Mad Men, Miles Davis and the Aesthetic of Cool

In short, Miles Davis was the personification of cool. Don Draper, not so much. The Notorious Ph.D. breaks it down for us.


story by the Root
written by Todd Boyd
photo by MilesDavis.com
 
Would it be proper to describe Mad Men as ''cool''? Well, yes and no, but before answering that question, let's ponder the often misunderstood properties of cool.


Cool has a history, believe it or not. It is the lack of historical knowledge about cool's origins that has allowed for the rampant and unfettered exploitation of this concept and its rather elusive properties in modern times. Cool, detached from its history, is style without substance, in the worst way. It is a free-floating signifier of emptiness, unmoored from its complicated birth in a more repressive era.

Cool has been around in one form or another for years. Yet cool, as we know it, is a product of the conformity, paranoia and racism of that which defined the early Cold War era through the mid 1960s. While it is difficult to label a lone inventor of cool, there are the pioneers, and the pioneers of cool all tended to come from the same place: the world of jazz. Imagine luminary cool figures, like the suave Duke Ellington; the debonair baritone ''Mr. B,'' Billy Eckstein; and the original black ''Prez'' himself, Lester Young, as just a few of these pioneers.

John Burkes ''Dizzy'' Gillespie, another progenitor of cool, rocked a beret and horn-rimmed glasses, while making up his own bebop language in the process. Charlie ''Bird'' Parker was never cool in the way these other cats were cool, his slovenly appearance being the primary culprit. But what he lacked in style, he more than made up for through his horn and his transcendent iconic status. The influence he would have on others helps explain why cool has always had a large pool of potential imitators. Bird's legend stretched far and wide, inspiring, among others, a generation of disaffected post-war white boys who came to be known as the Beat Generation, as they went about converting Bird's intellectual and artistic ethos into their own form of literary lifestyle energy; thus making the phrase ''Bird Lives'' a signature moment along the historic cool timeline.

Yet no figure came to embody this notion of Cold War cool more than that cultural behemoth Miles Dewey Davis III, as the title of his album Birth of the Cool would imply. It was during this phase of his lengthy career that the ''Cool Miles'' emerged as a new kind of black celebrity in the 1950s. As someone who moved freely through both black and white cultural spaces, the ever-stylish East St. Louis native came to embody the very definition of cool. He was uniquely suited to do so.

Miles' progressive-minded father was both a success as a dentist and a hog farmer, while his mother came from a family with elite political connections in the NAACP. A rare black child of privilege in a segregated society, Miles journeyed to New York to study music at Juilliard by day. But he spent his evenings studying at the University of Bebop, spending time at both its 52nd Street and Harlem campuses, while learning at the feet of esteemed professors like Bird and Diz.

Miles thus possessed the ability to fuse what I like to call the formal and the vernacular. The merging of the formal and the vernacular, in the broadest sense, resulted in a practice where the African-American oral tradition went about deconstructing European classic music and the American songbook. In a more personal sense, Miles, while immersed in the formal institutional practices of Juilliard, combined these teachings with the street knowledge absorbed from his time on the bandstand with the more organic genius of someone like Bird. Miles recognized that the formal and the vernacular came together through improvisation. That merger was most often manifest through style.

At an early age, Miles, the black kid in the Brooks Brothers suit, drew his style inspiration from Hollywood figures like Fred Astaire and Cary Grant, forging what he called his own ''hip, quasi-black English look.'' Miles would become a devout boxing fan later in life and often practiced the sport himself, while hanging with his good friend Sugar Ray Robinson -- he of the ever-so-slick Marcel process, spotless white robes and the famed Pink Cadillac -- another noted practitioner of cool from this era.

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