The Cool Robert Farris Thompson Summary

Robert Farris Thompson, a Yale professor, is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost experts on the Afro-Atlantic world. Though he has published countless numbers of papers and books, Thompson compiled a select number of the papers he wrote and interviews he conducted into Aesthetic of the Cool: Afro-Atlantic Art and Music, considered by some to be the magnum opus of his illustrious academic career. In doing so, Thompson provides readers with a comprehensive overview of decades of research, enlightening them on concepts of the cool and Afro-Atlantic music. Thompson begins by discussing the relationship between African dance percussive music, the latter of which he lists the four traits of. He details how talking dances require dancers …show more content…
As a result, many African traditions, such as face-freezing while dancing and Cuban manifestations of a leopard king messenger, were very closely replicated in the New World. Over time, however, these traditions were recombined and evolved into many different forms explored in later chapters, such as breakdancing in the Bronx and naming and decorating buses in Haiti. As Thompson believes that the purer a person becomes, the cooler and therefore more ancestral he or she becomes, these deep-rooted artistic forms are united through a thick vein of coolness. Whether maintaining a constant facial expression while performing stage or building abstract sculptures, one is always using some element of the cool, especially as music in America has now been proven to carry a heavy African influence. Thompson’s continual switching from art form to art form in his book represents how all these seemingly distinct African arts are all connected through the cool, and even his poetic writing style is reminiscent of the cool that is so heavily prevalent in African percussive rhythms. Thus, Aesthetic of the Cool is ultimately a testimony to the centrality of the cool to the melting pot of African culture and its influence in the Americas, serving as an organic antithesis to a highly categorized Eurocentric art and resulting in a unique cultural atmosphere in …show more content…
Being that the genre came about after World War II, a time when blacks had gained enough social, economic and political independence to rid themselves of subservient attitudes towards whites, black jazz musicians were able to play more for personal self-exploration and interest rather than entertainment and satisfaction of others. Thus, West African cool and African American jazz cool are one and the same. Both employ a mask (the mask of performance) to serve as a front for inner exploration and improvement (the innovation and development of jazz to African American tastes rather than commercial Caucasian ones). Even the fact that cool jazz appears to have few African elements serves as a mask for the recapturing of jazz from mainstream media and reversion to its pure artistic