与“热爵士乐”相对应，也称“凉爵士乐”，它在演奏上偏于轻松从容，是一种柔美的爵士乐风格。由于集中在
美国西海岸，故又称“西海岸爵士”（West Coast Jazz）。
从演奏形式上看，冷爵士有点类似于古典音乐中的室内乐，乐队一般由3～6名乐手组成，其中最典型的是由钢琴、贝司、鼓组成的爵士三重奏。萨克斯、小号、
颤音琴盖瑞．穆里根（Gerry Mulligan，1927～1996，作曲家，编曲，擅长乐器：上低音萨克斯）
Cool jazz.
From the late 1940s, a jazz style derived largely from
Bop, but advocating a moderation of those musical, emotional or ritualistic qualities associated with the parent style. Most of its musicians pursued a soft level of dynamics, for example favouring drum brushes rather than sticks, and many avoided a pronounced use of vibrato. Beyond this the pursuit of moderation was diverse and inconsistent. Possibilities included the meticulously restrained lyricism of Stan Getz’s solo on Early Autumn with Woody Herman’s Second Herd (1948, Cap.); the elimination of cutting sharply differentiated articulation, as heard in the highly chromatic and rather unmelodic unison themes and improvised lines presented by Lennie Tristano’s group (1949); an emphasis on mid-range register and subdued timbres, and a delicate balance between improvisation and composition, as practised by Miles Davis’s ‘Birth of the Cool’ nonet (1949–50); the Baroque- and Classically-influenced chamber jazz of the Modern Jazz Quartet (from 1952), with its concomitant appeal to an audience behaviour associated with the concert hall rather than the nightclub; the heady, transparent and contrapuntal dialogues improvised by Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan in Mulligan’s pianoless quartet (also from 1952). Cool jazz led directly to another substyle of bop, West Coast jazz. The distinction between bop and cool jazz may seem obscure as these styles share many of the same conventions.
M.Williams: ‘Bebop and After’, Jazz: New Perspectives on the History of Jazz, ed. N. Hentoff and A.J. McCarthy (New York, 1959/R), 287–301