Birth of the Cool: Beat, Bebop, and the American Avant Garde

By Lewis MacAdams

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0684813548
• ISBN13: 9780684813547
• Release Date: February 2001
• Publisher: Free Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.73 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.4" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Cool is

This is a pretty engrossing book - if you think you know about "cool" check it out. Lewis puts together stuff in avery original manner and helps one to get a perspectiveon what cool is.The section on DT Suzuki and cool caught my attention.The chapter was called "The Bodhisattvas of Cool." Did you know that Siddartha means , "He who accomplishes his goals."The layout of the book is cool and the type changes so things stay cool.

what is cool?

There is a new commercial on the air right now for, of all things, the new domain .tv. It is simply a procession of images: a dog, a skier, a fat guy in a swimming pool. The voice-over is simply a guys saying "cool," ot "not "cool" whenever a new image is revealed. as I watched it, I couldn't help but think, "what the hell happened to cool." When pretty much everything is cool, nothing is. Lewis MacAdams' book is thus pretty timely. He takes us back to the guys who really were cool. They were outlaws, outside the mainstream. Most people thought they were freak, but they didn't care because they were cool. Anyone who has read Macadams' poetry or journalism is awaere of his talents. It is about time he put them to something larger.