Cool and Hot

"Cool" and "hot" are, on the surface, very simplistic descriptive terms. But in the jazz world, they take on deeper meanings. Consider this excerpt from Wikipedia, describing my latest obsession, "hard bop":

Hard bop was developed in the mid-1950s, partly in response to the vogue for cool jazz that became popular in the early 1950s. A simplistic definition states that "cool jazz", or "west coast jazz", emphasized the more European elements of the music, deriving to a great extent from the "chamber jazz" experiments of the Miles Davis nonet and Dave Brubeck's various quartets, while hard bop brought the church and gospel music back into jazz, emphasizing the African elements.

The definition of cool in this context isn't what I would expect. When you think of cool, don't you envision snapping fingers, Chet Baker's chilly vocals or Miles' muted trumpet, a sinuous bass line? Instead, this description describes cool jazz as intellectual, studied, and, well, white. The contrast between cool jazz and hard bop is one I feel strongly today. The serious jazz is either formulaic to a fault or intellectual to the point of sucking the gospel/blues spirit from the music. Or, even worse, is mired in atmospherics and borderline "new age." While I'm not calling for a rigid return to traditional jazz, I do find jazz that tosses the gospel/blues root out the window to be, well, not jazz, and less frequently what I want to listen to.

I mean, there's a lot of room to be intellectual and challenging within the framework! Such as, one of my latest finds (as always, new to me but I'm sure not new to many others):



"Hot" jazz, on the other hand, isn't the opposite of cool but a description from another era entirely. I'll save that for another post. But to sum up, I don't want to reject the "cool" entirely- an intellectual approach to music brings to fruition many great projects. But it is also too much at risk of losing the soul, the root that makes music music.

Gone too long from this record, and in the meantime have spelunked many discoveries. Number one of which: Yusef Lateef and his early experiments in melding Eastern sounds with jazz.



Blues for the Orient is an indicative track. The drums start out quiet, with a snaking rhythm with tambourine. The piano thrums in, with an aggressive drone. Then Lateef comes in, playing an oboe with mysterious long notes. A quiet tension holds the piece together, until it bursts into a swinging jazz rhythm, only to return to the East 12 bars later.

One of my favorite pieces of music has a similar sound: Duke Ellington's version of Tchiakovsky's Arabesque, which he calls Arabesque Cookie.



Spike Lee used it for a scene in Malcolm X where he enters a mosque in Africa and decides to convert to the Muslim faith. Lateef was also a Muslim convert, and I think you can hear his spirituality in his music. He's a professor of music, and he teaches his own theory of music which he calls Autophysiopsychic Music. He xplains it as music which comes from one's physical, mental, and spiritual self.

I can dig it.