The Birth Of The Cool Bebop was hip, with its own look, its own argot and its own rather exclusive set of attitudes. The 1950s would see bop move to a more central position, through the emergence of the related forms of hard bop and soul jaz: on the jukeboxes of the African-American community. The end of the decade also saw the first stirring of another development that would play a key role in the 1950s; the Nonet sessions of 1949-50 under the leadership of Miles Davis (1926-91), later dubbed the 'Birth Of The Cool', took an alternative approach to the by then well-established mores of bebop, using careful arrangements by the likes of Gerry Mulligan (1927-96) and Gil Evans (1912-88), and a less involved interplay of musical textures that would be taken up in the West Coast and cool jazz movements of the coming decade.
Jazz And Blues Part Ways So it was that in the 1940s jazz and blues music, which had been so closely linked at the start of the decade, began to pull apart from one another. As far as blues far were concerned, the Tympany Five, a small jump band led by saxophonist Louis Jordan (1908-75) and playing light, jazz-tinged blues and novelty numbers, was the number one combo in the country. Newly urbanized black communities seized this fresh, rocking music, which represented a welcome move forward from the memories of the rural South. Similar groups led by Roy Milton (1907-83) and Eddie Vinson (1917-88) were also finding an audience. Boogie-woogie, once embrace-by jazz bands, was now being abandoned but picked up on by those little blues combos, which utilized the rhythm in very different ways.
Billboard, the record industry trade paper, trace< the sales progress of records and its dilemma as to wh; to call 'black music' was apparent. In 1942 Billboard tracked it as the Harlem Hit Parade, changed this name to Race Records in 1945 and in 1949 called it Rhythm & Blues. Finally, they had come up with a term that applied to all secular black music that wasn bebop or traditional jazz: R&B.