Cool Jazz

Cool jazz is the restrained, lyrical branch of modern jazz that emerged in the late 1940s as a reaction to the heat and speed of bebop. It favours soft dynamics, a light, vibrato-free tone, moderate tempos, and carefully written arrangements with counterpoint borrowed from classical music. Miles Davis's Birth of the Cool sessions, Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker's pianoless quartet, the Dave Brubeck Quartet and the Modern Jazz Quartet are its landmarks; on the West Coast in the 1950s it became known simply as West Coast jazz.

This guide covers where cool jazz came from, what it sounds like, the New York and California scenes, the records to start with and how it differs from hard bop. Curious how a quiet, brushed small group reads to an algorithm? Try a clip in our free AI music genre detector.

Cool jazz is modern jazz played with the temperature turned down. Its harmonic language comes from bebop — extended chords, substitutions, sophisticated standards — but its priorities are different. Instead of blazing tempos and dense, fast solos, cool jazz values space, a pure and often breathy tone, melodic lines that sit in the middle of the instrument's range, and arrangements in which instruments weave independent lines around one another.

Its ancestors are easy to hear. The tenor saxophonist Lester Young had shown in the 1930s that a jazz horn could swing with a light, floating sound rather than a big vibrato. The Claude Thornhill Orchestra of the 1940s, arranged partly by Gil Evans, used French horns, tuba and sustained, cloud-like voicings that sounded more like impressionist orchestral music than a swing band. Cool jazz took those colours into small-group modern jazz.

The word "cool" describes the mood, not a fixed rulebook, and many players moved freely between cool, bebop and later styles. Miles Davis, the figure most associated with its birth, spent the mid-1950s leading one of the great hard bop quintets and then pioneered modal jazz. But the cool sound — soft, intimate, arranged — became one of the defining sounds of 1950s America.

In the late 1940s a group of musicians gathered in Gil Evans's small basement apartment on West 55th Street in New York — among them Miles Davis, baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, pianist and composer John Lewis and alto saxophonist Lee Konitz. Out of those discussions came a nonet: trumpet, trombone, French horn, tuba, alto and baritone saxophones, piano, bass and drums. It played only briefly in public, at the Royal Roost in 1948, but recorded three sessions for Capitol in 1949 and 1950. Those sides were later collected on an LP titled Birth of the Cool (1957), which gave the movement its name in retrospect.

Another strand ran through the pianist Lennie Tristano and his students Lee Konitz and tenor saxophonist Warne Marsh, whose long, cool-toned, contrapuntal lines were an intellectual counterpart to bebop. Tristano's 1949 recordings also included early experiments in free collective improvisation.

The style found its largest audience in California. Gerry Mulligan moved to Los Angeles and in 1952 formed a pianoless quartet with trumpeter Chet Baker: without piano chords, the baritone and trumpet improvised in counterpoint over bass and drums. Their versions of "Bernie's Tune" and "My Funny Valentine" made Baker a star, and Chet Baker Sings (1954) added his soft, vibrato-light voice to the picture. Around them a Los Angeles scene of studio-trained players — Shorty Rogers, Shelly Manne, Art Pepper, Jimmy Giuffre, Bud Shank — recorded for labels such as Pacific Jazz and Contemporary, and "West Coast jazz" became a marketing category of its own.

Two of the most successful groups of the decade came from the cool aesthetic. The Modern Jazz Quartet — John Lewis, vibraphonist Milt Jackson, bassist Percy Heath and drummer Connie Kay (who replaced Kenny Clarke in 1955) — performed in formal dress and wrote fugues and suites alongside blues. The Dave Brubeck Quartet, with alto saxophonist Paul Desmond, toured college campuses and in 1959 released Time Out, whose Desmond composition "Take Five" in 5/4 became one of the best-selling jazz singles ever.

From the mid-1950s, the louder, blues-based hard bop took the critical spotlight, but the cool sound did not disappear. It flowed into Third Stream music, a term coined by Gunther Schuller in 1957 for the meeting of jazz and classical composition, into Miles Davis and Gil Evans's orchestral albums Miles Ahead (1957) and Sketches of Spain (1960), and — most influentially — into Brazil. Stan Getz's collaborations with João Gilberto and Antônio Carlos Jobim, above all Getz/Gilberto (1964), carried the cool jazz sensibility into bossa nova and onto the pop charts.

• Tempo: mostly slow to medium — ballads around 60–90 BPM, swingers around 120–180 BPM. Fast tunes exist, but the style is defined by its relaxed middle range.
• Tone: light, pure, often with little or no vibrato; alto and tenor saxophones sound airy rather than raspy, trumpets frequently play with a Harmon mute or in the middle register.
• Dynamics: quiet. Drummers often use brushes, and the ride cymbal is played lightly.
• Arrangement: written ensemble passages, counterpoint between two horns, unusual instrumental colours (French horn, tuba, flute, vibraphone, cello).
• Harmony: bebop's extended chords, with a fondness for lush voicings and classical devices such as fugue, canon and rondo.
• Metre: mostly 4/4, but cool and West Coast players were early experimenters with odd metres — "Take Five" in 5/4, Brubeck's "Blue Rondo à la Turk" in 9/8.
• Mood: introspective, lyrical, sometimes wistful; emotion through understatement.

Cool jazz is unusually open about instrumentation, because colour is part of the point:

• Alto saxophone — the central voice: Lee Konitz, Paul Desmond, Art Pepper, Bud Shank.
• Baritone saxophone — Gerry Mulligan made the low horn a lyrical, agile instrument.
• Trumpet — Chet Baker and Miles Davis, often in the middle register, sometimes muted.
• Tenor saxophone — Stan Getz, Zoot Sims and the "Four Brothers" sound of Woody Herman's band.
• French horn and tuba — the signature colours of the Birth of the Cool nonet.
• Vibraphone — Milt Jackson in the Modern Jazz Quartet; its soft, ringing attack suits the style.
• Clarinet and flute — Jimmy Giuffre and Bud Shank brought woodwinds back into modern jazz.
• Piano or no piano — Brubeck and John Lewis used it orchestrally; Mulligan famously did without it.
• Drums with brushes — Connie Kay, Shelly Manne and Joe Morello kept time quietly and precisely.

Recordings of the period, especially on the West Coast, tend to sound clean and spacious, with less room noise and a softer drum sound than New York hard bop sessions.

• New York cool — the Birth of the Cool circle and the Tristano school: Davis, Evans, Mulligan, Lewis, Konitz, Marsh.
• West Coast jazz — Los Angeles and San Francisco in the 1950s: Mulligan and Baker, Shorty Rogers, Shelly Manne, Art Pepper, Brubeck, the Contemporary and Pacific Jazz catalogues.
• Chamber jazz — the Modern Jazz Quartet and Jimmy Giuffre's trios, where written form and quiet interplay take over.
• Third Stream — Gunther Schuller and John Lewis's fusion of jazz and classical composition.
• Bossa nova and jazz samba — the Brazilian connection through Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd. See bossa nova.
• Later echoes — the hushed, spacious end of modern jazz, much of the ECM label's catalogue, and the lounge side of smooth jazz and easy listening all owe something to cool's restraint.

Where to start:

Against bebop, cool jazz shares the harmony but rejects the heat: slower, quieter, more arranged, less concerned with speed. Against hard bop, the contrast is almost total — hard bop turns up the blues, the drums and the tone; cool turns them down and brings in counterpoint.

The comparison listeners most often get wrong today is with smooth jazz. Both are relaxed and easy on the ear, but smooth jazz is a 1980s radio format built on electric bass, programmed or R&B-style drums, synthesisers and short, melody-led solos. Cool jazz is acoustic, swings in the traditional sense, and improvises over the full harmonic language of modern jazz. It is also distinct from modal jazz, though Kind of Blue's calm surface — and Bill Evans's piano — owe a great deal to the cool sensibility.

For a classifier, cool jazz is identifiable as jazz from the instruments: double bass, saxophone or trumpet, and a drummer keeping a swung pattern. What distinguishes it from its neighbours is mostly level and texture — lower loudness, softer transients from brushes, a smoother horn spectrum with less upper-harmonic bite, and sometimes vibraphone or French horn. Those are exactly the cues that also describe easy listening, lounge music and quiet modern jazz, which makes the boundary blurry.

Run a track through the Genre AI music genre detector and look at the runner-up labels, which tell you which neighbour the recording resembles most.

What is cool jazz?

What is the difference between cool jazz and West Coast jazz?

Is 'Take Five' cool jazz?

Why is it called Birth of the Cool?

Is cool jazz the same as smooth jazz?

How did cool jazz influence bossa nova?