Product Description

Miles Davis and Juliette Greco, Jackson Pollock and Jack Kerouac, Marlon Brando and Bob Dylan and William Burroughs.

What do all these people have in common? Fame, of course, and undeniable talent. But most of all, they were cool.

Birth of the Cool is a stunningly illustrated, brilliantly written cultural history of the American avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s -- the decades in which cool was born. From intimate interviews with cool icons like poet Allen Ginsberg, bop saxophonist Jackie McLean, and Living Theatre cofounder Judith Malina, award-winning journalist and poet Lewis MacAdams extracts the essence of cool. Taking us inside the most influential and experimental art movements of the twentieth century -- from the Harlem jazz joints where Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker invented bebop to the back room at Max's Kansas City when Andy Warhol was holding court to backstage at the Newport Folk Festival the night Bob Dylan went electric, from Surrealism to the Black Mountain School to Zen -- MacAdams traces the evolution of cool from the very fringes of society to the mainstream.

Born of World War II, raised on atomic-age paranoia, cast out of the culture by the realities of racism and the insanity of the Cold War, cool is now, perversely, as conventional as you can get. Allen Ginsberg suited up for Gap ads. Volvo appropriated a phrase from Jack Kerouac's On the Road for its TV commercials. How one became the other is a terrific story, and it is presented here in a gorgeous package, rich with the coolest photographs of the black-and-white era from Robert Doisneau, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray, and many others.

Drawing a direct line between Lester Young wearing his pork-pie hat and his crepe-sole shoes staring out his hotel window at Birdland to the author's three-year-old daughter saying "cool" while watching a Scooby-Doo cartoon at the cusp of a new millennium, Birth of the Cool is a cool book about a hot subject...maybe even the coolest book ever.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #114782 in Books
• Published on: 2001-02-05
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Amazon.com
Lewis MacAdams says it bluntly in his book's preface: "Anybody trying to define 'cool' quickly comes up against cool's quicksilver nature. As soon as anything is cool, its cool starts to vaporize." With that, he still manages to weave a complex ode to all forms of cool in The Birth of Cool, a book that swings through the highs and lows of bebop and beat without ever losing its intrinsic coolness. MacAdams's background as a poet and film historian enables him to smoothly blend personal histories, public awareness, and political context into a fascinating exploration of the many facets of cool. He begins with the individuals who created bebop: Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bill Evans, Billy Eckstine, and Thelonious Monk. Relatively minor incidents, like Gillespie stabbing Cab Calloway in the butt with a carpet cutter, are played against a larger framework of astonishing new works that Parker and Gillespie created and the enormous cultural changes brought about by these few folks. As the story moves forward into the 1950s, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Arshile Gorky and the beginnings of modern art are examined. Pollock's comment that "technique is just a means of arriving at a statement" seems like something that could have come from any of the artists, musicians, or writers covered in this book. The early years of the Beats get surprisingly little coverage, beginning with William S. Burroughs being "born weird" and ending with the accidental death of Joan Vollmer. The lives of Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Neal Cassady are returned to in later chapters that cover the introduction and adoption of Zen and the final blending of bebop and Beat into one inseparable cultural unit.

With numerous photos and pleasantly glossy paper, The Birth of Cool is a dense book that is both entertaining and depressing. MacAdams has managed an homage to cool that temporarily conquers that "quicksilver nature" and gives us a lasting look at a nearly indefinable era. --Jill Lightner

From Publishers Weekly
Tracing the inception and progression of an artistic movement via a series of fluid portraits, MacAdams delivers a fascinating study of the subcommunities comprising the 20th-century phenomenon of cool. A prot?g? of the movement and a writer for Rolling Stone and LA Weekly, MacAdams discusses cool's journey from the avant-garde underground in the 1940sAwhere it primarily took the form of bebop, pre-Beat, Beat and Abstract ExpressionismAthrough its mainstreaming during the folk and pop-culture movements spearheaded by Dylan and Warhol. Along the way, he splices in bits of the theory of cool, considers the political sensibilities of the cultural vanguard and displays a sweeping, nuanced knowledge of his subject. Particularly strong is his account of how the movement became politicized early in the Cold War when, in protest against air raid drills, New York theater folk joined activists in refusing the role of Cold Warrior demanded of every citizen. MacAdams's lively prose does occasionally fall prey to the lure of hackneyed phrasing. Partially as a result of his repetition of the word "cool," the narrative sometimes seems slightly sloppy, na?ve, uncool. Other disappointments concern certain omissions, most glaringly in the field of experimental writing and women. (He mentions Billie Holiday and Juliette Greco, shows their pictures and moves onAbad form for a work that endeavors to represent the underrepresented.) Overall, though, MacAdams's rendering of cool culture fleshes out the broad picture with insider details that should attract jazz and painting fans in the mood for an illuminating, fun read. Photos. (Feb.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
Jann Wennereditor and founder of Rolling StoneI've always been a fan of Lewis MacAdams's writing. He brings the eye and ear of a poet and the heart of a journalist to his work.

Kurt LoderMTVI loved this book, which is so redolent of the periods it covers. The history of hip, from the beginning. Lewis MacAdams connects all the dots -- Monk and Miles, Burroughs and the Beats, Pollock and Sartre and Warhol and Dylan -- in this vivid chronicle of the birth of a new postwar culture, high on art and Zen and heroin, too. The saga of the crazed jazz conguero Chano Pozo is worth the price of purchase alone.

Andrei CodrescuNPR commentator and author of MessiahThe elusive quality of "cool" needed a poet to keep it still long enough to glimpse its awesome pervasiveness. For generations of Americans, "cool" has been the alternative to hypocrisy, the creative challenge to boredom, the hallmark of distinction. What began as the search for an attitude of defiance and beauty on the part of some Black musicians became a veritable "cool rush" in the last decades. Lewis MacAdams charts the complex flows of this cultural force from its underground roots to its present ubiquitousness. This is a cool book written by one of America's coolest poets.

Jim Carrollauthor of The Basketball DiariesThis book's a dead-on hit. MacAdams combines a reporter's sense for research with a poet's voice. It's not just the facts he comes up with, but that the facts are so entertaining.

Rubin Martinezauthor of The Other Side: Notes from the New L.A., Mexico City, and Beyond and associate editor of Pacific News ServiceBirth of the Cool reads great, and connects dots that somehow have become disconnected over time. From the ethereal breath of jazz players to the inimitable gait of zoot suiters, from beatific bards searching for satori to pop musicians hiding their pain behind the baddest of shades, cool is not just highest sign of American signage; it is the very house of our being. Cool smashes the border between high and low art, cuts across the lines of race and class, provides a link between peoples and places with little in common other than their desire to reimagine themselves through style and create a language for that which cannot be spoken. MacAdams's cool prose -- an epic yet restrained ode -- delivers the aesthetic history of twentieth-century America and prepares us for the cool to come.

Robert Farris ThompsonProfessor of History of Art at Yale UniversityThe Doctor of Cool-ology's text is in and it's witty, informative, and rich -- essential reading for anyone following American popular culture.

Customer Reviews

Slapdash in details but generally on the money thematically
Reviews of this book on this site have characterized it as sloppy, uninformed, and even erroneous in certain historical details. I would have to agree that the book is breezy at times, and at its worst is slapdash in its treatment of what is probably one of the most important cultural phenomena of the past fifty to sixty years, i.e., the development and growth of the idea of "cool" as a form of cultural currency. Despite the misgivings, though, I think this book's themes are right on the money. Read in conjunction with other more attentive books about the phenomenon in question (and/or the historical period), this book can be a door-opener or a good supplement, depending on your point of view.

Don't Bother Me With Facts, Can't You See I'm Creating?
I do not trust Lewis MacAdams. In a book brimming with details, he gets too many wrong. What's worse, because he's cool, he doesn't care. Asked by radio journalist Paul DeRienzo if he'd watched Ken Burns's monumental documentary Jazz, MacAdams confessed, "I haven't watched the bebop section because I was afraid I'd see something that showed that I said something wrong." This preference for ignorance over knowledge typifies what the author himself conceived as "a coffee-table book."

The slipshod approach begins on the first page of his Preface, where MacAdams discusses the namesake of this book, Miles Davis's seminal 1949-1950 jazz recording sessions. MacAdams maintains this 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." Impressive, huh? Except it's not true.

What set these landmark recordings apart was their deliberate avoidance of both the hysteria of bop and the earthiness of blues. Instead, thoughtful, restrained solos were meticulously couched within unhurried, impressionistic orchestrations (even on "Israel," the album's only 12-bar blues). And as for the "intellectual advances of the black avant-garde," that's just plain silly. Most of the musicians, arrangers, and composers involved were white.

MacAdams also misidentifies Denzil Best as the drummer on Birth of the Cool, and adds the scurrilous misinformation that Best OD'ed on heroin. Frederick J. Spencer, M.D., in his book Jazz and Death, reports Denzil Best suffered from a bone disease and died in hospital after fracturing his skull in a fall. Yet because OD'ing on heroin better suits MacAdams's histrionic purpose, he concocts a seamier demise.

MacAdams takes similarly erring aim at saxophonist Lester Young, whose "Fu Manchu mustache and trademark porkpie hat were pieces of a mask that hid many things." Sax Rohmer's fictional fiend is usually depicted with mustaches extending down each side of his face, right? Yet in the dozens of photographs or album art I've seen of Lester Young, there are no such extensions; his neatly trimmed mustache always terminates at the corners of his mouth. Unable to cite even one of the "many things" that were allegedly hidden by Lester's "mask," MacAdams deviously lengthens Lester's mustache to make him appear more mysterious, like a schoolboy with a crayon defacing Mona Lisa.

But wait, he's not done. "To most of the world," writes MacAdams, "Young appeared unruffled and fastidious." MacAdams does not reveal how he divines what most of the world perceived, nor does he explain his implication that said image was deceptive. To the contrary, the full-page photo of Young in this book shows a calm, immaculately groomed, nattily attired gentleman. Apparently when mere facts do not satisfy his narrative needs, MacAdams exercises poetic license and makes things up.

For all-around erroneousness, however, nothing compares with MacAdams's assault on organized crime. First he jumbles the birth name of Salvatore Lucania with that legendary hoodlum's Americanized moniker Charles ("Lucky") Luciano and emerges with Charles Lucania, which is wrong on both counts. Then MacAdams contends the gangster was deported to Sicily "in the late '30s," which also is false.

Undeterred, MacAdams identifies the man who toppled Luciano, Thomas Dewey, as New York State Attorney General. Actually, Dewey was appointed special prosecutor in 1935 and elected New York County D.A. in 1937; he was never State A.G.

Still not satisfied, MacAdams asserts that after a gubernatorial pardon, "Lucky returned to the States." In reality, Luciano never left, confined since his 1936 conviction to prison for 30-50 years. In 1946, he was pardoned expressly for the purpose of deportation FROM the United States, sailed aboard the dilapidated Liberty ship SS Laura Keene, and never returned. The nearest he ever got was Cuba, which at least is closer than MacAdams gets to the truth.

Lewis MacAdams's inattention to detail bothers me. I know, I know, don't sweat the small stuff. But if you can't trust somebody on little things, how can you rely on him for the Big Picture? What makes me nervous is that the errors above are just the ones I caught. In his haste to publish this book, how many other mistakes did he make?

Maybe I'm old fashioned. Perhaps nowadays it's cool to mangle history, situate people where they weren't, misspell names, misrepresent statistics, misstate events, even defame the dead. Sure, what the hell, untruth is fine, as long as you're cool about it. And by that yardstick, Lewis MacAdams is cool, man, cool.

Shallow and somewhat bland...
I was hoping for some kind of in-depth discussion of cool and its history in the 20th century, but this is more a high-school textbook treatment of cool.

So-and-so was cool and this is why he was cool. And then so-and-so was cool and this why she was cool. On and on. A few interesting spots, and a quick introduction to some of the major figures in jazz and art, but little more.