Kind of Cool

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The Phil Shotton ‘Kind of Cool’ Nonet plays live the entire iconic Birth of the Cool album! This concert is a rare and exciting opportunity to hear one of the most important and influential albums in jazz performed live, with the original instrumentation and arrangements, by some of the finest jazz musicians in the North of England.

Birth of the Cool was the most important stylistic step to follow after bebop – generating an entirely new wave of playing that influenced a new generation in the early 1950s. This compilation album by American jazz trumpeter and bandleader Miles Davis, released in February 1957 by Capitol Records compiled eleven tracks recorded by Davis’s nonet for the label over the course of three sessions during 1949 and 1950.

Featuring unusual instrumentation and several notable musicians, the music consisted of innovative arrangements influenced by classical orchestral music techniques such as polyphony, and marked a major development in post-bebop jazz. As the title suggests, these recordings are considered seminal in the history of cool jazz.