Hipness Is What It Is

A cool, light, bluesy sound, the feeling that he popped out of the womb wearing a business suit and horned-rim glasses, smoking, and with a blond on his arm, Paul Desmond was an icon of hipness

American jazz saxophonist and composer Paul Desmond behind the scenes of American television show Playboy's Penthouse. The show was hosted by Playboy founder and then-editor/publisher Hugh Hefner and first broadcast on October 24, 1959. Photo by Ted Williams.

Listen to Paul Desmond, what do you hear? The epitome of a cool emotional tone, means understated and expressive. He said just what he needed to say in the context of the moment, and most of what he said was just straight, pure, hip blues.

Despite his self-deprecating claims, he could play fast and hit rhythms hard. An admirer of Charlie Parker, he is one of the greatest post-Parker alto players, starting close to the same place as Lee Konitz but moving in a very different, though sympathetic, direction. One cultural perspective on Desmond (born Paul Emil Breitenfeld 100 years go today, he supposedly claimed he changed his name because Breitenfeld sounded “too Irish,” and his father Emil Breintenfeld was a notable early 20th century musician) is that he was what Woody Allen longed to be, the smart and talented (non-observant) Jewish kid who instead of growing up to be a narcissistic nebbish became one of the iconic jazz—the hippest American art—voices of the 20th century.

White Blues

With that cool, light, bluesy sound, the feeling that he popped out of the womb already wearing a business suit and horned-rim glasses, smoking, and with a blond on his arm, he was an icon of hipness, the white yang to Miles Davis’ yin. In a way that is more than a little corny (and skeevy) now, and even was in the late-50s/early-60s, Desmond’s sound was a style paragon for the likes of Esquire and Playboy, publications working very, very hard from a bourgeois consumerist perspective to be hip.

His career strikes me as showing he was aware of the social advantages of being a white jazz musician. While another white jazz star of the same era, Art Pepper, was self-conscious, insecure, and at times angry about feeling he didn’t measure up as a white man playing music created by Black musicians, Desmond was never self-conscious about his success, it never went to his head or his promotion of himself.

He famously said we wanted to sound like a “dry martini”—which of course is the hippest cocktail—and he nailed it, ultra-cool, chilling you into a state of fulfilled repose and clarity, and with a bit of an edge to it (although he was a much heavier scotch drinker, and of course a heavy smoker, and it’s the cigarettes that killed him in 1977, only 52 years old). The wit of his words is part of the hipness of his sound and the self-deprecation was a way to keep himself from blowing his own horn and let his playing speak for itself. Hipness is a stance, accessible to the mainstream but outside it, he let listeners come to him. The wit captures it not just in the “martini” remark but also “I have won several prizes as the world's slowest alto player, as well as a special award in 1961 for quietness.”

Jazz Cocktail

Vesper Martini:

3 parts gin

1 part vodka

1/2 part Lillet

Shake with ice until extremely cold, strain into the martini glass of your choice, serve with a twist. Then put on some records:

He’s most famous, especially with the general public, for playing with Dave Brubeck and penning “Take Five,” the jazz tune that everybody who hates/knows nothing about jazz loves (Desmond’s will mandates that all proceeds from the song go to the Red Cross). Take nothing away from it, it’s a great piece of music from one of the most important jazz albums ever made (from the unbelievable jazz year that was 1959), and Desmond was indispensable to Brubeck’s group and sound.

But that’s nowhere near the heights of his discography. The albums he made with Gerry Mulligan are special, an unreal quickness and depth of communication between the two. The albums with Jim Hall are classics for a reason, another meeting of two translucent voices who spoke loudly by playing quietly and succinctly. Those indulge in a lot of bossa nova, trying to cash in on what was a craze in the 1960s, but as whole it’s a wonderful body of work. This unearthed set of live recordings on Mosaic, from a little under two years before his death, is also superb.

There’s also an obscure and fine album he made on Fantasy in 1954, only his second release: Paul Desmond Quartet featuring Don Elliott. Elliott plays the mellophone, a pleasantly oddball instrument that’s a kind of French horn made for playing marching bands, which adds a big but soft and warm sound. Here’s one track from it, from the reissue collection of his first two albums, that tells you everything you need to know about Desmond’s hipness and where it sits on the edifice of 20th century culture, which is at the pinnacle:

If you know, you know. Good listening to all.