Cool Jazz Jazz Piano Solo Series – Vol. 5

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(Jazz Piano Solos). 24 tunes from the ’50s and ’60s jazz cats who invented “cool”! Includes piano solo arrangements with chord names for: All Blues * Blue in Green * Con Alma * Django * Epistrophy * Jeru * Lullaby of Birdland * Nardis * So What * Stella by Starlight * Take Five * Waltz for Debby * and more!…

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List of songs:

All Blues
Background Music
A Ballad
Blue In Green
Cast Your Fate To The Wind
Con Alma
Conception
Crosscurrent
Django
Epistrophy
Ernie’s Blues
Five Brothers
Israel
Jambangle
Jeru
Killer Joe
Lullaby Of Birdland
Nardis
Off Minor
So What
Stella By Starlight
Take Five
Waltz For Debby

Browse in the Library:

Take Five by Paul Desmond (Jazz Piano Solo Series)

What is “Cool Jazz”?

On Wikipedia.

Cool jazz is a style of modern jazz music inspired by bebop and big band that arose in the United States after World War II. It is characterized by relaxed tempos and a lighter tone than that used in the fast and complex bebop style. Cool jazz often employs formal arrangements and incorporates elements of classical music. Broadly, the genre refers to a number of post-war jazz styles employing a more subdued approach than that of contemporaneous jazz idioms. As Paul Tanner, Maurice Gerow, and David Megill suggest, “the tonal sonorities of these conservative players could be compared to pastel colors, while the solos of [Dizzy] Gillespie and his followers could be compared to fiery red colors.”

The term cool started being applied to this music around 1953, when Capitol Records released the album Classics in Jazz: Cool and Quiet. Mark C. Gridley, writing in the All Music Guide to Jazz, identifies four overlapping sub-categories of cool jazz:

1. “Soft variants of bebop,” including the Miles Davis recordings that constitute Birth of the Cool; the complete works of the Modern Jazz Quartet; the output of Gerry Mulligan, especially his work with Chet Baker and Bob Brookmeyer; the music of Stan Kenton‘s side men during the late 1940s through the 1950s; and the works of George Shearing and Stan Getz.
2. The output of modern players who eschewed bebop in favor of advanced swing-era developments, including Lennie Tristano, Lee Konitz, and Warne Marsh; Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond; and performers such as Jimmy Giuffre and Dave Pell who were influenced by Count Basie and Lester Young‘s small-group music.
3. Musicians from either of the previous categories who were active in California from the 1940s through the 1960s, developing what came to be known as West Coast jazz.
4. “Exploratory music with a subdued effect by Teddy Charles, Chico Hamilton, John LaPorta, and their colleagues during the 1950s.”

Characteristics

Cool jazz emerged as a reaction to bop, and is characterized by more moderate tempos and “a more reflective attitude”. Ted Gioia and Lee Konitz have each identified cornetist Bix Beiderbecke and saxophonist Frankie Trumbauer as early progenitors of the cool aesthetic in jazz. Gioia cites Beiderbecke’s softening of jazz’s strong rhythmic impact in favor of maintaining melodic flow, while also employing complex techniques such as unusual harmonies and whole tone scales. Trumbauer, through “his smooth and seemingly effortless saxophone work,” greatly affected tenor saxophonist Lester Young, who prefigured – and influenced – cool jazz more than any other musician.

Young’s saxophone playing employed a light sound,^: in contrast to the “full-bodied” approach of players such as Coleman Hawkins. Young also had a tendency to play behind the beat, instead of driving it.^: He more strongly emphasized melodic development in his improvisation, rather than “hot” phrases or chord changes.^{: 684–685} While Young’s style initially alienated some observers, the cool school embraced it. (Young would also influence bebop through Charlie Parker‘s emulation of Young’s playing style.) Tanner, Gerow, and Megill point out that “cool developed gradually, as did previous styles.” In addition to Lester Young’s approach, cool had other antecedents:

Saxophonist Benny Carter underplayed his attacks, Teddy Wilson played the piano with a delicate touch, Benny Goodman stopped using the thick vibrato of Jimmy Noone and other clarinetists. Miles Davis’s solo on Charlie Parker’s “Chasin’ the Bird” in 1947 and John Lewis‘s piano solo on Dizzie Gillespie’s record of “‘Round Midnight” in 1948 anticipated the Cool Era.

Legacy

In 1959, The Dave Brubeck Quartet recorded Time Out, which reached No. 2 on the Billboard “Pop Albums” chart. The cool influence stretches into such later developments as bossa nova, modal jazz (especially in the form of Davis’s Kind of Blue (1959), and even free jazz (in the form of Jimmy Giuffre’s 1961–1962 trio).

Following their work on Birth of the Cool, Miles Davis and Gil Evans would again collaborate on albums such as Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess, and Sketches of Spain.

Some observers saw the subsequent hard bop style as a response to cool and West Coast jazz. Conversely, David H. Rosenthal sees the development of hard bop as a response to both a perceived decline in bebop and the rise of rhythm and blues. Shelly Manne suggested that cool jazz and hard bop simply reflected their respective geographic environments: the relaxed cool jazz style reflected a more relaxed lifestyle in California, while driving bop typified the New York scene.

Ted Gioia has noted that some of the artists associated with the ECM label during the 1970s are direct stylistic heirs of cool jazz. While these musicians may not sound similar to earlier cool artists, they share the same values:

clarity of expression; subtlety of meaning; a willingness to depart from the standard rhythms of hot jazz and learn from other genres of music; a preference for emotion rather than mere emoting; progressive ambitions and a tendency to experiment; above all, a dislike for bombast.

Gioia also identifies cool’s influence upon other idioms, such as new-age, minimalism, pop, folk, and world music.

Cool also inspired avant-garde jazz and, later, free jazz