This Day in Jazz History (Birth of Tenor Sax Titan Coleman Hawkins)

Nov. 21, 1904— Coleman Hawkins, who became the first important tenor saxophonist with his mastery of the art of vertical improvisation, was born in St. Joseph, MO.

The circumstances of Hawkins’ birth were infinitely fungible in his telling, including its location (on an ocean liner) and time (as much as eight years after the event). 

Even his formal musical education could be fudged, with biographers unable to document claims that he attended Washburn College in Topeka or the University of Chicago.

His real musical development needed no embellishment. Encouraged from an early age by his mother, a pianist and organist, Hawkins tackled the piano by age five, the cello at seven, and (an outgrowth in range and color), the tenor sax at nine. He was a natural musical talent.

In adulthood, he interacted with a galaxy of jazz talent across four decades, from Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson (whose band he joined) in 1924 to Sonny Rollins in the mid-1960s. Through vertical improvisation, he showed how to use his chosen instrument—which had earlier taken a supporting role to clarinets in jazz bands—to weave chords in a progression to improvise, rather than doing so through scales.

But the first decade in that time was spent learning the tenor sax thoroughly enough to make it do his bidding, while the last half decade was a remorseless physical decline. For all practical purposes, then, the height of his influence extended from the Thirties through the Fifties.

The year 1939 may have represented his zenith with his rendition of “Body and Soul.” Though the Eddie Hayman-Johnny Green composition had attracted attention since its release in 1930, Hawkins’ performance helped make it a standard, opening up manifold interpretations even within its strictly instrumental format.

What was especially noteworthy was how, after the first two bars, Hawkins largely dispensed with the melody in favor of a riff and variations. (“It’s Coleman Hawkins superimposed on Johnny Green, if you will,” the composer told Fred Hall in a January 1986 interview that was later collected in an anthology edited by Robert Gottlieb, Reading Jazz.)

Having already inspired the likes of Lester Young and Ben Webster by disclosing how the unique, full-bodied sound of the tenor sax, Hawkins quickly also recognized its potential through the fast tempos, complex chord progressions and improvisational lines of bebop.

It was Hawkins who in 1944 made the first recording of young Dizzy Gillespie’s “Woody ‘n’ You” (see this blog post from the independent public radio station KUVO) and Hawkins who in that same year employed pianist-composer Thelonious Monk as part of his quartet.

In his younger years, even with his short, compact frame, Hawkins dominated virtually every room where he was present with his dapper attire, attractive dates, and cosmopolitan manner.

By the mid-1960s, as his increased drinking affected his appearance, Hawkins looked more like a jazz Methuselah. In a Spring 1998 reminiscence in The Antioch Review, jazz historian and critic Gary Giddins described his physical impact in a 1966 performance at New York’s Village Vanguard:

“The grizzled, full-bearded patriarch still looked sharp and slightly forbidding, even if he had receded a bit into his tailored gray silk-mohair. He gazed over the crowd with sad but alert eyes, his tight-lipped smile implying bemusement and perhaps disdain. When he greeted someone between sets, his voice was stately and deep, a match for his sound on tenor. He exuded dignity.”