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For better or worse, the "Cool" sessions changed jazz forever. By 1950 Nat Cole, another Capitol artist and that supreme inventor of the modern small-group sound, was disbanding his Trio for his highly profitable sugary pop glop (I don't blame him but some jazz buffs do), and Miles Davis stepped into the suddenly vacant storefront with what essentially is art music. Jazz went from extroversion to introversion to such an extent many groups seemed to play solely for themselves, helping gradually turn it from America's primary popular music into the corpse of today.
That said, the "Cool" sides are defining moments in jazz, and among the greatest. It's not as though the music hadn't had odd combinations before, or instruments -- violins and harmonicas and accordions got into the act, and the tuba was the string bass of the twenties big bands -- or others with the artistic itch, like Gil Evans's once boss Claude Thornhill; but Davis not only made it work, he made it work with intense eloquence. This is not music to snuggle up to; it takes three or four plays before you can really immerse yourself in the totality of Davis's ideas. And these ideas demand respect. "Pioneering don't pay" said Andrew Carnegie, and these sides didn't sell, but they stand as perhaps the most forward-looking and intellectually satisfying tracks ever laid down by jazzmen.
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