In 1949 and 1950, a black, twenty-one-year-old trumpet player from East Saint Louis named Miles Davis, and a white, thirty-seven-year-old big-band arranger from Toronto named Gil Evans, working out of Evans’s windowless basement apartment behind a Chinese restaurant on Fifty-fifth Street in Manhattan, created a new kind of music—brass accented and smooth; then suddenly jagged and cut-to-the-chase, with in-a-hurry titles like “Boplicity” and “Move.” The music wed the sophistication of Duke Ellington with the break-neck tempos of bebop. It melded the blues with the intellectual advances of the black avant-garde. It was “slow and strange,” admitted big-band leader Count Basie, whose music was formed in an earlier era, but it was “good, real good.”
Davis and Evans brought in some of the best and most innovative young players in town, including Gerry Mulligan, Lee Konitz, and Max Roach, for a trio of recording sessions, which were released as a series of 78s. In 1957, eight of the tunes were reissued by Capitol Records as one of the first wave of twelve-inch LPs. Titled Birth of the Cool—the phrase came from Capitol arranger-conductor Pete Rugolo, who’d overseen the original sessions—the collection was, as jazz critic Pete Welding pointed out, “anything but cool. As anyone familiar with the music can attest, it possesses an abundance of focused emotional power.” Birth of the Cool came to symbolize the style and attitude of an era. And Miles Davis, with his “clean as a motherfucker” custom-tailored suits, his Picasso-like “cold flame,” his “take no prisoners” approach to the work, came to epitomize its art.
I think I heard the word “cool” for the first time when I was about eight years old—roughly 1952—while tuning in to Cat’s Caravan, a rhythm ’n’ blues show on WRR radio that came on after the Dallas Eagles baseball games. The host of the show was the old “coffee-drinkin’ nighthawk,” Jim Lowe, the “Cool Fool.” Every night, when Buddy Morrow shouted “All abooard for the night train!” I embarked on a journey into the life I wanted to live.
In November 1959, my sophomore year at St. Mark’s School of Texas, Life magazine published a story about “beatniks,” a term that had only recently been coined by San Francisco gossip columnist Herb Caen. The word combined “beat”—beatific, so beat-down as to be forced to give one’s ego, one’s pretensions of control, up to the flow—with Sputnik, the name of the first earth-orbiting satellite, which the Russians had launched in 1957. The Life profile was meant as a hit piece on William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Jack Kerouac, the beats’ best-known literary practitioners. “Undisciplined and slovenly amateurs,” the magazine sneered, “who have deluded themselves into believing that their lugubrious absurdities are art.” But to me, they seemed very cool.
Even in high school I could see through the corny media image that was already spreading about the idea of the “cool.” To me, the July 1960 Mad magazine parody “‘Beatnik’: The Magazine for Hipsters,” featuring brooding, bearded, huarache-shod bongo players at a coffeehouse poetry reading (snap, snap) was the exact opposite of what Kerouac and Ginsberg meant by “cool.” Decades later, Ginsberg was still putting down the so-called cool scene for being so negative that it didn’t even bother to create works of art. “They became junkies or businessmen,” he told me once. What did I mean, then, when I thought that the beats were cool? I had no idea. I just liked the feeling I got when I said the word. “Cool” meant not only approval, but kinship. It was a ticket out of the life I felt closing in all around me: it meant the path to a cooler world.
Where does “cool” come from? The Random House Dictionary of American Slang points to an 1825 reference in the English satirical publication Spy. A young Etonian is referred to as “a right cool [hence impudent, insolent, or daring] fish.” Most scholars point to an African-American derivation. In his pioneering African-American dictionary, Juba to Jive, Clarence Major finds the root of cool in the Mandingo word for “gone out” or, as we might say, “trippin’,” linking it to the hippies’ “far out” and the hipster’s “gone, man, gone.”