Mystic coolness

BENJAMIN MARKOVITS

There’s a throwaway line in the fourth Canto of Don Juan where you get a kind of pre-echo of what the word “cool” will come to mean. Byron’s teenage hero has been shipwrecked and washed up on the shores of a Greek island, where he falls in love with Haidée, the girl who discovers him. She thinks her father Lambro, a pirate chieftain, is dead, but when he shows up and finds the two youngsters sleeping together, he threatens to shoot Juan. Haidée throws herself in front of her lover. Lambro puts down his gun and sends his soldiers instead. Juan hacks down the first two but then the third, “a wary, cool old sworder”, calmly receives his cutlass thrusts and disarms him (while cutting Juan up only a little). That “cool” already shows glimpses of its twentieth-century connotations: it implies the suppression of some emotion (in this case fear or over-eagerness), a kind of style or competence (or maybe really the combination of the two), and something like the writer’s admiration. Over the next fifty years, the admiration element would all but swallow up the other meanings.
Joel Dinerstein’s exhaustive but enjoyable book, The Origins of Cool in Postwar America, takes as its starting point the English upper-class ideal “of the gentleman, the social value of keeping a stiff upper lip”. Duke Ellington, he says, “thought of Londoners as ‘the most civilized’ people in the world and admired their ‘sense of balance’”. But Americans, and specifically African American jazz musicians, adapted the idea of cool and turned it from a class virtue – a way of fitting in – into something more individualistic, a way of surviving on the outskirts of society. Phrases like “keep cool”, “play it cool”, “cool out” have all entered the language; they refer originally to the need for black Americans to keep their temper in the face of white provocations, and to dignify that temper-keeping with style. Dinerstein traces both word and style back to the saxophonist Lester Young, “the primogenitor of cool: he disseminated the modern usage of the term and concept of cool; he modeled it as an embodied philosophy; his solos are the foundation for the genre of ‘cool jazz’”.
For black musicians – most of whom at one point or another were beaten up by the police, imprisoned, denied service in or entry to restaurants and hotels, ritually degraded by waiters, club-owners and even their white friends and colleagues – being cool was an alternative to “uncle Tomming” – smiling and grinning to placate white authority. Cool offered a form of concealment that didn’t require falsification. (Young used to wear sunglasses to every gig. Other musicians followed suit.) But “cool” also had its roots in West African culture, and Dinerstein relates it to the Yoruba concept of “itutu – mystic coolness”, and to the emphasis “on projecting coolness in music and dance across the African diaspora”. In other words, a kind of individual grace that has a social function, too, that responds to others and contributes to the general harmony.