This Day in History (Coleman Hawkins’ Birthday Gift)

November 21, 1913—Most boys of the time likely requested a toy or baseball equipment for their birthdays, but Coleman Hawkins got a more unusual piece of his heart’s desire from his mother when he turned nine: a C-melody tenor saxophone.

Cordelia Hawkins could never have guessed that her son—whom she had coaxed into practicing classical music on the piano and cello with rewards--could use this gift to become a jazz virtuoso, as surely as Franz Liszt and Pablo Casals had become on their instruments.

At this point, I have to acknowledge at least some degree of inexactitude about this date, because Coleman Hawkins, for all his volubility with later interviewers, was not always precise about the elementary facts of his life. He said, for instance, that he took composition classes at Washburn College in Topeka, Kans., but the school has no record of his attendance.

Historians believe that November 21, 1904, was his date of birth, despite his insistence that it came later. But this most elegant of gentleman and players also claimed that he was born aboard a transatlantic liner—not, perhaps, entirely realistic given that booking passage might have severely pinched the funds of his middle-class parents (Will and Cordelia Hawkins were, respectively, an electrician and schoolteacher living in St. Joseph, Mo., 50 miles north of Kansas City).

If Cordelia wanted to console herself about this purchase, she could have reasoned that the relatively new saxophone (introduced only about 60 years before Coleman’s birth by Adolphe Sax) had been used by the likes of Berlioz, Bizet, Richard Strauss, and Ravel. Yet when Hawkins began playing, noted Gary Giddins in his marvelous collection of music criticism, Visions of Jazz: The First Century, “it was still regarded as an undisciplined poor relation to other reed instruments.”

“The Hawk” changed all of that, first by soaking up influences wherever he found them—in Cordelia’s own piano and organ playing, the composition theory classes he might have audited at Washburn, the Six Brown Brothers in vaudeville, tenor saxophonist Stump Evans in Kansas City, blue singer Mamie Smith, and Fletcher Henderson—before arriving at his own bright, rhythmic command.

The achievement that cemented “The Hawk’s” mastery of the instrument was his 1939 recording of "Body and Soul. " “If Hawkins’ ‘Body and Soul’ isn’t the single most acclaimed improvisation in jazz’s first hundred years,” writes Giddins, “it is unquestionably a leading contender.” If you want to know why, just listen to this recording on YouTube.

The moral of this tale couldn’t be clearer: Parents, you never know when that inexplicable enthusiasm of your child will transform into a hobby, then an avocation, then what so many of us desire: performing the work we love.