Back Beats #1: Cool revisited
Wherein articles from the archive in which music and the literary find common currency earn a fresh airing
This piece, ‘Losing your cool’, first appeared in Words of Warner on April 8th, 2009
THERE WAS a very promising Arena documentary in the offing on BBC4 last Friday evening when the the subject of ‘Cool’ came under the microscope. Yet the account fell somewhat short for me. Rich in archive footage of the mid-century American city, the piece ultimately was light on substance, relied too much on over-extended passages of live jazz performance and frustrated with an irrelevant diversion onto the beaches of Rio de Janeiro.
Cool as a term, as a modus operandi, has both a lengthy heritage and a contemporary clout. It has been a complimentary adjective over several eras and remains, almost a decade into the new century, a ubiquitous synonym for ‘good’ among teens in the US and the UK. So its genealogy is well worth exploring.
But, while this stylish TV survey – an evocative soundtrack meshed atmospherically with largely monochromatic film stock – passingly acknowledged cool’s associations with James Dean and Elvis Presley, Marlon Brando and Jack Kerouac, its principal thesis rested on the argument that it was Miles Davis’ re-imagining of the frenetics of bebop, as the 1940s wound to a close, and his creative work over the subsequent 10 years that would actually construct our current understandings of cool.
Davis, between 1949’s The Birth of the Cool and 1959’s Kind of Blue, dispensed with much of the pent-up emotion that typified bop’s initial, bristling assault – the original high-octane innovations of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were emblematic – and instead sought an arm’s length detachment in his art.
In doing so he hoped to express, perhaps, both an existential certainty – the trumpeter had actually befriended the French novelist-philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in Paris – but also strike a note of dispassionate separation from the whirring, maybe deafening, engines of the world.
The followers of this particular brand of cool – and Davis had many musical disciples, black and white – proposed that while you should unquestionably recognise the profound problems that life posed – inequality and injustice, poverty and segregation, for example, even heartbreak – you should avoid getting too het up about them. Instead your confident assurance should rest on a steadfast stoicism.
To over-emote was almost to give in to the problem; a quiet, controlled introspection was preferred to gut-busting, vein-pumping outpourings: the cerebral should rule the visceral, the rational should trump the hysterical. As the black Beat poet LeRoi Jones stated in his 1963 jazz history Blues People: ‘To be cool was, in its most accessible meaning, to be calm, even unimpressed, by what horror the world might daily propose.’
In many ways, the premises of this aesthetic cool owed something to the sleek and unembroidered lines of modernism, a movement that, on many of its fronts, had discharged ornament in favour of the clean line, and the sounds of post-war jazz distilled something of the taut yet restrained energy present in the art and architecture of at the centre of the twentieth-century’s long sweep.
Yet, my main problem with the programme was not that Davis and his cool school pupils should be identified as part of this history but that it failed to report the longer evolution of this cultural state of mind.
Certainly in Dick Pountain and David Robins’ 2000 volume Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude, the much earlier pre-slavery, African antecedents of cool are well investigated and should, I feel, have found a more prominent place within this small-screen account.
But the final drift towards the beaches of Brazil, to Jobim, Gilberto and bossa nova, as the closing section of the piece unfolded was just a non sequitur. The fascinating muso-political machinations of Rio and Sao Paolo are, of course, well worth addressing – the same channel’s quite recent four-part series on contemporary Brazil covered these matters in admirable detail.
However, the attention ought to have remained on the ethos of cool in the US – more on the Beats, the punks, on hip hop, those subcultures shaped by the wider ideology of urban bohemia – rather than dilute the narrative with an exotic diversion to the Copacabana. By doing so, the documentary undermined its cause, trying to cover rather too much in its hour-long format. More, in this instance, was unfortunately less.