NYJO: "Birth of the Cool"

About

It’s New York, 1949. The new, innovative, music known as bebop has everyone’s attention and a 23-year-old musician fresh from a 4-year stint in the band of one of the key innovators of that style, Charlie Parker, is looking to make a recording. In a decision that would become a hallmark of his career, he chooses to move away from what was expected and look in a completely different direction. The idea is to record music which, although still using the new modern harmonies, is gentler, more composed, thoughtful and swinging. To this end he gathers around him a group of 9 equally likeminded young musicians and composers. Amongst these are: baritone saxophonist/writer/arranger Gerry Mulligan, who was to go on to form the first pianoless quartet with trumpeter/singer Chet Baker; pianist/composer/arranger John Lewis who would go on to find international fame with his chamber jazz group MJQ; 22 year old alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, whose fluid, liquid, sound was to influence a whole generation of alto sax players, most notably Dave Brubecks’s sax player Paul Desmond, who wrote the iconic “Take 5” and Gil Evans, the composer/arranger whose vision, along with Mulligan’s, was the driving force behind the whole project and who himself would later find international recognition with a series of studio albums including “Sketches of Spain”.