Born in 1926 and raised in East St. Louis, Illinois, in the shadow of that city’s deadly 1917 race riot, Miles Davis was acutely conscious throughout his life of the dilemmas white supremacy posed for African Americans in their daily public speech, actions, and deportment. For prominent musicians such as Davis, moreover, whose careers partly depended on performance across the color line, such dilemmas were negotiated in the glare of audience and media scrutiny. When the teenage Davis began to make his way as a professional trumpeter in the early 1940s, the promotion of jazz to white Americans remained bound up with Jim Crow protocols and demeaning minstrel imagery. At Club Plantation in nearby St. Louis, Missouri, for example, a white-only clientele ordered from menus decorated with grinning minstrel caricatures.Footnote 1 Davis, however, like many of his generation of jazz musicians, had no intention of adopting the jovial manner and novelty antics the entertainment industry had long expected of Black performers. Perhaps more than any other African American musician of the twentieth century, Davis became known for his relentless dedication to extinguishing the vestiges of minstrelsy.
His name became synonymous with an altogether different way of meeting the white gaze. Studies of Davis’s long career, which continued almost until his death in 1991, are virtually unanimous in asserting his significance to the history of what is variously described as the mask, pose, style, or stance of “cool”: he was “the epitome of cool,” “the personification of cool,” a “universal symbol of cool,” and an “archetypal cool dude,” who “defined cool, elegant, dark-skinned masculinity for the post-World War II generation.”Footnote 2 While an attenuated “cool” would become a globalized cliché by the end of the twentieth century, Amiri Baraka in 1963 identified the concept’s signification within the African American culture that had nurtured it: “To be cool was … to be calm, even unimpressed, by what horror the world might daily propose.” For Baraka, this “calm, or stoical, repression of suffering” was a technique by which Black people had protected their dignity and self-respect in the face of enslavement and subsequent iterations of white supremacy.Footnote 3 Ralph Ellison recalled in 1985 that during his student days in 1930s Alabama, “cloaking one’s feelings” in a “bulletproof vest – known as ‘cool’” – had been “a life-preserving discipline.”Footnote 4 For Ellison and his contemporaries, a cool demeanor had hinted at inner defiance without exhibiting overt resistance, which would almost certainly have prompted violent reprisals. Meeting hostile and demeaning words, looks, and laws with an unflinching, steely expression denied racists the satisfaction of observing their power to engender Black humiliation or fear, and offered an alternative to smiling, submissive forms of behavior that would signal acceptance of racial hierarchy.
In the most compelling, panoramic study of cool’s diffusion through twentieth-century US culture, Joel Dinerstein traces American cool’s emergence from a melding of West African, European, and American cultural elements, and charts its postwar transition from the margins to mass appeal. Reacting, in part, against primitivist celebrations of jazz as a “hot” music of unbridled emotion, tenor saxophonist Lester Young and vocalist Billie Holiday had begun in the 1930s to fashion a cool musical aesthetic within jazz – breezily melodic, rhythmically unhurried – and a demeanor emanating “public composure.” In this, they enlisted facets of African American culture deriving from practices long shared (notwithstanding variations) across a swathe of West African societies, which valorized displays of serenity and self-control even in the act of performing music or dance that sparked intense collective enthusiasm. From Young and Holiday, an aura of cool imperturbability radiated within the jazz world and beyond. Musicians and actors, Black and white, wove a variety of European and Euro-American influences together with cool’s African American fabric, from the emotionally reserved images of the English gentleman and the taciturn cowboy to the defiant selfhood associated with French existentialism. In the 1950s, the appeal of James Dean and Marlon Brando signaled cool’s currency within popular culture as a stance of “inchoate rebellion against religious morality and corrupt politics, against repressive social norms and runaway technological worship.”Footnote 5 Within scholarship on cool, however, the militancy of the 1960s is seen to have necessitated a turn toward more forthright, impassioned, and collective modes of self-presentation. The “cultural work of cool had peaked by 1960,” Dinerstein contends. Though its “cultural rebellion” had “helped generate the conditions for political protest and social change,” cool “did not converge with political protest,” he concludes.Footnote 6
In this article, I wish to open up a reconsideration of cool’s developing meanings within African American expressive culture and of cool’s relationship to protest during the 1960s. Aspects of cool that have long been associated with musicians such as Miles Davis were of far greater salience to the conduct of civil rights activism, especially in the early part of that decade, than has previously been recognized. Moreover, I argue that a stark revision of the cool demeanor occurred over the course of the 1960s that was first evident in Davis’s music and public speech and then echoed in some of the alterations to the forms and dynamics of the freedom struggle that unfolded as the decade progressed.
The first section of this article looks to Davis’s career to deepen understanding of the classic cool demeanor as it was elaborated within postwar African American culture. I argue that this classic cool was the performance of emotional sovereignty, the assertion of a state of affective self-possession in defiance of white supremacy’s putative power over Black inner life and its outward expression. Cool’s embattled claim of self-ownership underscores the continued potency of the cultural memory of enslavement during the mid-twentieth century, as well as reflecting the ongoing lived experience of white supremacy.Footnote 7 “White people have certain things they expect from Negro musicians … It goes clear back to slavery days,” Davis remarked in 1962.Footnote 8 As highly visible performers across the color line, working in white-dominated spaces and media, jazz musicians such as Davis reflected and elaborated on African American vernacular modes of deportment that resisted the ever-present specter of white expectations of, and claims to own (dominate, control), Black people, and that were available for use in everyday public settings. They were also available for use in the performance of public protest. Yet cool’s utility to the civil rights movement has scarcely been considered in scholarship to date.Footnote 9 The second section of this article makes the case that, far from waning in significance by the 1960s, cool was deployed in some of the most consequential civil rights mobilizations of the first half of the decade, as a template for performing dignified self-possession in the face of frenzied white hostility and violence.
However, even as Davis honed classic cool’s sonic and visual devices to new levels of refinement during these years, he simultaneously revoked its foundational assertion of emotional sovereignty. As the final section of this article demonstrates, at the turn of the 1960s Davis presented a redefinition of cool as expressive sovereignty. No longer willing or able to deny the emotional turmoil wrought by white supremacy, Davis now frequently dispensed with the “serenity” and “equipoise” that had been hallmarks of his classic cool.Footnote 10 By 1961, it was Davis’s “smouldering fury” that Ebony magazine noted.Footnote 11 Yet his emotional candor extended beyond the expressions of anger that were beginning to be voiced from the edges of the freedom struggle and would soon multiply within it.Footnote 12 In a sequence of interviews that in many respects paralleled his music’s emotional register during these years, Davis spoke with remarkable openness about the pain white supremacy instilled in him, and that pain’s sometimes debilitating effects. In the process, he disarticulated cool self-possession from the claim of emotional inviolability and attached it instead to a notion of expressive self-determination. While he now conceded racism’s power to disrupt his inner life, Davis made plain his own power to determine just when and how he would give expression to the depth of his feeling, and made equally plain that his rejection of white scripts for Black emotional display was undiminished. Conveying this expressive sovereignty required a dynamic of alternating disclosure and withholding, such that familiar markers of classic cool – from dark glasses to an ease and economy of sound and movement – were retained as signifiers of a barrier behind which he reserved the right to retreat at any time.
Davis’s break with classic cool’s stoicism, as the final section also shows, anticipated a similar shift that would come to the fore within the freedom struggle by the mid-1960s. My claim is not that it was Davis’s example that inspired many civil rights and Black Power activists to dispense with stoicism – though the possibility of his influence on some activists should not be discounted (a point I will return to) – but instead that the redefinition of cool as expressive sovereignty, by the musician and many activists alike, signaled that constant public repression of suffering had become an intolerable burden.
Though cool has sometimes been identified almost exclusively with masculinity, it was codified by Billie Holiday as much as by Lester Young or Miles Davis, and enlisted by female as well as male activists.Footnote 13 Nonetheless, it is significant that Davis’s reformulation of cool involved disclosure of inner suffering with a directness that broke with idealizations of toughness that had been integral not only to classic cool, but to all conventional forms of mid-twentieth-century American masculinity.Footnote 14 Certain expressions of toughness – along with brutality toward women – would remain part of Davis’s complex, contradictory masculinity throughout his life.Footnote 15 Yet his openness about racism’s sometimes immobilizing impact on him, and the notes of frailty that sounded within his music, were striking even amid the rise of America’s therapeutic postwar culture.Footnote 16
“A reputation for cool indifference”
Jazz was at the crest of its postwar popularity in the years around 1960, and Miles Davis’s renown was unmatched by that of any other figure associated with the music. Feted by critics as one of the genre’s most innovative players, Davis simultaneously attained the status of a “pop star.” His interracial audience reached far beyond the realm of jazz fandom, and the volume of his press coverage outstripped that of any of his peers.Footnote 17 While Time magazine lauded his trumpet solos for their “serene, spare, lyrical flights,” much coverage was as concerned with his look and demeanor as with his sound.Footnote 18 Journalists touted his “reputation for cool indifference” toward his audiences, the “‘cool’ wall” he had “erected … between himself and the public.”Footnote 19 Along with his Italian suits and casually confident bearing, this aloofness made his cool masculinity an object of fascination in men’s magazines: Playboy dedicated feature articles to him, and Gentleman’s Quarterly anointed him its fashion personality of the month in May 1961.Footnote 20 Meanwhile, mass-market publications and the Black press reported his acerbic condemnations of American racism and personal experience of police brutality.Footnote 21
The interplay of sound and physical bearing that comprised Davis’s pristine cool is encapsulated in the opening moments of a half-hour CBS television broadcast, The Sound of Miles Davis, that aired across the United States on 21 July 1960 (see Figure 1). Following brief words from the host, Robert Herridge, the camera swings around to a side-on view of Davis’s ensemble embarking on one of his recent compositions. Bassist Paul Chambers plucks a decidedly funky eight-note phrase that initiates a call-and-response cycle, eliciting a terse, two-note retort from pianist Wynton Kelly. This retort is soon harmonized by Davis, tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, and trombonist Bill Elton, while drummer Jimmy Cobb supplies brushwork accompaniment. Before a minute has passed, Davis’s trumpet solo pierces outward from this ensemble texture, its first phrase announcing in a mere three notes a singular authority, clarity, and economy of sound that are only heightened by the four beats of silence from Davis that follow. The phrase’s nonchalance and hint of disdain are multiplied by the series of movements Davis executes immediately before this solo: a slight pivot from the hips as he momentarily lowers his trumpet; a pout that, for an instant, almost becomes a scowl; and a flick of his forefinger across the tip of his tongue. “So What” was the piece’s title, the absence of a question mark lending Davis’s stylized indifference the unequivocal last word.Footnote 22
Miles Davis and Paul Chambers rehearsing on set for The Sound of Miles Davis at CBS TV’s Studio 61, New York City, 2 April 1959. The program aired on 21 July 1960. Photograph by CBS via Getty Images.
The broadcast was a high point of Davis’s public exposure and a further step in jazz’s perceived ascent to the venerated status of “art” music.Footnote 23 Davis had been reluctant to agree to this television debut, in part because of his scathing view of a recent televised All-Star Jazz Show, introduced by comedian Jackie Gleason, as resembling “a Christmas tree on a plantation.”Footnote 24 Yet he was reassured that CBS would accommodate a serious presentation of the kind he offered nightly in jazz clubs and concert halls across the country. Indeed, the company’s press release played up Davis’s cool demeanor and uncompromising artistry, relating how, “unimpressed with the paraphernalia of a modern television studio, he came to make music.”Footnote 25
Davis’s cool carried echoes of the “easy, introverted sound” and unflustered physicality of Lester Young, whom he revered long after Young’s death in March 1959.Footnote 26 Alongside Billie Holiday, with whom he formed a celebrated musical partnership, Young had accentuated and refined the cool aesthetic within jazz in contrast to the fervent “hot” playing of most interwar African American musicians and the “Uncle Tomming” he believed the music industry demanded of them.Footnote 27 As late as 1942, Louis Armstrong performed his signature song “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South” as a movie “short” that seemed to squeeze every antebellum minstrel stereotype into its three minutes, from lingering shots of beaming Black men lazing on cotton bales to lyrics basking in “mammy’s arms.”Footnote 28 Just two years later, Young featured in Jammin’ the Blues, an innovative ten-minute film that could scarcely have differed from Armstrong’s vehicle more completely, with Young’s inscrutable face and languid saxophone gently exuding cool as a stylish, dignified deflection of the white gaze.Footnote 29
Nonetheless, The Sound of Miles Davis signaled how the younger musician was lending cool a more confrontational edge. As Dinerstein recognizes, both the “fierce reserve” of Davis’s onstage deportment and the loathing of white supremacy that he verbalized in his public speech “would have been suicide in the Deep South of the 1920s” where the Mississippi-born Young had toured with his family’s band.Footnote 30 By the early 1960s, when journalists asked Davis about his reputation for “rudeness to your audiences” – why he often played with his back toward them, left the stage while his sidemen were soloing, and declined to announce song titles or acknowledge applause – his responses were forthright and did not conceal his frustration:
Look man, all I am is a trumpet player. I only can do one thing – play my horn – and that’s what’s at the bottom of the whole mess. I ain’t no entertainer … I don’t sing or dance, and I damn sure ain’t no Uncle Tom just to be up there grinning.Footnote 31
The shadow of the plantation loomed over Davis’s conception of contemporary Black performance. Though proud that the “slave Davises” had “played classical string music on the plantations,” he remarked that “slavery days” were also when “Uncle Tomming got started because white people demanded it.” Such demands had “carried right on over to now,” he insisted, adding that his club audiences often included “expense account ofays” who “will holler, ‘Hey, boy, play Sweet Georgia Brown!’”Footnote 32
Davis’s cool demeanor was, in part, his means of resisting such claims of ownership and authority, which recalled and extended a painful history of dehumanization and, specifically, denials of Black manhood (“boy”). Though white men owned the clubs and record companies, Davis would not let them call the tunes. Nor would he serve up the exuberance long associated, in the primitivist imaginary, with supposedly innate Black emotiveness and musicality.Footnote 33 To produce the sounds and emotional states that whites demanded would be to toil on the plantation – to be owned. “White people own all this shit,” Davis told one interviewer as he drove around Manhattan, but “They don’t own me.”Footnote 34 Indeed, he described his bandstand deportment explicitly in terms of a struggle for mastery. “I don’t even see audiences,” he told Ebony in 1961, “because I don’t look at them. I’m playing for me, and if I look at them, it’s a draw.”Footnote 35
Judging by some responses, Davis’s efforts to project dominance met with considerable success. The critic Stanley Dance observed, also in 1961, that Davis and his bandmates “play as though in private, undisturbed by the temerity (or servility?) of an audience which claps enthusiastically whenever there is a brief pause.”Footnote 36 Decades later, the Canadian composer John MacLachlan Gray’s recollection of one concert seemed to corroborate Dance’s suggestion: “I don’t remember Davis … acknowledging the audience once, even looking at us, yet he controlled us physically – all over the theatre you could see people simultaneously sitting upright, bouncing on their seats, then lolling back, as though choreographed.”Footnote 37 The inversion of white supremacist power dynamics evoked by Davis’s performance style struck a chord with African Americans in his hometown, according to the East St. Louis poet Eugene Redmond: “We used to talk about him turning his back on the audience … [W]e used to really brag about that. You know, ‘Miles makes’em pay and turns his back.’”Footnote 38
An aesthetic of detachment and withholding also marked out the cool sound as it developed within jazz. Davis’s move to New York City in September 1944, initially to study at the Juilliard School of Music, had also placed him at the epicenter of bebop, the virtuosic, experimental music then convulsing the jazz scene. The beboppers’ self-presentation as a studious avant-garde and derision of what trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie in 1949 called Louis Armstrong’s “plantation character” indicate an affinity with cool’s revolt against Black music’s packaging as a primitive spectacle.Footnote 39 Yet Davis’s cool trumpet stood out within bebop’s soundscape, which, at least in terms of its ardor and energy, resembled “hot jazz at its most intense.”Footnote 40 Faced with soloing after Charlie Parker’s lightning-fast alto saxophone, Davis eschewed pyrotechnics for a laid-back lyricism in the trumpet’s middle register.Footnote 41
Davis’s reserved trumpet style soon influenced a new front of experimentation that would attract the name of “cool jazz.” The recordings he led in 1949 and 1950 with an interracial nine-piece ensemble, in collaboration with arranger Gil Evans, dialed down bebop’s vehemence in favor of subtle counterpoint and reaffirmation of melody. When the recordings were eventually released to acclaim in 1957 as the Miles Davis Nonet’s Birth of the Cool, his name was firmly stamped on the concept of “cool” that, at this moment, was becoming an American “cultural fixation.”Footnote 42 By this time, Davis had in fact left behind the subgenre of “cool jazz” per se, which had come to be identified primarily with white musicians, including pianist Dave Brubeck and baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, who performed their own varieties of emotional reserve.Footnote 43 In contrast to some of these players, Davis’s sound always married cool to the “hot” tension and rawness that characterized the blues.Footnote 44 Hotness had never been simply a confection devised for white spectators, notwithstanding white primitivist distortions that equated it with supposedly innate Black emotiveness and sensuality (“Get hot, boy!” taunts a white voice in Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man).Footnote 45 A hot ethic and aesthetic of intensity, exertion, and agitation were deeply embedded in histories of African American worship, dance, and music making.Footnote 46 Nonetheless, a spare, cool aesthetic persisted as a major element within Davis’s trumpet sound – and his demeanor – even after he moved on from “cool jazz” to spearhead earthy, propulsive “hard bop” and then harmonically simplified “modal” jazz, the latter epitomized by the insouciant “So What.”Footnote 47 As Gary Giddins observes, “though Davis rejected cool jazz, he came to personify jazz cool.”Footnote 48
As Davis’s renown grew, some African American jazz artists began proclaiming support for Black freedom movements very directly through their music. In 1959, vocalist Abbey Lincoln decried American racism and affirmed her African diasporic consciousness on Abbey Is Blue, and bassist Charles Mingus responded caustically to the Little Rock school integration crisis through his composition “Fables of Faubus.” The following year, Lincoln and drummer Max Roach saluted civil rights and anti-apartheid activism with We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, and pianist Randy Weston hailed African independence on Uhuru Afrika.Footnote 49 Davis, meanwhile, lent his support during the late 1950s and early 1960s by playing benefit concerts for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and for the African Research Foundation’s medical work.Footnote 50 More than these fund-raisers, however, an incident on 25 August 1959 entwined Davis’s image with that of the civil rights movement.
That evening, Davis emerged from Birdland, the Broadway club where he had just performed with his sextet, and accompanied a young white woman to her taxi. As he then lingered for some air, a police officer demanded that he and others “get off the sidewalk.” He refused. The officer threatened him with arrest, yet Davis stood firm. He was then struck repeatedly on the head by a second officer’s nightstick. “It was the most horrible, brutal thing I’d ever seen,” an eyewitness told jazz critic Leonard Feather. “People were crying out to the man not to kill Miles.” Davis was arrested. Though it was the trumpeter’s head that required stitches, the first officer alleged that Davis had punched him repeatedly. Witnesses did not corroborate this; instead, some described “tussling” between Davis and the officers. In January 1960, Davis was acquitted of assault, the judge ruling that it would be a “travesty of justice to adjudge the very victim of the illegal arrest guilty.”Footnote 51
“But I must be cool”
Davis’s beating received extensive coverage in the Black press. “It Was Police Brutality,” declared the front-page of New York’s Amsterdam News, which carried an interview with Davis and reported that a “large crowd” had greeted him on his release from the West 54th Street precinct.Footnote 52 In January 1961, Ebony’s feature on Davis carried a photograph from the incident’s aftermath showing him in a blood-soaked shirt, with the caption “Bloody, defiant and handcuffed … Miles battled New York police.”Footnote 53 By this time, civil rights protest had entered a new escalation. Beginning in Greensboro, North Carolina in February 1960, sit-ins spread rapidly to many parts of the South. A little over a year later, Freedom Riders suffered beatings and bombings in Alabama as they tested interstate transport desegregation. Closer to Davis’s home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the Nation of Islam’s Harlem minister Malcolm X had attained notoriety a few weeks before the Birdland incident through the televised documentary The Hate That Hate Produced. Malcolm’s recent agitation against police brutality had been crucial to his increasing support among Black New Yorkers, and was among the seeds of the future Black Power movement he and other dissenting activists were sowing in New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, and elsewhere.Footnote 54
Coverage of Davis’s beating and “defiant” response resonated powerfully with these developments, in divergent ways. Practitioners of nonviolence could see a celebrated Black artist who, like them, had risked assault by standing his ground, and endured a principled arrest. Skeptics of nonviolence could identify with Davis’s reported “tussling” with his attackers, and might give credence to their claim that Davis himself had thrown punches. From either perspective, Davis emerged with dignity. As Ingrid Monson emphasizes, the incident enhanced Davis’s standing in relation to the freedom struggle: “Miles put his body on the line, when it would have been easier to capitulate to police authority.”Footnote 55
Jazz devotees had already been exposed to Davis’s cool sound and demeanor through his club and concert appearances, records on Prestige and Columbia, and striking photographic portraits on the covers of long-play albums such as ’Round About Midnight (1957; see Figure 2). By the early 1960s, however, Davis’s police beating, nationwide television broadcast, and publicity in outlets ranging from men’s magazines to Ebony and Negro Digest had projected his cool image far more widely, establishing him as one of the most recognized Black figures in the United States and one of those most readily associated with defiance of the norms and expectations of the racial order.
Album cover of Miles Davis, ’Round About Midnight, first released by Columbia Records in 1957. Courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment. Photograph by Marvin Koner. Courtesy of the Marvin Koner Archive.
In an incisive study, Ruth Feldstein has argued that Black women such as Abbey Lincoln and Nina Simone came to “perform civil rights” through their widely disseminated music, public discourse, and self-fashioning. These artists popularized ideas, attitudes, and ways of being that “helped constitute the political history of this period.”Footnote 56 Similarly, the cool demeanor of which Davis had become the best-known practitioner warrants recognition as part of the material from which civil rights protests derived their form and conduct. As much as methods, settings, and levels of risk differed between music making and frontline activism, public performance across the color line was integral to both, especially in the late 1950s and early 1960s when civil rights strategy centered on media spectacles designed to expose white supremacist hatred and violence. Davis epitomized and advertised a way of facing the white gaze, and the media’s glare, that was unflinching, unimpressed (to use Baraka’s term) by hostility and insult, and sustained by seemingly impregnable self-respect.
Cool’s currency among African Americans extended far beyond northern communities and urban centers. When SNCC’s Robert Moses arrived in McComb, Mississippi in July 1961, he was introduced to residents who soon became the backbone of the voter registration campaign by Webb Owens, a “sharp-dressing” local NAACP activist and retired railroad porter universally known as “Super Cool Daddy.”Footnote 57 Owens’s moniker, resembling those of countless radio DJs of the period, indicates how jazz and rhythm and blues had shaped and amplified cool’s resonances by this time.Footnote 58 Yet those musical forms were themselves outgrowths of a broader matrix of African American culture – not least in the South – that had long fostered cool as an affirmation of self-worth and self-possession in the face of white hostility and derision.
A quarter-century after the “bullet-proof vest” of cool had fortified Ralph Ellison and fellow Tuskegee students against white contempt, high-school and college students became the vanguard of civil rights struggle across the South.Footnote 59 The composed, stoic expression worn by sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford on 4 September 1957, as she walked the gauntlet toward Little Rock’s Central High School, speaks eloquently of cool’s utility to this generation (see Figure 3). Photographs of Eckford surrounded by white students screaming threats and racial slurs sparked immediate outrage around the world. If such responses hinged on the contrast between Eckford’s “innocent, demure young womanhood” and the “disorderly and subversive” mob, the look of dignified composure Eckford managed to project comprised something more than the gendered, class-bound ideals of respectability promoted by sections of the civil rights leadership.Footnote 60 As heightened as the stakes were at that moment, her comportment echoed the ways in which, as Ellison testified, African Americans had long withstood the indignities and threats that white supremacy imposed on their everyday lives.Footnote 61
Elizabeth Eckford outside Little Rock’s Central High School, 4 September 1957. Photograph by Pete Harris. © Bettmann.
Alongside her tight-lipped, controlled countenance, Eckford’s sunglasses connect with cool’s visual vocabulary and methods of screening the white gaze. “Shades” had long served as a distancing, withholding device, signifying an inscrutability that punctured white presumptions to know African Americans and their supposedly simple thoughts and emotions.Footnote 62 Lester Young and numerous beboppers had deepened shades’ association with cool by performing in them indoors as well as outdoors, night and day.Footnote 63 By the late 1950s, Davis had become “perhaps the jazzman most famous for wearing shades,” largely through press photography and the covers of LPs such as ’Round About Midnight (Figure 2).Footnote 64 In crowded jazz clubs, shades frequently formed part of the barrier Davis raised between himself and audiences he often performed just a few feet away from.Footnote 65 For Eckford, too, sunglasses surely served more than their most basic function by providing some semblance of cover (an extension of the “bullet-proof” cool demeanor itself), filtering the glare of hostility and scrutiny, and asserting self-possession through the ability to withhold rather than lay her emotions bare.
Civil rights demonstrators had long been trained to repress any instinct to react to threats and provocations with visible fear or fury. By keeping their cool, activists invited onlookers and consumers of media to contrast dignified Black self-possession with white supremacists’ wild emotion and cruelty.Footnote 66 Moreover, as a projection of emotional sovereignty, and therefore of self-mastery, classic cool’s utility extended beyond the creation of nonviolent imagery as the basis for moral appeals to whites. Faced with degrading treatment, self-respect mattered to Black participants. Within civil rights scholarship, however, composed deportment is usually linked to “respectability,” understood as a display of conformity to bourgeois American idealizations of dress, speech, demeanor, religiosity, and gendered and sexual identities. The frequency of references to demonstrators wearing their “Sunday best” in fact obscures the variety of clothing worn.Footnote 67 Students mounting lunch-counter sit-ins were as likely to wear casual jackets and sweaters – sometimes even shades – as church dresses or suits and ties.Footnote 68
For some activists, cool held out the promise of defiant dignity in extreme circumstances. In August 1961, James Forman, SNCC’s executive secretary, traveled with a group of Freedom Riders to Monroe, North Carolina, where local NAACP president Robert F. Williams was leading resistance to the Ku Klux Klan. On 27 August, some three thousand white supremacists surrounded approximately thirty activists demonstrating in the courthouse square. A shotgun was pointed at Forman, eighteen inches from his face. His memoir, published a decade later, recalls,
Everything stopped. I thought, this is the moment of death and I must die as a man. I must not cry out. I must not beg this cracker for mercy. I must show strength to those few black people watching … I can see down the barrel of the shotgun, but I must be cool. I must not panic. Look the mother fucker straight in the eye and let him know he has lynched a strong black man … The crowd is yelling, “Kill him! Kill him! Kill the n[*****]!” Yet I am calm. There is a strange calmness in me. I thought I would be excited if ever faced with this type of death, but no. I cannot explain this quiet within me. I am cool. I am icy. I have decided to die for my people.
In Forman’s eyes, a cool demeanor was vital to transforming “the moment of death” into an affirmation of manhood that would “make a revolutionary.”Footnote 69
After surviving Monroe and other, equally dangerous campaigns, Forman, and SNCC itself, moved in the mid-1960s into the rising currents of the Black Power movement, where similar notions of “revolutionary suicide” and vindication of Black manhood became commonplace.Footnote 70 Cool’s significance to Black Power, however, is evident in visions of Black life as well as death. Early in 1968, Eldridge Cleaver, wearing “Cuban sunglasses” and the Black Panther Party’s uniform of leather jacket and powder-blue turtleneck, implored a Black audience in New Haven, Connecticut to join the gathering “nation-wide force” of revolutionaries with a loving tribute to the stylized defiance that marked Black expressive culture: “as cool as we are, we will be out of sight! And you won’t find nobody on the face of the planet earth crazy enough, fool enough, to be messing with us.”Footnote 71 By this time, however, cool’s meanings had multiplied beyond the stoic dictates of emotional sovereignty.
Rebirth of the cool
Miles Davis, several scholars of his career have remarked, was not one to indulge interviewers’ professional curiosity. For one biographer, “reticence was central to his mystique,” such that he gave only a “few crimped and guarded interviews.”Footnote 72 In fact, it was in interviews with high-profile publications during the early 1960s that Davis spoke of his inner turmoil with a frankness that shattered classic cool’s projection of emotional sovereignty.
An Ebony interview published in January 1961 saw Davis begin to address the ways in which white supremacy impacted his inner life. “You’re goddamn right I’m angry,” he avowed as he described how “everything I see around me” signaled racism, from the State Department sending “white jazz groups” as cultural emissaries to Africa to “People say[ing] ‘Would you want your sister to marry a Negro?’” In a phrase he would use repeatedly, Davis stated, “It makes me sick.”Footnote 73 The following year he became the first subject of a Playboy interview. If the magazine had been drawn to the combination of Davis’s luxurious lifestyle (Ferrari and “five-story home”) and flinty reputation as “the Jazz World’s Premier Iconoclast,” the depth of Davis’s emotional candor must have taken its editors aback as he likened the internalized effect of “this Jim Crow scene” to “a big sore eating inside of your belly.”Footnote 74
Over the course of this extended interview, conducted by African American journalist and author Alex Haley, Davis castigated the racism of the United States, as manifested in geopolitics (the hypocrisy of American claims to champion “human rights”), segregation, and the slights and hostilities he endured in his own daily life. Far from portraying himself as invulnerable, he dwelled on the emotional disturbance such incidents caused. Speaking of audience members whose boisterousness conveyed disrespect for Black musicians, and who yelled song requests or addressed him as “boy,” Davis revealed, “Sometimes one table like this has bugged me so that when I get home or to my hotel, I walk the floor because I can’t sleep.” His recollection of one incident underscored that the pain and humiliation such encounters engendered could virtually incapacitate him for days at a time. Visiting a bar during a recent tour, Davis had asked one of a group of West Point cadets “why there were so many of them in town.” The cadet walked away without deigning to respond. Conscious that his eldest son, Gregory, might enter the army within a few years, Davis was consumed by a disabling pain: “It bugged me so, man, I wasn’t worth a damn for two or three days.”Footnote 75
These were jarring disclosures from the man who had carried cool indifference to new lengths and continued to display his classic cool demeanor on the bandstand. The Birdland beating, his autobiography would relate, had “changed my whole life and my whole attitude”; it “made me bitter and cynical.”Footnote 76 The escalating violence meted out to civil rights activists and Black communities also drove him to speak about his turmoil. “I can’t explain to you how it makes me feel to read about somebody getting bombed,” he told another men’s magazine, Cavalier, the year after the Birmingham church bombing that had killed four girls in September 1963. “It just makes me sick, man.”Footnote 77 Reflecting on the life of his father, a wealthy dentist who had died in 1962, prompted anguished words about intra-racial class divisions and internalized racism – “I got to thinking about my father last night … how he spent his whole life trying to be better than the ‘n[*****]s’” – along with a striking addition: “and I started crying.”Footnote 78
These wounded disclosures sounded a world away from the nonchalance of “So What.” That piece had opened his best-selling 1959 album Kind of Blue and would remain a key part of his repertoire for several years.Footnote 79 Yet the album’s third track evokes altogether different emotional states, more akin to the feelings Davis soon attested to in his interviews. “Blue in Green,” a hauntingly slow ballad, commences with four bars of delicate piano and bass playing by Bill Evans and Paul Chambers that establishes a suspenseful, contemplative mood.Footnote 80 Davis’s muted trumpet then enters with a high, sustained note of such rawness and plangency that it demands to be heard as a wail or cry, before subsiding into a descending pair of notes at lessening volume. Mournful ballads were scarcely a novelty in jazz. Furthermore, as Nichole Rustin-Paschal discerns, emotional expression was fundamental to the “jazzmasculinity” practiced by postwar musicians such as bassist and composer Charles Mingus and, indeed, by female artists such as pianist Hazel Scott. Davis, however, had shaped his sound and masculine image around classic cool’s contrasting imperatives of inscrutability and restraint.Footnote 81 The “profound” expressiveness of Davis’s playing by the turn of the 1960s was thus especially striking to critics, who wrote of “the tears Miles weeps for every man,” his music’s “brooding” and “introspection,” and its moments of “excruciatingly agonizing sadness.”Footnote 82
How might we account for Kind of Blue’s juxtaposition of its supreme statement of emotional sovereignty, “So What,” with a piece as redolent of suffering as “Blue in Green”? A poem by Gwendolyn Brooks, published the year Kind of Blue was released, points to a way of comprehending Davis’s shifting performance of cool. As Brooks later explained, she had composed the poem after wondering how a group of teenage boys she observed, while passing by a Chicago pool hall, “felt about themselves.”Footnote 83 In “We Real Cool,” their collective voice seems to reverberate with self-assurance and swagger.Footnote 84 Brooks, however, commented in 1961 that her placement of “We” at the end of each line of the poem was “to indicate a sort of lostness … a little cry: we. And yet this ‘we’ can’t come and stand up straight and tall.” In public readings, Brooks delivered each “We” as a clipped, almost whispered insinuation of “lostness” amid the poem’s bravado. “Those pool players feel that way,” she remarked, “although I’m sure that most of them wouldn’t be able to express it.”Footnote 85
On “Blue in Green,” as in his interviews, Davis did express it. His opening note stretches out this “little cry,” which he leads with rather than burying it at the end of a line. Whereas Brooks’s poem centers classic cool’s front, which leaves no more than a stifled hint of vulnerability, Kind of Blue sees Davis expose both the front and the cry for what they are through the disjuncture between “So What” and “Blue in Green.” If the plaintive quality of his playing on “Blue in Green” burst the claim of emotional sovereignty, this did not render the mask of classic cool useless to Davis, however. The alternation between withholding and disclosure, exemplified by the two pieces’ juxtaposition, became Davis’s means of conveying expressive sovereignty. If he was to bare his emotions it would be on his terms, at moments of his choosing, while retaining the right to withdraw behind his barrier. In this way, Davis felt able to give of himself without surrendering himself – that is, without being owned, and so without losing his cool.Footnote 86
This alternation also mitigated, and thereby licensed, the breach of conventional masculinity effected by his open expressions of pain. Recorded and released in 1961, the album Someday My Prince Will Come saw Davis turn to the notion of chivalry in a bid to legitimate candid emotional expression as compatible with manly, warrior virtues.Footnote 87 Romance was to the fore. The album’s cover (see Figure 4) features a photographic portrait of Frances Taylor Davis, whom he had married in 1959, addressed by Davis’s trumpet in miniature silhouette. He had remonstrated with Columbia about the label’s use of a white female model on a previous cover, and this time, as he told Playboy, “It was my album and I’m Frances’s prince, so I suggested they use her for a model.”Footnote 88 The cruel reality was that while he styled himself as his wife’s knightly protector, Davis was repeatedly her assailant until she fled in 1965, fearing for her life.Footnote 89 While he framed her as his muse, he quelled her own artistic life, insisting, she later recalled, that she end her career as a celebrated dancer because “a woman should be with her man.”Footnote 90
Album cover of Miles Davis Sextet, Someday My Prince Will Come, first released by Columbia Records in 1961. Courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment. Photograph by Bob Cato.
Chivalric romance is announced at the album’s outset by its title track, presented as a brisk waltz, on which Davis’s playing is crisp and assured.Footnote 91 The third track, “Pfrancing” (a play on his wife’s name), is an up-tempo blues that Davis handles with almost preening confidence. Yet nestled between them is a ballad on which Davis evokes a highly contrasting image of masculinity, beset by frailty. “Old Folks” is a Tin Pan Alley song dating from 1938, the title of which, as Dedette Lee Hill’s sentimental lyrics establish, is the name “everyone” fondly calls a Civil War veteran who claims to have “held the speech at Gettysburg for Lincoln.” No less than the mournful tempo, the tone of Davis’s statement of the melody reflects the lyrics’ intimations of creeping infirmity (“his napkin up under his chin”) and mortality (“The day that they take Old Folks away”).Footnote 92 Davis’s instrumental rendition, however, overlays the song’s Civil War nostalgia with intimations of the anguish and woundedness the thirty-four-year-old himself was voicing in interviews around this time.Footnote 93
“Old Folks” epitomizes what made Davis perhaps the most singular of jazz trumpeters. From Buddy Bolden to Dizzy Gillespie, dominant jazz trumpet aesthetics had been brassily declarative, rooted in the instrument’s martial history.Footnote 94 Davis’s contrast lay not only in the coolness of his spare phrasing and moderate pitch and dynamics, but also in the very character of sound resulting from his contact with the instrument’s mouthpiece. As Robert Walser has observed, Davis’s unusually “loose” embouchure ceded a degree of precision while opening up “a great variety of tone colors and articulations.” A consequence of this “risky” technique was that Davis produced more “cracked and missed notes” than “any other major trumpet player.” Walser views these “cracks” as “mistakes” that Davis accepted as the price of an otherwise rewarding method.Footnote 95 However, Davis likely valued such sounds more positively. His second note on “Old Folks” is cracked, yet as easy (and, for most players, instinctive) as it would have been to start afresh, Davis plays on. His willingness to display his own “cracks” and vulnerabilities – to own them, in this way – was a declaration of expressive sovereignty.
The sense of infirmity laced into the composition of “Old Folks” is heightened by the breathiness and softness of much of Davis’s muted playing. And in another instance of his willingness to display what many musicians would have regarded as regrettable imperfections, condensed breath can be heard bubbling within his trumpet, repeatedly; he declined to drain the instrument from its water key during breaks in his playing.Footnote 96 The resulting sound conjures a leaky corporeality – open wounds, uncontainable feelings that age him. Like his cracked notes, these bubblings may be heard as the “telling ‘inarticulacy’” that Nathaniel Mackey finds across much Black literature and music, which encodes a critique of regnant notions of coherence and articulacy – and, perhaps, of the “clean,” even “articulation” demanded in classical trumpet playing. Such telling inarticulacy also, for Mackey, “symbolizes a refusal to forget damage done.”Footnote 97
The cracks Davis chose to exhibit likely had multiple sources. By the time he recorded “Old Folks” he had begun to suffer near-constant pain in his left hip due to sickle-cell disease – an illness overwhelmingly concentrated among people of African descent – and was relying on alcohol and cocaine for relief.Footnote 98 He bore the scars of his period of heroin addiction during the early 1950s and of the traumatic withdrawal and recovery that followed, along with knowledge of the pain he had inflicted, and was still inflicting, on others.Footnote 99 And if, as some who knew him believed, Davis felt sexual attraction toward men, the homophobia of American society and the jazz world would have compounded his own wounds.Footnote 100 Yet there is no reason to doubt that the racism he suffered (most acutely in his police beating) and witnessed, and told interviewers “makes me sick,” was a significant source of the inner pain he was now intent on expressing.
If the classically cool demeanor Davis had epitomized found parallels in the deportment of some civil rights activists during the late 1950s and early 1960s, his turn away from projecting emotional sovereignty presaged important changes within the freedom struggle over the following years. Amid the Birmingham, Alabama campaign of 1963 and uprisings in Harlem in 1964 and Watts in 1965, increasing numbers of activists questioned the strategy of exposing themselves to white violence and enduring assaults and taunts with stoic self-denial.Footnote 101 Rather than always suppressing fear, anger, and pain to preserve composure, some began to testify to their suffering. Interviewed by the white southern author Robert Penn Warren in March 1964, Stokely Carmichael, a leading SNCC activist, viscerally recalled his emotional state at a meal stop during the Freedom Rides:
you hear knife clicking, hot coffee being poured down people’s back … just before that first punch, just before you get hit … when tensions are built, and you can’t control your stomach, and it’s jumping, and you start thinking over and over again, I think, you know, maybe that’s the way it is, when you’re really alone.Footnote 102
By 1966, when he was elected SNCC’s chairman, Carmichael had repudiated the requirement to “suffer to be redeemed by sitting beside white folks.”Footnote 103 His speech that June in Greenwood, Mississippi, proclaiming the need for “Black Power,” made clear that the time for stoic forbearance had passed: “This is the 27th time I have been arrested – I ain’t going to jail no more.”Footnote 104
Discussion of emotional scars inflicted by racism became commonplace in the Black Power movement. In their 1967 manifesto, Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton identified self-doubt and even self-hatred as among the “psychological effects on black people of all their degrading experiences,” and in 1972 the Republic of New Africa listed “psychological disintegration” among the harms for which African Americans were owed reparations.Footnote 105 Academic studies concerning racism’s psychological impact had proliferated during the postwar period, and in pursuing the cases resulting in the US Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling of 1954, the NAACP had submitted that segregated schooling left Black children with lasting feelings of inferiority.Footnote 106 In the heat of the civil rights demonstrations that burgeoned in the late 1950s and early 1960s, many activists elected to mask their emotions, as required by respectability politics and classic cool’s projection of emotional sovereignty. By the mid-1960s, however, “battle fatigue” had set in among many “emotionally exhausted” activists.Footnote 107 Stoicism was increasingly cast aside; a new candor was needed, Carmichael and Hamilton insisted: “Anything less than clarity, honesty, and forcefulness perpetuates the centuries of sliding over, dressing up, and soothing down the true feelings, hopes and demands of an oppressed black people.”Footnote 108 Some activists now viewed certain emotional responses to white supremacy as qualifying credentials. Bill Ware, who led SNCC’s 1966 Atlanta Project, advised white members’ expulsion on the basis that, no matter how principled, “They cannot participate where anger … revenge … hate … are necessary.”Footnote 109
For Davis, selective acts of withdrawal and withholding became important means of coping with the intense emotions induced by racism, and of maintaining a sense of self-ownership even as he divulged more of his inner life. “I just go somewhere I can be quiet and don’t say nothing to nobody until I feel better,” he told Esquire in 1962.Footnote 110 The previous year, Ebony had reported that he “turned down an offer of $5,000” for a week-long club engagement in Chicago. “‘Man,’ said he, ‘I didn’t see a Negro bartender or waiter in there. How am I going to feel in a place like that. I don’t even like to play to an audience that ain’t got Negroes in it.’”Footnote 111 Davis never stated support for separatism, musical or societal, and he maintained close relationships with white friends and collaborators such as Gil Evans. Yet it is notable that virtually all the musicians he brought into his successive small ensembles between 1955 and 1968 were Black.Footnote 112 While the transition of SNCC and CORE to exclusively Black membership in the late 1960s had multiple causes, the “burnout” experienced by many activists was sometimes accompanied by a desire to insulate themselves from the hazards and indignities that interracial encounters often entailed. “I just want to pull out of the white world,” one unnamed activist told psychiatrist Robert Coles.Footnote 113 Such desires were one factor in the proliferation of Black political, professional, and cultural institutions during the Black Power era, which Jeffrey Ogbar attributes to African Americans carving out “spaces for respite from what they considered a hostile world.”Footnote 114
The alternation between disclosure and withholding that comprised Davis’s performance of expressive sovereignty at the beginning of the 1960s anticipated a similar dynamic that became more pronounced within the African American freedom struggle over the course of the decade. Relinquishing classic cool’s stoic projection of emotional sovereignty, activists increasingly spoke of their “true feelings,” in Carmichael and Hamilton’s words. Expressions of Black “rage” that had been voiced from the margins of the civil rights movement at the beginning of the 1960s, principally by James Baldwin and Malcolm X, now came to the fore.Footnote 115 Anger and disgust were notable elements of Black Power discourse, feeding media fascination with male leaders such as Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, and Eldridge Cleaver.Footnote 116 Yet in tandem with this ethic of disclosure, Black Power engendered practices of withholding and withdrawal. Creating “spaces for respite,” and marshaling Black communities’ resources and latent collective power, marked a significant inward turn. Moreover, echoing the method Davis had developed in the early 1960s for conveying expressive sovereignty, many activists continued to deploy devices of classic cool to signal a self-determined alternation between disclosure and withholding.
Shades, in particular, became integral to Black Power’s cool demeanor, signifying male and female activists’ right to screen themselves from the white gaze and thus their insistence that any disclosure would be on their terms.Footnote 117 Against the historic and contemporary backdrop of white presumptions to know African Americans’ thoughts and feelings, of stereotypes of (hot) Black emotionalism, which had long painted African Americans as childlike and unsuited to citizenship, and of notions of the Black subject as, in George Fredrickson’s words, a “slave to his emotions,” such withholding resisted white supremacy’s pervasive claims to ownership (mastery) of Black people’s inner lives and outward expression.Footnote 118 As Davis had done at the beginning of the decade, Black Power activists in the late 1960s redefined cool, locating its claims to self-ownership no longer in the performance of emotional sovereignty, but instead in the power of expressive sovereignty. For male activists in particular, as for Davis, retaining classically cool signals of withholding and inscrutability in alternation with disclosure also preserved some of the cultural capital of “tough” masculinity, even as newly candid expressions of emotion breached the conventional manly imperative of containment.
The sociologist Herman Gray has remarked of his generation of African American men who reached adulthood during the 1960s,
For many of us, jazz men articulated a different way of knowing ourselves and seeing the world through the very “structures of feeling” they assumed, articulated, and enacted – from the defiantly cool pose and fine vines of Miles to the black and third world internationalism that framed the ceaseless spiritual and musical quest of Coltrane.Footnote 119
What degree of direct impact Davis may have had on activists, male and female, who performed their cool demeanors on the front lines of civil rights and Black Power mobilizations resists quantification. Yet, as cool’s most widely recognized and documented exponent at a vital juncture in the African American freedom struggle, Davis offers scholars valuable insights into cool’s meanings and potentialities in this period. Attending to musicians’ sounds, public discourse, and demeanors enriches our understanding of the breadth of cultural resources the freedom struggle developed amid and was able to draw upon. Miles Davis – as much as those who demonstrated and organized – allows us to comprehend the 1960s as a decade when cool and its salience to African American politics were not eclipsed, but reborn.
Open access
