want to call it, it is great music.