Cool jazz

The cool jazz is current of Jazz appeared in the Années 1950.

It should be admitted that the term is debatable and does not recover a precise style and that very different musics were seen labelled like “cool jazz” (of the experiments of Lennie Tristano with the traditional reminiscences of the Modern Jazz Four-bit byte and passing by the unclassable four-bit byte of Dave Brubeck). More than one true “style”, the “cool jazz” it is rather an approach calmer (“cool” = fresh) and more slackened jazz, breaking with the frenzy of the Bebop.

By tradition, one considers that the “cool jazz” was born in 1949 pennies the crook from the musicians gathered by Miles Davis to work out the music of its little nun (Gerry Mulligan, Gil Evans, John Carisi, John Lewis,…). The faces recorded for 78t by this formation (and gathered later on the album titrated “ Birth off the cool ”), the recordings of Gerry Mulligan with its four-bit byte or its tentet, certain discs in small formations of Shorty Rogers (“Modern sounds” for Capitol) are representative of this esthetics.

The music of the little nun of Miles Davis was in fact the adaptation to the modern jazz of concepts already exploited by the orchestra of Claude Thornhill (absence of vibrato, its felted, phrased little accentuated,…). One can even consider that this “cool” approach of the jazz was already present in musicians of the Twenties like Bix Beiderbecke and Frankie Trumbauer, or of the jazzmen of the Thirties like Lester Young.

The “cool jazz” is often associated with the movement “Jazz West Coast”, jazz played, in the Fifties, by the musicians (most of the time white) who exerted then in California and worked for the cinematographic studios.

The writers Beatnik S, in particular Jack Kerouac, were singers of this “style” of jazz.

Some famous representatives of the “cool jazz”

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