Summary Of The Historical Development Of Cool Jazz

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An Analysis of the Historical Origins and Development of the “Cool Jazz” Movement in Mid-20th Century America

This historical analysis defines the origins and the development of the “cool jazz” movement in the post-WWII era of United States history. The originations of “cool” begin with the mellow and more relaxed expression of jazz by Miles Davis, Chet Baker, and other musicians that defined a contrasting tonal approach to jazz than the fast-paced music of the Be-bop movement. Davis’ album Birth of the Cool defines the trend towards slower placed and more relaxed musical arrangements that were defined as “cool” in the counter culture of jazz music. The deviant aspects of “cool jazz’ also incorporate the subculture of heroine use and criminal behavior as part of a more mellow jazz culture. The late 1940s …show more content…

By the 1920s, though, cool is firmly fixed as an unambiguous term of approval and even reverence. In 1924, the singer Anna Lee Chisholm recorded “Cool Kind Daddy Blues.” In the early 1930s, Zora Neale Hurston, in her short story “The Gilded Six-Bits,” wrote of a male character: “And whut make it so cool, he got money 'cumulated. And womens give it all to 'im” (Vuolo para.10).
These early stages of “cool” culture in the African American community brought about a stable etymological word usage, which provided a foundation for the school of “cool jazz” to form at a later stage. Therefore, a combination of African American 19th century word uses for “cool” and the continued use of the word in popular musical and literary culture defined the “cool” in artistic communities. More so, the counter culture aspects of a deviant music scene also helped to enforce a popularized image of the “cool cat” in terms of a more mainstream musical expression in the early

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