Sonny Rollins is a nice mellow player. Paul Desmond and Dave Brubeck. Desmond wrote "Take Five". Paul Horn, Paul Winter are choices also. (Flute players..mellow). Laureindo Almeida plays mellow jazz Brazilian style on nylon string guitar. Chuck Mangione is considered to be pretty commercial by some jazz standards but his music is appealing in a mellow way. Duke Ellington with Johnny Hodges. Freddie Hubbard plays mellow sometimes. George Shearing, Ahmed Jamal, and Marion MacPartland offer a kind of impressionistic jazz. Early Nat King Cole is great too. Not many people know that he was a superb jazz pianist. Oscar Petersen can play very "pretty". Bill Evans plays in a romantic mood as does guitarist Jim Hall. The two have played together. Lester Young, the "Prez" with Billy Holiday never fails to set a mood. Some Coleman Hawkins is dreamy style jazz. Andre Previn was once a jazz pianist in this vein. Concerto for flute and jazz piano by Claude (?) (French composer) is nice for background music. James Moody, a sax player does a lot of "ballad" type tunes (not folk ballad, here.) Errol Garner is very listenable for relaxing music, a unique pianist.

Cool is epitomized by a kind of low-key listening type music practiced by Miles Davis, Lenny Tristano, Lee Konitz and others who followed that style. It tends to be less impassioned as hot jazz and less frantic than bebop or hard driving as the later Hard Bop. Cool jazz tended toward an intellectual approach to jazz emphasizing subtle and complex harmonic structure and lots of whistling wind through the reeds and horns. Tristano's "Imagination" and "Wow" would epitomize the extreme in the style. Or pieces like "Ice Cream Konitz". Paul Desmond must be in this category as well. Nowadays, the legacy would be in the playing of David Sandborn and Tom Scott who do a kind of easy listening fusion.

Frank