ABSTRACT
The cool image adopted by black jazz musicians in the 1950s and 1960s was a potent form of masculine expression. This “cool pose” included the visual and cultural representations of masculinity as well as modes of artistic expressions of masculinity. Black jazz musicians projected the aesthetics of power and invulnerability through cool pose as a means of establishing a cool personal image as well as a way of challenging entrenched modes of white hegemony. This chapter examines how a cool pose is expressed sonically in hard bop, specifically in the music of Lee Morgan. It identifies some of the ways in which bebop and the blues converge to project masculinity in hard bop.
