1950s
He was the son of St Louis dentist, who took up the trumpet at age 13. He became obsessed with the music of Charlie Parker, and on moving to New York, still a teenager, he followed the saxophonist from club to club - eventually rooming with him and deputizing for Dizzy Gillespie in Parker's quintet. At the beginning, he didn't sound like an ideal bop player. He frequently missed notes, had faulty intonation and was uncomfortable with fast tempos. Temperamentally he was a different kind of trumpet player, an artist who could hear an as-yet unformed jazz in which improvisation depended on subtleties of tone and timing. These would deepen its emotional appeal and eventually hypnotize the jazz world. The trumpeter, you've probably guessed by now, was Miles Davis.
Towards the end of the forties, the unrest and excitement of bop were more and more replaced by a tendency towards calm and smoothness. This trend first became apparent in the playing of trumpeter Miles Davis. As an 18-year old, he played with Charlie Parker's Quintet of 1945 in the so-called 'nervous' style of Dizzy Gillespie. A little later, however he began to 'blow' in a relaxed and 'cool' manner.
This trend also showed up in the piano improvisations of John Lewis who travelled with Gillespie's band to Paris in 1948, and in the arrangements Tadd Dameron wrote in the second half of the forties for Gillespie's same big band.
Miles Davis's trumpet solos of 1947 with Charlie Parker, such as Chasin' the Bird, or John Lewis's solo in Dizzy Gillespie's Round Midnight - are the first 'cool' solos in jazz history.
So, with these three musicians: Miles Davis, John Lewis and Tad Dameron - the style known as 'cool jazz' begins.
The concept of 'cool' dominated all jazz in the first half of the fifties. But it is notable that it found its most valid and representative expression at the moment almost coincidental with its origin - in the famed recordings of the Miles Davis Orchestra which was done for the Capitol label in 1949 and 1950. Arranged by Gil Evans, the tracks that this subtle, spacious band cut became known as the Birth of the Cool.
Of course, Miles Davis wasn't the only musician who inspired the cool school.
Lenny Tristano, a blind Chicago pianist was a tough single-minded musician who resembled Davis only in that he disliked the clichéd chords of Tin Pan Alley. He valued the melody line above all and was puritanical about flashy effects, blues clichés, strivings for freak notes and other safe bets that infested swing and some variations of bop.
While young musicians tried to emulate Parker's saxophone, Tristano's pupils tried to sound like pianists - even if they played sax - spinning long, impassive lines way out over the old bar-line breaks, twisting, weaving and doubling back, but rarely shifting in volume above a steady murmur. Drummers and bassists were timekeepers - none of the clattering interventions of Max Roach or Kenny Clark.
Tristano's music was too cerebral for some. But by moving away from song forms, the pianist anticipated a free-jazz movement that was to only become public knowledge ten years later.
Tristano's subdued melodics and Davis's gleaming harmonies were the essence of cool.
But the cool sound is usually identified with music made on the US West Coast at that time - much which wasn't cool at all,even though it revealed a scholarly interest in formal musical experiments and conservatoire devices.
There's Dave Brubeck's band which made exotic experiments with European classical forms, and time signatures complex even by jazz standards.
Gerry Mulligan (who played with Davis's Orchestra) and Chet Baker performed a quietly conversational kind of bebop without a piano. This band's balletic, airy jazz became the sound most associated with cool jazz. Their fashionable sound also encouraged one of the most long-lived and popular jazz groups on the East Coast.
The Modern Jazz Quartet was creating its own intimate atmosphere - but with a unique combination of baroque European music and blues.
There was a great deal of action in cool jazz. And not all the musicians fit into the coolness of Mulligan and Baker. Art Pepper and Frank Morgan with their fragmented phrasings were still as impassioned as Parker. Shorty Rogers, Hampton Hawes and Dexter Gordon - all led bands that played the hottest of cool jazz.
But, the centre of them all was still Miles Davis. For the next two decades he was to blend both hot and cool, both in his playing and with his bands. And though he had done a lot to to launch the fashion of cool music... he's very much part of the reaction which followed.
