MacAdams, Birth of the Cool

[Dave Monroe]

Thought this was an interesting bit of info, might have already come up
here, but, from Lewis MacAdams, Birth of the Cool: Beat, Bebop, and the
American Avant-Garde (New York: The Free Press, 2001) ...

    Wrapped in a battered sheepskin jacket and peering through
Coke-bottle-thick eyeglasses, Sartre lectured up and down teh East Coast
and was the subject of adoring articles in New York newspapers and
magazines.  "One is free to act," he told reporters, "but one must act
to be free."  Beboppers like trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and pianist
Theolonious Monk picked up on him, appropriating the Left Bank
cafe-intellectual style--the black beret, the horn-rimmed glasses. the
wee goatee.  Gillespie claimed to wear berets because they were the only
hats that he could stuff into his pocket, but there was more to it than
that: the beret was his, and other musicians', way to signify that they
were no longer to be looked at as clowns and entertainers, but as
artists.  The jazzmen's adoption of the philosopher's trappings was a
merger of two potent stances--bebop and existentialism.
    In Paris, the existential crowd, or "les rats," hung out in "caves"
along the Boulevard St.-German-des-Pres [now the Boulevard Jean-Paul
Sartre et Simone de Beauvoir or somesuch, I believe] ner the Sorbonne.
In those tiny cellar nightclubs like Le Tabou, Le Mephisto, and La Rose
Rouge, the scene's reigning young chnateuse was Juliette Greco.  Wearing
a beret atop straight black hair that hung down over the turned-up
collar of her loosely tied raincoat whispering the songs of the poet
Boris Vian into a microphone with an air of studied indifference, she
expressed the world-weariness of young people who had lived through a
war.  In 1949, Miles Davis made his first trip to Paris to play the
inaugural post-Occupation jazz festival; he and Greco met and fell in
love.  As David would later tell his amanuensis, the poet Quincy Troupe,
Juliette Greco was "probably the first woman that I loved as a human
being."  The offspring of tehir three-yaer, long-distance liaison--of
the marriage of bebop and existentialism--was the birth of the cool.
(24)

... anyway, just thought it was interesting not only that "rats" would
have overtones of existentialism here, esp. in V.'s various contexts
(setting, writing, publication, reception), but that maybe that Paola
Maijstral/McClintic Sphere romance might even echo that Juliette
Greco/Miles Davis "liaison," among others.

Hollander, whatever you think of him, does offer some interesting
thoughts on a harmonic perhaps rather closer to the fundamental here at
...

www.achilles.net/~howardm/pynchon.shtml

... comparing Paola and McClintic to Thelonious Sphere Monk and one
Baroness Kathleen Annie Pannonica de Koenigswarter.

On Juliette Greco, by the way, see ...

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/juliette.greco/greco.htm

I only have La Femme, which is apparently an uncharacteristically
"groovy" (in an Astrud Gilberto sense) for her, but I like it well
enough.  Probably exactly what just about anyone would expect an
existentialist French chanteuse to sound like.  A couple of decent
sources for cool French pop records ...

http://www.dustygroove.com/index.htm

http://www.magic-records.com/

I got La Femme at Dusty Groove last time they had it in, for less than
most places ask for U.S. releases here ...