[Dixielandjazz] Cool - ish

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

>From the pseuds who with BBC connivance brought "Swing" to British screens there has now been "Cool"

It's all rather reminiscent of the misuse of "Cultural Studies", a sub-department which has grown up within university literature depts. which used to discuss meaning, where one reads that "we" (cough!) "write ourselves", and finds that the assumptions of various novelists etc. and what they took for granted somehow amounted to a determining influence on a contemporary culture (forget that a relatively small number of people who read the books!).   

Now the good thing about "Coo-ool" as contrasted with "Swinggg" was that while the same photo of King Oliver popped up onscreen this time the figure wasn't identified as Louis Armstrong but actually as Oliver himself. There was also a 1930s bit of moving footage (without soundtrack) of Louis, properly identified. 
We even got proper, complete clips of performances, Peterson Brown Thigpen doing "Con Alma" and some MJQ, including Bach with Laurindo Almeida on guitar. Brubeck too! 

These were the shapers of culture. "Cool" meant that Gerry Mulligan influenced the clothes people affected, and Miles Davis was the successor of Bolden, Oliver, Louis, Roy & Diz, though Diz remained the godfather of jazz.  Somehow.  


Jazzmen were really influential, and cool became  (well, the word "cool" became as much an expression of the ignorance of the film fabricators as "swing" had done in the preceding film. Presumably Art Blakey was thrashing away in silence along with lots of other people who were not officially cool . . .  but apparently although Parker himself wasn't a maker of cool music he was adored by the coolmakers, and Kerouac (what was he on at the time?) said that every Parker solo really repeats the proposition "all is well with the world". I'll resist the temptation to say, "you could have fooled me."  
How were the BBC fooled into putting out this latest adolescent scrapbook as a documentary film?    
Probably too easily. 
Or was this a device by some actually musical people to get a whole number by Art Farmer and the uncredited Jim Hall broadcast too, as well as the other items.  Swing didn't get such an airing ....