Biography of Coleman Hawkins

After starting on piano and cello, Hawkins took up the saxophone at nine; seven years later, singer Mamie Smith picked him from a Kansas City theater-pit band to join her touring Jazz Hounds, with whom he made his first records. In New York he was part of a group of freelance musicians who chose Fletcher Henderson to front them for an audition in 1923; they landed the job, and Hawkins stayed with Fletcher for a decade, becoming the leading stylist on his instrument in jazz -- the first to create a viable vocabulary for the tenor. In 1934 British bandleader and promoter Jack Hylton invited him to Europe; he stayed until the late summer of 1939 and influenced a generation of European musicians. Back home, he recorded his two-chorus variations on "Body and Soul" and immediately reestablished his supremacy, which had been challenged by such comers as Chu Berry, Hershel Evans, and, notably, Lester Young. Hawk, or "Bean," as he was nicknamed, formed his own big band, but it was not a success and he soon reverted to small groups. Among the musicians he hired on 52nd Street before there was such a term as "bebop" were Thelonious Monk, Howard McGhee, and Dizzy Gillespie. Hawkins was the premier champion of the young modernists among established players, and they in turn admired and respected him. He was an early and permanent member of Jazz at the Philharmonic and often teamed with another JATP regular, Roy Eldridge, during the last two decades of his life. Not until his health began to deteriorate in the late 60s was Hawk ever less than a commanding presence on the bandstand, his tone alone a thing to marvel at, his harmonic knowledge unbeatable. ~ Dan Morgenstern