Birth of the Cool
Beat, Bebop, and the American Avant Garde
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher 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.
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 1940s--where it primarily took the form of bebop, pre-Beat, Beat and Abstract Expressionism--through 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 on--bad 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.