Beat, Bebop, and the American Avant-Garde.
Miles Davis and Juliette Greco, Jackson Pollock and Jack Kerouac, Marlon Brando and Bob Dylan and Williams Burroughs. What do all these people have in common? Fame, or course, and undeniable talent. But most of all, they were cool.
This book is a stunningly illustrated and 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,a 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.
'Birth Of The Cool' is a cool book about a hot subject . . . maybe even the coolest book ever.
