Birth of the Cool is a compilation album by the American jazz trumpeter and bandleader Miles Davis, released in February 1957 by Capitol Records.

[7] In 1948, Davis, becoming increasingly concerned about growing tensions within the Parker quintet, left the group and began looking for a new band to work with.

According to jazz historian Ted Gioia: [The participants] were developing a range of tools that would change the sound of contemporary music.

They explored new instrumental textures, preferring to blend the voices of the horns like a choir rather than pit them against each other as the big bands had traditionally done with their thrusting and parrying sections.

They brought down the tempos of their music ... they adopted a more lyrical approach to improvisation ...[9]The nonet recorded twelve tracks for Capitol during three sessions over the course of nearly a year and a half.

Davis, Lee Konitz, Gerry Mulligan and Bill Barber were the only musicians who played on all three sessions, though the instrumental lineup was constant (excepting the omission of piano on a few songs and the addition of Kenny Hagood on "Darn That Dream").

The first session occurred on January 21, 1949, recording four tracks: Mulligan's "Jeru" and "Godchild" as well as John Lewis's "Move" and "Budo".

Jazz critic Richard Cook hypothesizes that Capitol, wanting to get a good start, recorded these numbers first because they were the most catchy tunes in the nonet's small repertoire.

The second recording date came three months later on April 22, 1949 with Davis filling in for Fats Navarro in Tadd Dameron's band with Charlie Parker during the interim.

At this session, the nonet recorded Mulligan's "Venus de Milo", Lewis's "Rouge", Carisi's "Israel", and "Boplicity", a collaboration between Davis and Evans, credited to the pseudonym "Cleo Henry".

[21]Davis saw the full 18-piece Thornhill orchestra as cumbersome and thus decided to split the group in half for his desired sound.

The final track, "Darn That Dream" (the only song with vocals, by Hagood), was included with the other eleven on a 1972 LP Capitol Jazz Classics, Vol.

[25] In 1998, Capitol Records released The Complete Birth of the Cool, which was remastered by Mark Levinson and collected the nonet's live and studio tracks onto a single CD.

"[36] Winthrop Sargeant, classical music critic at The New Yorker, compared the band's sound to the work of an "impressionist composer with a great sense of aural poetry and a very fastidious feeling for tone color...

[39] In 1957, after the release of Birth of the Cool, Down Beat magazine wrote that the album "[influenced] deeply one important direction of modern chamber jazz.

[43] Many members of the Miles Davis Nonet went on to have successful careers in cool jazz, notably Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis, and Lee Konitz.

Mulligan moved to California and joined forces with trumpeter Chet Baker in a piano-less quartet, before creating his Concert Jazz Band.