It's Hard to be Cool
Miles Style
In even the most conservative accounts of his life and music, 1955 is recognized as a watershed year in the career of Miles Davis.
By 1954, his peers had begun to take notice of the significance and weight carried in his unique voice—both as a soloist and composer, as exemplified on Birth of the Cool and Walkin’.
Still reeling from the death of Parker in July of 1955, the jazz community turned its collective sight to Newport, Rhode Island, where impresario George Wein had—for the second consecutive year—organized the Newport Jazz Festival.
A huge outdoor event with performances; workshops; discussion panels; and jam sessions all involving a great many of the most popular jazz musicians of the day, the Newport festival was, by no accident, set in one of the United States’ most highly- esteemed cultural centers. On the bill for one of the Sunday, July 17 performances was the newly reemerged and heroin- free Miles Davis, playing as part of all-star sextet.
Birth Of The Cool
The group, comprised of Davis on trumpet; Zoot Sims on tenor saxophone; Gerry Mulligan on baritone saxophone; Thelonious Monk on piano; Percy Heath on bass; and Connie Kay on drums, seems only to have come together on this one occasion to perform a series of bebop standards, which included “Hackensack,” “Now’s The Time,” (a tribute to Parker) and—perhaps most significantly for Davis—Monk’s “‘Round Midnight.”
