Home » Jazz Articles » History of Jazz » Coleman Hawkins: Fifty Years Gone, A Saxophone Across Time
Coleman Hawkins: Fifty Years Gone, A Saxophone Across Time
Monk went into an emotional tailspin upon Hawkins’ death. Hawkins had been Monk’s first employer in the clubs of midtown Manhattan, and had given Monk his first recording date.
Coleman Hawkins
saxophone, tenor1904 - 1969
Thelonious Monk
piano1917 - 1982
With Monk was the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, attendant to jazz royalty, in whose hotel suite
Charlie Parker
saxophone, alto1920 - 1955
Coleman Hawkins: the name itself has a linguistic dignity unique to a music personage. Grouped with early figures in jazz, he may more generally be known about, even without specific recall, existing somewhere up in a Mt. Rushmore-worthy historical cloud. Fifty years after his passing, his music is still important and enjoyable in itself, and worthy of study beyond simple historic significance. It is generally accepted that every jazz saxophonist owes Hawkins for the place the horn occupies today.
Before Young and Webster
Born in 1904, Hawkins was five years older than the two great progenitors of tenor saxophone styles:
Lester Young
saxophone1909 - 1959
Ben Webster
saxophone, tenor1909 - 1973
Consider: his career started before the first recording of the
Louis Armstrong
trumpet and vocals1901 - 1971
Sonny Rollins
saxophoneb.1930
John Coltrane
saxophone1926 - 1967
Duke Ellington
piano1899 - 1974
Dizzy Gillespie
trumpet1917 - 1993
Django Reinhardt
guitar1910 - 1953
Armstrong, for all his importance, never made it to free jazz and avant-garde; Coleman Hawkins did. Hawkins endured: from 1923 with the
Fletcher Henderson
arranger1897 - 1952
Max Roach
drums1925 - 2007
Miles Davis
trumpet1926 - 1991
Hawkins was four years older than
Chu Berry
saxophone, tenor1908 - 1941
Cab Calloway
composer / conductor1907 - 1994
Hawkins generally played lower notes than Lester Young, but higher than Ben Webster. Young was lyrical, sweet, fast, playing in the upper register of the instrument, often sounding more like an alto than a tenor, a "cool" sound, leading the way to cool jazz.
Stan Getz
saxophone, tenor1927 - 1991
Gerry Mulligan
saxophone, baritone1927 - 1996
Paul Desmond
saxophone, alto1924 - 1977
Dexter Gordon
saxophone, tenor1923 - 1990
Joshua Redman
saxophoneb.1969
Eric Alexander
saxophone, tenorb.1968
Charles Lloyd
saxophoneb.1938
The Tenor Up Front
In the 1920s, the tenor sax was not used for improvisation, instead fitting in between clarinets and brass instruments in military and big bands. It was Louis Armstrong who broke out from the collective approach of musicians in bands large and small, with the innovation of soloing on trumpet.Hawkins was 19 when he joined Fletcher Henderson's orchestra in New York in 1923. Armstrong connected with Henderson in 1924, bringing his solo style, which inspired Hawkins on saxophone. Hawkins style became more fluid, legato, in place of a staccato dance band meter. Hawkins' individualism as a soloist on tenor would later be a bridge from the era of big band ensembles and swing to developments like bebop, which emphasized individual musicians in small groups.
Hawkins remained with Henderson for eleven years, but grew frustrated with the limitations of the musicians around him. Hawkins had acquired the nickname "Bean," for the mastery of his instrument and the intelligence he exhibited in understanding and applying theories of harmony.
Hawkins had been playing music since he was five years old, starting with piano and later cello, encouraged by his parents, and gravitated to saxophone by age nine. He attributed his skill to years of work. "Sure," he recalled in 1960, "I was advanced for my time in those early days, for just that reason—I had studied hard since I was five, and studied classics all my life, and it gives me an advantage over the other fellows I was playing with."
Enticed by reports of the warm response to American musicians in Europe, he left for a five-year sojourn to the continent in 1934 and was received enthusiastically. He played with multi-instrumentalist
Benny Carter
saxophone, alto1907 - 2003
Upon returning to the U.S., Hawkins, then just still in his early 30s, already was considered an old-timer as Young had re-emerged as the new tenor with the Count Basie band 1936-1940. Jazz critic Whitney Balliet of The New Yorker observed there has long been a tendency among jazz aficionados to regard each innovation in the music as "progress," and then abandoning the musicians who have supposedly been supplanted. Thus, Hawkins, a founding father, had been pushed aside by the popularity of "Pres," Lester Young, "the president of the saxophone," so anointed by
Billie Holiday
vocals1915 - 1959
Two "cutting sessions" between Hawkins and Young to determine primacy still engage partisan debate, now through hearsay among people who weren't there. Each was a master, of different styles: Young perhaps more refined, Hawkins perhaps rougher but more technically proficient. Young shrugged it off, suggesting that Hawkins was the "first president," and that "Pres" himself had followed as second president. Both men later played on the same stages in "Jazz at the Philharmonic" tours.
In the Firmament
In 1939 Hawkins assembled a nine-piece band and recorded "Body and Soul," a well-known ballad, in an improvisation that implies but never quite yields the actual melody. Rough edges had been polished away. The song was a jukebox hit, even with and perhaps because of its sophistication, and remains a classic. It predated Charlie Parker's treatment eight years later in 1947 of "Embraceable You," improvising on the familiar
George Gershwin
composer / conductor1898 - 1937
Sonny Rollins recalls that Thelonious Monk once asked Hawkins, "Hawk, how could you make a song that's a ballad and you didn't play the melody, and there was no words and still it became a hit?"
Rollins himself is stumped by the question, about a song recorded now 80 years ago, but still timely and easily listenable. It smooths out some of the lyrical but jumpy "hot jazz" that otherwise characterizes some of that period by Hawkins, and is already more modern than what was then being played in the swing era. It has a lightness, but also a depth. Rollins: "'Body and Soul' is a masterpiece. It still is, will always be. Far be it beyond me to explain it. It's why Coleman Hawkins is in the firmament."
Rollins explains that what Hawkins brought to the development of jazz music required musicians to have a greater understanding of music theory than did Young. Young had a style, he says, but Hawkins required more from the intellect. Rollins has stated that, over time, the demarcations between the Young and Webster schools are more nuanced than strict, and that he, like others, has built his own efforts upon the legacies of both. Beyond each he looks back to Coleman Hawkins as the fountainhead.
At The Birth of Bebop
Hawkins was the leader on what is generally considered to have been the first ever bebop recording session, of "Woody'n You" on February 16, 1944, with Dizzy Gillespie and Max Roach. It was an homage to
Woody Herman
band / ensemble / orchestra1913 - 1987
Kenny Clarke
drums1914 - 1985
Hawkins was fully middle-aged, 40, but took interest in the experiments and developments of the bebop youngsters, and advanced their cause. Hawkins knew Monk from Minton's Playhouse, the afterhours bebop incubator uptown in Harlem, and brought him downtown for Monk's first employment in the clubs of Manhattan's 52nd Street, from spring to late December in 1944. On October 19, 1944, Hawkins included him in what was the pianist's first recording date. Numbers included "Flying Hawk," "Drifting on a Reed," and "On a Bean," and appear on various reissues, most easily located now under "Bean and the Boys." In 1947, a 21-year-old Miles Davis cycled through a series of aggregations, among them the Coleman Hawkins All-Stars.
Hawkins was a mentor who understood and could complement what these younger musicians were doing compositionally, but he was not to stay with them. Their sound was more fervent than his own best playing. As Gillespie, Monk, and Charlie Parker became more closely associated with bebop, Hawkins moved on between styles and groups, with more traditional players who had gained a proficiency on their instruments through the swing era, and introducing what would become considered "modern," and then, later, "mainstream."
Being Modern
Hawkins reunited with Monk, with whom he hadn't played in years, in a June 1957 session including John Coltrane that would yield the classic Monk's Music album issued later that summer; the drummer was
Art Blakey
drums1919 - 1990
This 1957 period was when Monk tutored Coltrane on the pianist's compositions and theories, and they performed together for five months in the Five Spot café. It was the period after Coltrane had been fired by Miles Davis for drug use, and then had experienced his spiritual recovery. Monk himself had begun that year in a psychiatric hospital. It is said that what they formulated in those months set the pattern for all that they would accomplish over the remainder of the lives, even their furthest reaches. Recording with them in this time frame was Coleman Hawkins, almost 35 years after breaking in with Fletcher Henderson.
On December 8, 1957, Hawkins, Young, and Webster all appeared together on a CBS television special, "The Sound of Jazz," performing with Billie Holiday her song "Fine and Mellow," available on YouTube. It's an opportunity to compare and contrast each man's playing, and watch Holiday's response to each. Young is sublime, Webster focused, Hawkins impassioned. Another, from 1958, "Jumpin' With Symphony Sid" has Young and Hawkins dueling: Hawkins strongly defines the parameters, and Young defies anyone who would think Pres was soft.
In 1960 Hawkins recorded on the Max Roach/Abbey Lincoln We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, a strongly politicized declaration linking jazz and the civil rights movement. In 1962, Hawkins recorded with Duke Ellington for the 1962 album Duke Ellington Meets Coleman Hawkins, with Ellington veterans in a small group, saxophonists
Johnny Hodges
saxophone, alto1907 - 1970
Harry Carney
saxophone, baritone1910 - 1974
Lawrence Brown
tromboneb.1907
Ray Nance
cornet1913 - 1976
In 1963, Sonny Rollins and Hawkins played together at the Newport Jazz Festival, and followed up with a studio date released as Sonny Meets Hawk!. Lester Young had already been dead for four years. Rollins was venturing into free jazz, and Hawkins went with him. Rollins always held Hawkins in high regard, even idolized him, and each is respectful of the other.
This would be Hawkins' last album. On "Lover Man," both are exploring with their horns; as Rollins concludes with a squeaking altissimo, Hawkins is more grounded, but right with the younger man. Each addresses Gershwin's "Summertime" abstractly in his own manner. On "Yesterdays," Hawkins introduces a fluttering modernism that Rollins pursues. Rollins' identity then was as more of an experimenter, but Hawkins is not shy about the new idiom. Rollins does not overwhelm Hawkins, and Hawkins does not require careful handling.
The Ken Burns Jazz series singled out two dozen performers for dedicated retrospective albums, showcasing their significance. Coleman Hawkins was one of them. All About Jazz has more than a dozen articles describing and analyzing Hawkins in depth, easily found under his name in this site's search window. One in particular, by the late Henk De Boer, surveys a library of selected Hawkins recordings, a retrospective so complete it even includes a detour into bossa nova as Hawkins sought to be contemporary amid changing times. Read our coverage.
Hawkins' last performance was at the North Park Hotel in Chicago a month before he died. It was just a few months before Woodstock.
Tags
History of Jazz
Arthur R George
United States
Coleman Hawkins
Thelonious Monk
Charlie Parker
Lester Young
Ben Webster
Louis Armstrong
Sonny Rollins
John Coltrane
duke ellington
Dizzy Gillespie
Django Reinhardt
Fletcher Henderson
Max Roach
Miles Davis
Chu Berry
Cab Calloway
Stan Getz
Gerry Mulligan
Paul Desmond
Dexter Gordon
Joshua Redman
Eric Alexander
charles lloyd
Benny Carter
Billie Holliday
George Gershwin
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Art Blakey
Johnny Hodges
Harry Carney
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