Joe Locke and the Milt Jackson Rhythm Section gave a good vocabulary lesson there last Friday. Locke filled in on vibraphone (kind of like a xylophone) for the late Milt Jackson, whose rhythm section decided to give a tributary performance, a jazz wake if you will. Joe just leaks energy, and I highly recommend seeing his next performance in the city before he leaves for England. In between his invigorating solos he literally ran offstage so that the rhythm section could get a taste of some of the spotlight, and he always scats the notes of whatever he’s playing while pounding it out on the vibes. His whole air made me realize just how much we’ve lost our grasp of “cool.”

In mainstream music we never see guys like Joe anymore; it’s always the group of idiot teenagers whose manager and producer have more say in the music than the band does. And in the rare instances when we find a band that has creative control, what drives their music never really tends to be the same thing that drives Joe and the Milt Jackson Rhythm Section—the thing that I’m sure we’ve lost touch with. Granted, there are exceptions, but the wave of alternative rock, emo, and hip-hop that we’re seeing dominate the charts now is, at its core, driven by the fixation that the artists have on showing off.

For some reason—most likely a lack of ideas about anywhere new to go with music—current mainstream rock has come to rely on shock value. The genre now figures that, if it gives it to us hard enough, mindlessly enough, and distorted beyond all recognition, we won’t realize that the tunes just lack any substantive value.

Rap, on the other hand, loses its concern with where it’s stemming from by being so concentrated on showing that it knows its roots (i.e. Kanye’s reliance on sampling Nina Simone and the Beatles instead of original beats). Its fans, however, never seem to realize the references, making the whole self-destructive process pointless; I can’t even count how many people I’ve had to tell that Ma$e’s new single, “Welcome Back” is actually from the 1970s sitcom Welcome Back Kotter.

The front that these genres have had to put up as of late has forced them to become a hollow shell of music. What they’re missing—what Joe Locke embodies and the aspect of “cool” that has been forgotten—is soul. Cool is not screaming at the top of your lungs, “I will never know myself until I do this on my own” (cough, Linkin Park).

The Milt Jackson Rhythm Section doesn’t have to put up the front to make good music or to make their presence known: last Friday all of Smoke was awestruck at the section’s talent (another forgotten word), produced by a couple of old black versions of Mr. Magoo with sensible suits and ties, jamming with a shy pianist with a five o’ clock shadow. They can spend their time concentrating on their music because they’re not distracted by trying to show that they’ve got balls. They have soul, and soul permeates without effort, and that’s what’s cool, baby.