A new book out this month by jazz writer Ted Gioia charts the rise and fall of ‘the cool’.

In musical terms cool jazz evolved in the late 1940’s and 1950’s as a reaction in part to the aggressive tempos of bop, the style that had revolutionised jazz in the early to mid-1940s.

It mixed bop with certain aspects of swing with softer tones and more mellow arrangements. Some of the key proponents of the style centred around Los Angeles, which led to it being tagged “West Coast Jazz”.

In this video Billy Taylor explains cool jazz:

Among the artists important in the development of Cool Jazz were Lester Young, Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, Stan Getz, Shorty Rogers and Howard Rumsey (leader of the Lighthouse All-Stars).

But cool as an idea wasn’t just confined to music and in his new book Ted Gioia explores how it became a trend that influenced the wider culture.

Aside from being a key component to some of the biggest selling jazz albums ever (such as Kind of Blue), “cool” was a sensibility that permeated fashion, language, movies and other aspects of life.

In the 1950s figures like Miles Davis (music), James Dean (movies) and J.D. Salinger (literature) symbolised a sense of stylishness and hipness which lasted for decades.

However, Gioia now argues that this trend is coming to an end with the death of cool:

…it may sound like a paradox, but cool isn’t hip any more it may sound like a paradox, but cool isn’t hip any more.

The signs of this are everywhere, and start with the word itself.

I am not sure when the deliberate misspelling of cool as “kewl” started, but a quick search for the phrase “is not kewl” on Google comes back with 50,000 hits.

Oddly enough, there is even a competitor to Google, a new search engine called Cuil, which is itself a deliberate misspelling of the word.

Everywhere you look, cool is being mocked. And not just on the web.

On TV, nerds are in the ascendancy, as demonstrated by shows such as Beauty and the Geek, Ugly Betty, The Big Bang Theory, and Chuck. And a whole series of books are reinforcing the point.

Browse through this web site, and check out Geek Chic, American Nerd, A Girl’s Guide to Dating a Geek, The Geek Handbook, and Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them, to name a few.

And if you still doubt the cool is on the decline, I will say two words, and just two words, to make my case… [pause for dramatic effect]… Susan Boyle.

In addition to this latest book, Gioia has also published six others including ‘The History of Jazz’ (1999) which was selected as one of the twenty best books of the year in The Washington Post and was also a ‘notable book of the year’ in The New York Times.

His website is www.tedgioia.com and you can buy his book at Amazon UK here.