What it is, what to hear first, and what sits next to it.
Cool jazz is a jazz style that emerged in the late 1940s in New York City. During 1945, after the Second World War, there was an influx of Californian (predominantly white) jazz musicians to New York. Once there, these musicians mixed with the mostly black bebop musicians, but were also strongly influenced by the "smooth" sound of saxophonist Lester Young. The style that emerged became known as "cool jazz", which avoided the aggressive tempos and harmonic abstraction of bebop. .