Birth of the Cool
Publisher: Scribner
Published: March 4, 2002
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 288
ISBN-13: 9780743207782
Subjects: American studies; Popular culture; New York; USA; Postwar period, 1945 to c 2000; c 1945 to c 1960; c 1960 to c 1970; Cultural studies; Sociology
First sentence: 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-hand 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."