The Hard Core Of Cool

University of Pennsylvania music historian Guthrie Ramsey believes it's about control -- over " something, whether [it's] the basketball court, a musical instrument or just your wardrobe." Cool is so individual that one man's cool won't work for other men, in other times. Exuberant 1930s singer Cab Calloway, suave '40s crooner Billy Eckstine, and "extremely insular" '50s jazz icon Miles Davis were notably different -- yet "all were considered cool," Ramsey says.

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Each One Teach One

Cool looks instinctive, but growing up with three brothers and raising three sons taught me something surprising:

Cool is learned.

I've seen boys for cool's sake squeeze easy smiles into scowling submission. I've snickered as youths altered perfectly serviceable gaits the way my oldest brother did at 14. One day, Steve was just walking. The next, he was lowering his right shoulder, bending his left knee and dragging his right foot with each step before adding a barely perceptible bounce. Steve's schoolboy shuffle became what we called a "pimp walk." Every wanna-be-cool kid had one.

Art Mallory of Northeast learned early that looking cool isn't determined by a man's profession. His dapper dad, Artie, was a Detroit janitor who would sit with his son before the TV "watching old movies from the '40s and '50s, seeing how those guys dressed," Mallory recalls. By high school, the son had joined a "fashion club" whose members competed with stylish black boys from neighboring schools. Today, Mallory, 42, is a Verizon technician and entrepreneur who recently traded his trademark bow ties for handmade silk ascots.

Some black youths struggle with cool's demanding curriculum. As a New York preteen, former TransAfrica president Bill Fletcher, 52, of Mitchellville, labored "to emulate the brothers I saw who were cool. . . . They had the walk, they could dress, they could dance. . . . It didn't work."

Then at 14, Fletcher read "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," which sparked a penchant for activism and "quasi-military" sunglasses and leather jackets. Suddenly, "I was at the cutting edge," says Fletcher, a visiting professor at Brooklyn College. " Cool is being at the cutting edge, whether it's politically, musically or artistically."

How about intellectually? Ramsey is also a jazz pianist whose dual roles as academic and hipster suggest to him that cool-wise, "the life of the mind" is less appreciated.

"As Professor Ramsey, I get afforded a certain amount of 'deference,' " he says. But at his piano gigs, "as soon as I start moving the crowd . . . I'm building a different kind of power -- where I can walk off the stage and get [women's] telephone numbers."