Another distinctive outgrowth of bebop, the cool jazz style came to prominence in the late ’40s and early ’50s. Cool jazz was lighter and less dissonant than bebop, and placed a greater emphasis on arrangements, while incorporating some of the pop and swing influences that bebop had avoided.
Although cool jazz was popularized by such white musicians as Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan, Paul Desmond and Stan Getz, a key cornerstone in the style’s creation was a series of 1949-1950 recordings by Miles Davis; those performances were subsequently collected on the album Birth of the Cool. Although the cool jazz style initially took root in New York, the style flourished on the west coast in the ’50s. The influence of cool jazz extended into such subsequent innovations as bossa nova and modal jazz; the latter style was pioneered on Davis’ 1959 classic Kind of Blue.
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