The hat Charles Mingus named his elegy after was not, strictly, a porkpie. Lester Young bought wider-brimmed ones and bent them himself, collapsing the crown and working the brim to the flat-topped shape he wanted. The look that stood for jazz cool for decades was a custom object, made by one man's hands on top of a hatmaker's work.

Young rose in Count Basie's band in the mid-1930s, playing tenor as no one had: airy, horizontal, conversational rather than harmonically aggressive. He held the horn out to the right at a 45-degree angle, a stance said to begin at the cramped Reno Club in Kansas City. The constraint became a trademark, and the hat finished it. Where Coleman Hawkins played like a declaration, Young played like a question held at a slight tilt.

Billie Holiday named him Pres, president of the tenor. Look and sound fused into one statement: authority without aggression, cool as a stance. The modern sense of the word cool drifted out of Young's circle into American speech, a debt widely noted and rarely credited to him.

In 1944 the Army drafted him, found marijuana, court-martialed him, and held him a year in a detention barracks. He wrote D.B. Blues about it and was dishonorably discharged in 1945. He died on March 15, 1959. Two months later Mingus recorded Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, a blues elegy that named the hat, not the man. It became a standard, and Joni Mitchell added words in 1979. The hat now sits in the Smithsonian, made at Duke-Rigs Men's Shop in New York.

Naming the elegy after an accessory was not sentimental. It was precise. The hat was the legible part of a man the country found easier to iconize than to protect.