The word “cool” goes back to the hip vocabulary of the 1940s, when it was
used to distinguish a type of modern jazz from the “hot” music of the 1920s. The
defining moment was The Birth of the Cool recordings of 1949 and 1950
(http://tychonic.antioch.edu/~michael/cooljazz/intro.html). The songs were
originally issued on 78s—things your grandparents played on gramophones in
the days before LPs.
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