Birth of The Cool - Reception and Aftermath

Reception and Aftermath

The band's original debut at the Royal Roost was positive but reserved reactions. Count Basie, the Roost's headliner during the Nonet's brief tenure, however, was more open to the groups sound, saying, "Those slow things sounded strange and good. I didn't always know what they were doing, but I listened, and I liked it." Winthrop Sargeant, classical music critic at The New Yorker, compared the band's sound to the work of an "impressionist composer with a great sense of aural poetry and a very fastidious feeling for tone color. . . The music sounds more like that of a new Maurice Ravel than it does like jazz . . . it is not really jazz." Though he did not recognize the record as jazz, Sargeant acknowledged that he found the record "charming and exciting". In the short term the reaction to the band was little to none, but in the long term the albums effects have been great and lasting. The album has been credited with starting the cool jazz movement as well as creating a new and viable alternative to bebop In 1957, after the release of the full Birth of the Cool, Down Beat magazine wrote that Birth of the Cool " deeply one important direction of modern chamber jazz." Several tunes from the album, such as Carisi's "Israel", have gone on to become jazz standards.

Many members of the Miles Davis Nonet went on to have successful careers in cool jazz, notably Gerry Mulligan and John Lewis. Mulligan moved to California and joined forces with trumpeter Chet Baker in a piano-less quartet, before creating his Concert Jazz Band Lewis would become music director of the Modern Jazz Quartet, which would become one of the most influential cool jazz groups. Evans would go on to collaborate with Davis again on the Davis albums Miles Ahead and Sketches of Spain. Following Birth of the Cool, Miles Davis did not return to cool jazz, instead going to play hard bop, and eventually spearheading modal jazz.