Cool Jazz: Characteristics, History, Key Musicians and Albums

Cool jazz is a style of modern jazz that took shape in the late 1940s as a calmer alternative to bebop and flourished through the 1950s. It is marked by moderate tempos, a light tone with little vibrato, carefully arranged ensemble writing and ideas borrowed from classical music. Its starting point is usually traced to the nonet led by Miles Davis, whose 1949 and 1950 recordings for Capitol were collected in 1957 as Birth of the Cool; its best-known players include Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Lee Konitz, Dave Brubeck, Paul Desmond, Stan Getz and the Modern Jazz Quartet.

Cool Jazz Characteristics

Cool jazz kept bebop’s modern harmony but delivered it more softly. The textbook authors Paul Tanner, Maurice Gerow and David Megill compared the cool players’ sound to pastel colors and Dizzy Gillespie’s solos to fiery red. What to listen for:

• Relaxed tempos. Moderate speeds and an unhurried, reflective mood.
• A light tone with little vibrato. Lee Konitz explained his own sound to The Wall Street Journal in 2013: “I knew and loved Charlie Parker and copied his bebop solos like everyone else. But I didn’t want to sound like him. So I used almost no vibrato and played mostly in the higher register.”
• Arrangement and counterpoint. Written ensemble passages carry as much weight as the solos. Horns are blended like a choir instead of being set against each other in riffing sections, and the Modern Jazz Quartet played fugues whose expositions were improvised.
• Unusual instruments. French horn and tuba in the Davis nonet, vibraphone in the Modern Jazz Quartet, cello (Fred Katz) in Chico Hamilton’s group.
• Fewer blues inflections. Konitz and Paul Desmond developed styles that owed little to Charlie Parker or his blues phrasing.
• Room to experiment. Gerry Mulligan’s quartet worked without a piano, Dave Brubeck’s quartet recorded in 5/4 and 9/8, and in 1949 Lennie Tristano’s group made the first free group improvisations on record.

Cool Jazz vs Bebop vs Smooth Jazz

Cool jazz and smooth jazz are often confused because both sound soft. Cool jazz is an improvised small-group and ensemble style that grew directly out of bebop. Smooth jazz is a commercially oriented crossover style that mixes jazz with R&B, funk and pop; the term itself is traced to radio marketing and a late-1980s industry focus group.

How Cool Jazz Began

Its main forerunner was tenor saxophonist Lester Young, whose light sound, habit of playing behind the beat and focus on melodic development made him, in Tanner, Gerow and Megill’s view, the musician who prefigured and influenced cool jazz more than any other. A second root was Claude Thornhill’s orchestra, known for its impressionistic style, its French horns and tuba, and non-vibrato playing. Between 1946 and 1949 arranger Gil Evans, baritone saxophonist and arranger Gerry Mulligan and alto saxophonist Lee Konitz all worked for Thornhill. A third was Woody Herman’s 1947 band, whose “Four Brothers” saxophone section, named after a Jimmy Giuffre tune, included Stan Getz.

Evans’s basement apartment on West 55th Street in Manhattan became a meeting place for young musicians, and out of those gatherings came the nine-piece band Davis formed in 1948: trumpet, trombone, French horn, tuba, alto and baritone saxophones, piano, bass and drums, with arrangements by Evans, Mulligan, John Lewis and John Carisi. During a two-week engagement at the Royal Roost in September 1948, producer Pete Rugolo heard the band and signed it to Capitol. The nonet recorded twelve pieces at WOR Studio in New York on January 21 and April 22, 1949, and March 9, 1950, most of them issued at first as 78 rpm singles. Capitol was disappointed with the sales, but in 1957 it collected eleven of the sides on an LP titled Birth of the Cool. The Wikipedia article on the album lists the changing personnel, including French horn players Junior Collins, Sandy Siegelstein and Gunther Schuller and tuba player Bill Barber.

The word cool came after the music. It began to be applied to this style around 1953, when Capitol released the album Classics in Jazz: Cool and Quiet, and Mulligan said the nonet had simply been meant as a good rehearsal band to write for, not as a break with bebop.

Cool Jazz in New York and on the West Coast

In New York, pianist Lennie Tristano and his students Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh developed a more abstract branch built on long melodic lines and interweaving rhythms. In 1949 his group recorded “Intuition” and “Digression,” the first free group improvisations on record: only the order of entrances was planned, with no set key, tempo, harmony or melody. The nonet’s pianist John Lewis (1920 to 2001) became musical director of the Modern Jazz Quartet, formed in 1952 with Milt Jackson on vibraphone, Percy Heath on bass and Kenny Clarke on drums (Connie Kay from 1955). Under Lewis, whose “Vendome” was the group’s first try at fugal counterpoint, the MJQ used Baroque-inspired counterpoint while keeping a strong blues feel, performed in tuxedos and was one of the first small jazz groups to play concert halls rather than nightclubs.

In California the style became known as West Coast jazz. In the early 1950s Mulligan moved to Los Angeles and, at the club The Haig, formed a quartet without piano with trumpeter Chet Baker and drummer Chico Hamilton; free of piano chords, trumpet and baritone saxophone improvised in counterpoint, and the 1952 recordings for the new Pacific Jazz label sold well. Former members of the Stan Kenton and Woody Herman bands settled in the city, and trumpeter Shorty Rogers, drummer Shelly Manne and saxophonist Jimmy Giuffre played in bassist Howard Rumsey’s Lighthouse All-Stars at the Lighthouse Café in Hermosa Beach, the center of the scene in 1952 and 1953. Pacific Jazz and Contemporary became its best-known labels. In the Bay Area, pianist Dave Brubeck formed his quartet with alto saxophonist Paul Desmond in 1951.

West Coast jazz is often treated as a subgenre of cool jazz, but the two are not identical. The cool sound was born in New York, where Lester Young, Thornhill and Davis were based, and Los Angeles also had harder-swinging bands, such as the Clifford Brown and Max Roach quintet. Race shaped the scene. The Los Angeles jazz musicians with steady studio work were mostly white, which led to accusations that the studios excluded Black players, and the city’s segregated musicians’ union locals were integrated only in the early 1950s. Some critics dismissed West Coast jazz as cerebral or lacking swing partly because many of its stars were white, although Black musicians such as John Lewis, Chico Hamilton, Curtis Counce, Harold Land and Hampton Hawes played in the style. When Time put Brubeck on its cover in November 1954, the second jazz musician after Louis Armstrong, he felt Duke Ellington deserved it more and believed he had been chosen because he was white.

Cool Jazz Musicians to Know

• Miles Davis (trumpet, 1926 to 1991). Led the nonet, then moved on to hard bop and modal jazz, but kept working with Gil Evans on Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess and Sketches of Spain.
• Gil Evans (arranger, 1912 to 1988). Toronto-born orchestrator who arranged “Boplicity” (which he wrote with Davis) and “Moon Dreams” for the nonet.
• Gerry Mulligan (baritone saxophone, 1927 to 1996). Wrote and arranged “Jeru,” “Venus de Milo” and “Rocker” for the nonet, led the quartet with Baker and later a tentet based on the nonet idea; his “Walkin’ Shoes” became a standard. His official biography covers his later work, including the Concert Jazz Band he formed in 1960.
• Chet Baker (trumpet and vocals, 1929 to 1988). Nicknamed the “Prince of Cool,” he won readers’ polls in DownBeat and Metronome ahead of Miles Davis and Clifford Brown.
• Lennie Tristano (piano, 1919 to 1978), Lee Konitz (alto saxophone, 1927 to 2020) and Warne Marsh (tenor saxophone, 1927 to 1987). The core of the New York school; Konitz also played on all three nonet sessions. More in the Wikipedia biography of Tristano.
• Dave Brubeck (piano, 1920 to 2012) and Paul Desmond (alto saxophone, 1924 to 1977). Brubeck had studied with Darius Milhaud; his quartet built its following on college concerts such as Jazz at Oberlin (recorded March 1953). Desmond, who said he wanted his alto to sound like a dry martini, composed “Take Five.” Brubeck received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996.
• Stan Getz (tenor saxophone, 1927 to 1991). Known as “The Sound” for a warm, lyrical tone modeled on Lester Young; with guitarist Charlie Byrd he recorded Jazz Samba (1962), whose version of “Desafinado” became a hit and helped introduce bossa nova in the US. See our list of important jazz saxophonists.

Essential Cool Jazz Albums

Seven records, roughly in order of recording. For a wider shelf, see our jazz albums for beginners.

1. Miles Davis, Birth of the Cool (Capitol, 1957; recorded 1949 and 1950). The nonet sides. Hear first: “Jeru,” “Boplicity,” “Moon Dreams.”
2. Lee Konitz, Subconscious-Lee (Prestige, 1955). Collects his first recordings as a leader, begun in 1949.
3. Gerry Mulligan Quartet, The Original Quartet with Chet Baker (Blue Note, 1998). The pianoless quartet’s 1952 and 1953 Pacific Jazz recordings, the clearest example of the style’s open, counterpoint-driven sound.
4. Chet Baker, Chet Baker Sings (Pacific Jazz, 1954). His first vocal album, inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2001. Hear first: “My Funny Valentine,” “The Thrill Is Gone.”
5. Modern Jazz Quartet, Django (Prestige, 1956). Recorded between 1953 and 1955 with Kenny Clarke on drums; the title piece is Lewis’s tribute to guitarist Django Reinhardt. Hear first: “Django,” “Autumn in New York.”
6. Dave Brubeck Quartet, Time Out (Columbia, 1959). Original compositions built around unusual time signatures; it reached No. 2 on the Billboard album chart, became the first jazz album to sell a million copies and was added to the National Recording Registry in 2005. Hear first: “Take Five” (5/4), “Blue Rondo à la Turk” (9/8).
7. Stan Getz and João Gilberto, Getz/Gilberto (Verve, 1964). Recorded in March 1963 with Antônio Carlos Jobim on piano; it won the Grammy for Album of the Year, and “The Girl from Ipanema” won Record of the Year. Hear first: “The Girl from Ipanema,” “Corcovado.”

What Came After Cool Jazz

By the mid-1950s the energy in small-group jazz had moved to hard bop, which some observers saw as a response to cool and West Coast jazz (historian David H. Rosenthal points instead to the rise of rhythm and blues and a perceived decline in bebop). Cool ideas lived on in several directions. Gunther Schuller, who had played French horn on the nonet’s final session, coined the term third stream in a 1957 lecture at Brandeis University for music between jazz and classical composition. Getz’s bossa nova records carried the cool sound into the 1960s. Davis’s Kind of Blue (Columbia, 1959) is the best-known example of how cool ideas fed into modal jazz, and Giuffre’s 1961 trio with Paul Bley and Steve Swallow took quiet, chamber-like playing toward free improvisation. Critic Ted Gioia counts some 1970s artists on the ECM label, founded in Munich in 1969, as direct heirs of cool jazz for their clarity, subtlety and dislike of bombast. For where cool sits among the other styles, see our overview of the main types of jazz.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was the pioneer of cool jazz?

Miles Davis is usually named, because the 1949 and 1950 recordings of his nonet, collected as Birth of the Cool, are seen as the starting point of the style; arrangers Gil Evans and Gerry Mulligan shaped that sound. Tenor saxophonist Lester Young, with his light tone and relaxed phrasing, is regarded as its most important forerunner.

What is the difference between cool jazz and smooth jazz?

Cool jazz is an improvised style of the late 1940s and 1950s that grew out of bebop, played by musicians such as Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan and Dave Brubeck. Smooth jazz is a commercially oriented crossover style that grew out of 1970s fusion, R&B and pop, became a radio format in the 1980s and 1990s, and usually puts a saxophone or guitar melody over programmed rhythms.

Is cool jazz the same as West Coast jazz?

Not exactly. West Coast jazz is the 1950s scene in Los Angeles and San Francisco, often treated as a subgenre of cool jazz, with Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Shorty Rogers, Shelly Manne and Dave Brubeck. Cool jazz began earlier in New York with the Miles Davis nonet and Lennie Tristano’s circle, and the Modern Jazz Quartet also came out of New York.

Why is it called cool jazz?

The name describes the music’s calm, unhurried mood compared with the heat of bebop. The label came after the music: it began to be used around 1953, when Capitol Records released an album called Classics in Jazz: Cool and Quiet, and Gerry Mulligan said the Davis nonet was never planned as a break with bebop.

What are the main characteristics of cool jazz?

Moderate tempos, a light tone with little vibrato, arranged ensemble passages and counterpoint, a reflective rather than aggressive mood, and borrowings from classical music. Many groups used unusual instruments such as French horn, tuba, vibraphone or cello, and some left out the piano.