We have a little classic "East meets West" album for today. Birth of the Cool (sessions from 1949 and 1950) launched a whole bunch of careers (Mulligan and Konitz to the West coast scene and the official "cool jazz" movement), Lewis into the Modern Jazz Quartet, and Gil Evans' future collaborations with Davis) and in a lot of these cases this is the only time (or one of the few times) you will see some of these musicians playing with Miles Davis (Max Roach, for one). Also, there are a few less common instruments featured, like trombone, tuba, baritone sax, and French horn. Regular bop instruments like string bass and piano are either absent or pushed to the background. Finally this is the only Capitol album in the Miles Davis catalog; most of the albums from this period were issued by Prestige. Oddly enough, Miles Davis himself would return to hard bop after this and eventually "cool" into a whole different subgenre in modal jazz.
Birth of the Cool was one of the first jazz albums I really studied hard. It was almost always the first disc I played when opening up the store during my Borders years and the songs were tight enough to get a good feel for the distinctiveness of each track.
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