Coleman Hawkins

• Born: November 21, 1904
• Birthplace: St. Joseph, Missouri
• Died: May 19, 1969
• Place of death: New York, New York

American tenor saxophonist

Hawkins is generally recognized as the first great tenor saxophonist in jazz. He influenced virtually all subsequent players on all types of saxophones in the jazz world.

The Life

Coleman Randolph Hawkins was born in St. Joseph, Missouri. His parents had one other child, a girl who died one year before Coleman was born. His father was an electrical engineer; his mother taught him to play the piano at the age of five. He also learned to play the cello before taking up the instrument with which he became associated, the saxophone. He attended high school in Chicago and in Topeka, Kansas, where he also studied harmony and composition at Washburn College.

Hawkins was a music professional when only sixteen. In 1921, while playing in a theater orchestra in Kansas City, he was signed by Mamie Smith, a black singer whose Jazz Hounds was one of the first African American jazz groups to be recorded regularly. In 1924 he joined the band of one of the foremost jazz musicians, Fletcher Henderson. In ten years with Henderson, a long stint for a jazz musician at the time, he developed a highly innovative style.

By 1934 many opportunities for black American musicians were developing in Europe. From March, 1934, Hawkins worked in Britain, France, Holland, Switzerland, Belgium, and the Scandinavian countries for more than five years. His associations there included the great British orchestra leader Jack Hylton, who had invited Hawkins to play with his orchestra; Django Reinhardt, the most renowned European guitarist; and another American who was also touring Europe at the time, Benny Carter. Hawkins is credited with raising the level of European jazz to a new height. By 1939, however, he, along with many other Americans abroad, returned from the wartorn European continent as World War II escalated.

At this point, Hawkins’s style reached a peak, especially with his highly original yet popular recording of “Body and Soul.” For two years he led his own bands and then toured with small bands. He continued to perform with important jazz figures of the 1920’s and 1930’s but also appeared with bebop organizations that developed in the mid-1940’s, playing with Dizzy Gillespie as early as 1943. In his own band in 1944 he employed and played the compositions of pianist Thelonious Monk and helped raise Monk to prominence.

Among his later successes were a return trip to Europe in 1954, recordings with Duke Ellington in 1962, and many appearances at the Village Vanguard in Manhattan. Although he had a problem with alcohol in his last years, he worked until shortly before his death in 1969. He was survived by his wife, Delores, his son Rene, and his two daughters, Mimi and Colette.

The Music

The saxophone, with few exceptions an unpopular instrument in the performance of classical music, was not used in the ragtime era from the late 1890’s until well into the 1910’s. A few early jazz musicians played it in the World War I period (1914-1919), but these men did not become important figures, and they employed the tenor saxophone as a rhythmical instrument, not a melodic one. Coleman Hawkins has generally received credit from jazz historians for making the tenor saxophone a staple of jazz music. Influenced by Louis Armstrong, who revolutionized trumpet playing, Hawkins did the same thing with the saxophone. He introduced a smoother and more rhythmical tonguing of his instrument and adopted hard and heavy reeds that his contemporaries did not have the strength to use.

Hawkins was a competitive man with the urge to outdo his contemporaries, but his originality involved a great capacity for listening and learning from other musicians. He could adapt to the tenor saxophone the best musical expressions that he heard on other instruments. By the late 1930’s he was able to do what only Armstrong had done: interpret the songs that he played—in effect recompose them—in performances that went far beyond the intentions of the original composer. He was one of the great energizers of European jazz during his five years abroad. His unique style became the standard for almost all saxophonists, especially tenor saxophonists in the field of jazz.

“One Hour.”It must be remembered that performances of jazz music, especially in recordings before the time of long-playing (LP) records and later developments such as compact discs (CDs), usually lasted about three minutes, and a new and important stage of a musician’s development might be reflected in several recordings made at about the same time. Therefore, it is sometimes difficult to choose one banner performance by Hawkins. In 1929, Hawkins, while a member of the Fletcher Henderson orchestra, on occasion played with other organizations, including McKinney’s Cotton Pickers and the Mound City Blue Blowers. Within a week he recorded with both these bands, and in each case the style he had been developing in this decade became obvious.

“One Hour,” with the latter group, can be associated with James P. Johnson’s song “If I Could Be with You One Hour Tonight,” still well known many decades later. Although Johnson’s melody is never heard directly, “One Hour” is clearly based on its chords. A six-measure introduction by Hawkins, in which he abandons the conventional staccato rhythm employing short notes that even he had been relying upon and instead offers a legato style with descending figures that would become one of the features of his later playing. This performance illustrates the improvisational approach to familiar songs that is taken for granted today but was unknown in jazz at that time. Critic Gary Giddins considers this eighteen-measure solo to be the first “entirely successful tenor solo.” “Body and Soul.”Hawkins recorded one of the most famous of all jazz performances on October 11, 1939, in the RCA studio in New York City. The song was “Body and Soul,” composed nine years earlier by John Green. The theme of this song is never stated directly, although it is recognizable in the early measures of the recording. Thereafter the performance is all an improvisation, grounded on Hawkins’s grasp of the song’s melodic and rhythmical possibilities. Today it sounds conventional, but that is because instrumentalists after Hawkins enthusiastically adapted his kind of jazz invention.

Like Armstrong’s interpretation of “West End Blues” eleven years earlier, Hawkins “Body and Soul” was recognized as entirely original, both in way he played the tenor saxophone and in his method of recording the song. Although truly original work is often not recognized as such until long afterward, this recording proved to be enormously popular. Hawkins had been developing this style for many years, and thus his interpretation of “Body and Soul” was not a sudden breakthrough into a new style of playing the saxophone but rather a particularly pure example of a style he had been perfecting in his decades with the Fletcher Henderson orchestra.

He was immediately obliged to repeat his performance, which he sometimes did on recordings and sometimes transformed extensively. It is likely that he had performed it many times on the European tour that he had just concluded, but now his fans demanded it, and he would continue to play it throughout his career. He began to play an expanded version of the song that fall of 1939 while fronting a band he had organized. Using the harmonies of the song, he elaborated the possibilities of the earlier three-minute recording, moving from a lower range upward in the second chorus. Despite the tedium of repeating this popular number, Hawkins was able, twenty years later, to perform it with enormous success at the Chicago Playboy Jazz Festival.

“Picasso.”In 1948 Norman Granz, who produced a number of important jazz performances, issued “Picasso” on his Clef Record label. Hawkins recorded this work either in that year or perhaps somewhat earlier. It was an unaccompanied saxophone solo, an innovation at the time. Hawkins mingled dramatic passages with free-form excursions in a remarkable display. The title reflects Granz’s interest in artist Pablo Picasso, although for Hawkins the Pablo who beguiled him was the great cellist, Pablo Casals. Having played the piano and cello before taking up the saxophone, and continuing to play them for his own satisfaction, Hawkins was able to use his insights into the capacities of the piano and the cello in this solo recording of “Picasso” on the tenor saxophone.

“Mood Indigo.”Until 1962, when Hawkins was in his late fifties and Duke Ellington in his early sixties, the two men had never recorded together, probably because Ellington’s orchestra had over the years included several outstanding saxophonists, such as Ben Webster, whose style Hawkins had obviously influenced. Now, with Webster on his own, Hawkins joined with Ellington and six members of his orchestra for an album called Duke Ellington Meets Coleman Hawkins. It included several Ellington compositions, among them a six-minute version of his already famous “Mood Indigo,” which became a highlight of this recording session. This is the only recorded combination of these two powerhouses of jazz late in their careers, but it took place while each was still performing at a high level.

Musical Legacy

Coleman Hawkins was essentially a gifted soloist, the first outstanding tenor saxophonist in jazz. Although he led his own musical groups at times, his temperament did not permit him to guide and discipline other musicians, who for him were essentially accompanists, and his own orchestras were not outstanding. Highly competitive, he enjoyed matching skills with other performers. It has been argued that he influenced virtually all later tenor saxophonists with the exception of Lester Young, the first man recognized as having defeated Hawkins in a jam session.

Hawkins was one of the most influential jazz musicians in style and technique. He moved away from the old “slap-tongue” style to a more powerful, fluent, legato manner of playing and characteristically projected an exciting, driving rhythm. Because he was adept at both piano and cello, Hawkins was able to bring a measure of their polyphonic capacities to a single-note instrument. His style drew adherents throughout the 1930’s, and in the following decade Hawkins did what few of his contemporaries, the jazz musicians born before World War I, attempted. He encouraged younger musicians like Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis and performed with Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, and Sonny Rollins and other jazzmen of the bebop era, even as he continued his associations with the men who dominated jazz between the two world wars. As late as the 1960’s, Hawkins, who had made the tenor saxophone a melodic instrument and performed for more than forty years, remained a major force in jazz music.

Principal Recordings

albums:April in Paris, Featuring Body and Soul, 1936; The King of the Tenor Sax, 1943; Coleman Hawkins/Lester Young, 1945 (with Lester Young); Hawk in Flight, 1947; The Hawk Returns, 1954; The Tenor Sax Album, 1954; Cool Groove, 1955; The Hawk in Hi Fi, 1956; The Hawk in Paris, 1956; Coleman Hawkins Encounters Ben Webster, 1957 (with Ben Webster); The Genius of Coleman Hawkins, 1957; The Hawk Flies High, 1957; Standards and Warhorses, 1957 (with Red Allen); Coleman Hawkins and His Friends at a Famous Jazz Party, 1958 (with others); Coleman Hawkins Meets the Sax Section, 1958; High and Mighty Hawk, 1958; Soul, 1958; Coleman Hawkins with the Red Garland Trio, 1959 (with the Red Garland Trio); Hawk Eyes, 1959; Stasch, 1959; At Ease with Coleman Hawkins, 1960; Coleman Hawkins All Stars, 1960; In a Mellow Tone, 1960; Night Hawk, 1960 (with Eddie Davis); Swingville, 1960 (with Coleman Hawkins All Stars); The Hawk Relaxes, 1961; Jam Session in Swingville, 1961 (with Pee Wee Russell); Jazz Reunion, 1961 (with others); Alive!, 1962 (with Roy Eldridge and Johnny Hodges); Desafinado: Bossa Nova and Jazz Samba, 1962; Duke Ellington Meets Coleman Hawkins, 1962; Good Old Broadway, 1962; No Strings, 1962; Plays Make Someone Happy, 1962; Hawk Talk, 1963; Sonny Meets Hawk, 1963; Today and Now, 1963; Wrapped Tight, 1965; Sirius, 1966; Supreme, 1966.

Bibliography

Chilton, John. The Song of the Hawk. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990. Hawkins has not been blessed with an outstanding biography, but this work by a significant British jazz historian is the most informative work.

Giddins, Gary. Visions of Jazz: The First Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. The chapter on Hawkins is a good short biography, including accounts of the author’s personal observations of the saxophonist’s late concerts.

Hentoff, Nat. Jazz Is. New York: Random House, 1976. Hentoff’s short section on Hawkins contains an account of the first time he was beaten in one of the saxophone competitions that were part of the jazz ritual known as the jam session.

Kirchner, Bill, ed. The Oxford Companion to Jazz. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. The Hawkins chapter highlights some of his major performances, especially in the 1940’s, when he collaborated with several young musicians who transformed jazz after World War II.

Schuller, Gunther. The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930-1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Schuller’s chapter on Hawkins contains eight reproductions of musical examples transcribed by the author from recordings.