Birth Of The Cool Beat, Bebop, and the American Avant Garde

by MacAdams, Lewis

• ISBN13: 9780684813547
• ISBN10: 0684813548
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-02-05
• Publisher: Free Press

Summary

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 Coolis 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'sOn the Roadfor 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 Coolis a cool book about a hot subject...maybe even the coolest book ever.

Author Biography

A two-time winner of the World Heavyweight Poetry Championship, Lewis MacAdams is the author of ten books of poetry, a film documentarian (What Happened to Kerouac?, Eric Bogosian's FunHouse, and The Battle of the Bards), and an award-winning writer for Rolling Stone, Actuel, Los Angeles Times Magazine, and L.A. Weekly, among many others. Born in West Texas, MacAdams graduated from Princeton in 1966 but got most of his education following beat poet Gregory Corso around the Village and the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He lives with his wife and two children in Los Angeles.

Table of Contents

Preface	11	(20)
A Cooler World
The Essence of Cool
A Cool Revolution
The Capital of the World
The Uncoolest Thing in the World	31	(44)
``Bird Was Bebop's Spirit...''
``...Dizzy Was Its Head and Its Hands''
Minton's University of Bebop
Groovin' High
``Heroin Was Our Badge''
The Very Architecture of Cool
The Uncoolest Thing in the World
Breaking the Ice	75	(34)
The Rank Outsider
A Hard Lesson in the Cool
``Let Paris Come to Me''
The Technician of Shock
``It Was a Stampede''
``Breaking the Ice''
Somewhere Where It's Cool	109	(36)
``This Guy Is the Heat''
A Parallel Universe
Somewhere Where It's Cool
The Furthest Thing from Cool
When Cool and Beat Were One
Very Uncool in Texas
Cool's Tragic Shadow
The Bodhisattvas of Cool	145	(38)
A Cool Revolution
``Understanding Came Later-or Not at All''
Silence
The Yen for Zen
Signaling Through the Flames	183	(32)
Growing Up Absurd
Cooler with a Saint
The White Negroes
Is This the Way Cool Passes from Black to White? Is This How Cool Enters the Mainstream?
``A Cool Play''
The Age of Cool	215	(54)
``Cool on Everything''
Struggling to Remain Cool
American Cool
Cool on Everything
References	269	(13)
Index	282