“IT’S SURPRISING that a musician with his knowledge and experience should take time out to listen to younger musicians, but then his thinking isn’t limited by the past.” Lockjaw Davis was talking about Coleman Hawkins, a senior he holds in high regard. “And he doesn’t just listen to saxophones. He listens to all instruments. He always retains his personal flavor, but you find young musicians on his dates, and he’s just as comfortable with them as with the older guys.”
Hawkins’ perennial freshness is echoed by Johnny Hodges: “The older he gets, the better he gets. If ever you think he’s through, you find he’s just gone right on ahead again.”
Paul Gonsalves, himself one of the formidable technicians of the tenor saxophone, never hesitates to express admiration.
“Coleman Hawkins is more than a stylist. He is a great stylist, of course, but he is also a very, very good musician. He plays jazz, and he also plays the instrument the way it should be played. I’m sure he could take a place among symphony musicians and command their respect. You might say that the secret of his success has been that he had a natural gift and that he took trouble to develop it, just like Duke. You can’t rely on natural talent alone in today’s competitive music world. There certainly aren’t many guys around with talent like Hawk’s, and there are even fewer with what I’d call the humility to recognize any need for developing that talent.”
The subject of these perceptive comments is a jazz phenomenon. In terms of durable artistic accomplishment and growth, the only parallel to Hawkins’ career is provided by that of Duke Ellington. Hawkins has been challenged by different stylists several times in his long career, but his supremacy has soon been reasserted. Basic to this, and to his ability to go on adding creatively, is his sound.
Discussing “the wide range of tonal approaches” to the tenor saxophone in The Book of Jazz, Leonard Feather refers to the “manly sonorities of a Coleman Hawkins.” There have been many approaches, but for the majority of musicians and listeners, the Hawkins tone has consistently represented the ultimate. The tones of some others have been appealing, permissible deviations, though they often have suggested loyalties split between alto and tenor. Others again have sought to match Hawkins tone, but they have never quite attained its full, rounded power and authority.
Despite his strong convictions about tone, Hawkins’ appreciation of another musician’s ideas is unaffected by a different tonal approach.
“I like most music unless it’s wrong,” he said. “I liked Lester Young the first time I heard him, and I always got along very well with him. We were on a lot of tours together, and I spent a lot of time with him, talking and drinking, in hotel rooms and places like that. People forget that Chu Berry’s sound wasn’t like mine, either.
“As for mine, sometimes when people think I’m blowing harder or softer, I’m really blowing with just the same power, but the difference is due to the reed. I like my reed to speak. It’s supposed to sound just like a voice. On records, the engineering can do things, too—make the sound harder or sharper. I dropped the buzz a long time ago and just play with a clear tone now.” His attitude toward contemporary activities is unambiguous.
“I’ve got all that current scene,” he said. “If I play with you, I’ve got you. Coltrane, Lockjaw, Charlie Rouse, Paul Gonsalves, Johnny Griffin—I hear what they’re doing, and I’ve played with all of them. And…I nearly forgot Sonny Rollins. He’s a favorite of mine.” He kids the members of the quintet he and Roy Eldridge lead jointly: “Last night you had Coltrane. Tonight you’re going to get plenty of Ornette!”
On his nocturnal rounds and in record studios he hears plenty of jazz, but at home the records he plays are almost entirely classical.
“I love all the operas,” he said. “I like Stravinsky when I’m listening to Stravinsky, Bach when I’m listening to Bach, and Beethoven when I’m listening to Beethoven. I have no prejudices. I think Tchaikovsky was a great composer, but I guess his music became too popular to be chic.
“You see this sheet music here—Deux Arabesques by Debussy? I must have bought it 10 times, but I always seem to lose it. I play it on piano and on my horn.
“I’d been telling Roy for a year that I’d write out the melody of ‘I Mean You’ for him, the number I did with Fats Navarro. Well, today I decided to do it, and I went out and bought some music paper and a couple of pencils, and there was this piece lying in the store right under my nose.”
Almost every night, between sets, wherever Hawkins happens to be playing, the length of his career becomes the subject for discussion.
The talk may at first sound unkind, even malicious, but with familiarity the outlines of a kind of game emerge, the object being to prove Hawkins older than he really is. (According to The Encyclopedia of Jazz, he was born in St. Joseph, Mo., on Nov. 21, 1904). The players do not expect to win. Their pleasure lies rather in seeing how he will extricate himself from the traps they set or how their arguments will be refuted. Two notably talented players of this game are Sonny Stitt and Roy Eldridge.
“Yeah?” someone says. “Then how about the time when you were working with Mamie Smith?”
“That was somebody else using my name,” Hawkins replies with crushing finality.
“I can remember you, a grown man, playing with Fletcher Henderson when I was still a child,” says some swing-era veteran.
Reminiscences flood in. Hawkins himself talks with more animation, to give the impression that his guard is down. Then: “I don’t think,” he says, suddenly and airily, “that I ever was a child!”
When the Eldridge-Hawkins Quintet was playing the Heublein Lounge in Hartford, Conn., recently, an eight-year-old girl insisted on getting the autograph of Hawkins—and only his.
“How is it, Roy,” Hawkins asked afterwards, “that all your fans are old people? They come in here with canes and crutches. They must be anywhere from 58 to 108. But my fans are all young, from eight to 58 years old!”
“That little girl thought you were Santa Claus,” said drummer Eddie Locke.
“Is that so? Well, who’s got more fans than Santa Claus?”
An often-cited example of Hawkins’ mischievous and sometimes macabre sense of humor goes back to the early Jazz at the Philharmonic tours. Several musicians on the tour were unaccustomed to flying and fearful of it. On this occasion, the plane took off uneventfully. No sooner were safety belts unloosed, however, than Hawkins was on his feet, slowly pacing the aisle, his head behind an opened tabloid, the big black headlines of which proclaimed the number dead in a catastrophic air crash.
Unsentimental about the past, he prefers to talk about today—and tomorrow. For instance, of Jimmy Harrison, one of the great pace-setters on trombone, with whom he had a close friendship, he will simply say:
“Yes, Jimmy and I were real tight. He could play. He had a good beat, and he could swing.”
Although he prefers not to talk too much about the past, Hawkins remembers the time when bands were hired by clubs for long-run engagements. He said he feels that the current club policy of hiring groups for short periods of time has hurt the music business.
“They have a different group in their place every week, or every two weeks,” he said. “You don’t get to know the people, and they don’t get to know you. They don’t get into the habit of coming to hear you. They may like what you’re doing, but when they come back, they find a totally different group and music. You take when Red Allen was at the Metropole all those years. People liked him and knew he was there and kept on coming back. Same thing with Wilbur DeParis at Ryan’s. Engagements used to be much longer, and then you had a chance to build up a following. The combo would be identified with the place and the place with the combo.”
Hawkins’ ability to construct solos of depth, especially on ballads, has been noted by many critics. This sensitivity to emotion in music was reflected when he said:
“I think a solo should tell a story, but to most people that’s as much a matter of shape as of what the story is about. Romanticism and sorrow and greed—they can all be put into music. I can definitely recognize greed. I know when a man is playing for money. And, good gracious, there’s plenty of that going on right now!
“Tempo is important, too, of course. Tempo should go according to the piece. Certain pieces are writing so that the right tempo—fast, medium, slow—is really quite clear. If you play a slow ballad fast, you lose everything. There’s plenty of that going on, too!” Then the tenor saxophonist reminisced a bit about his career.
“Some of my biggest moments,” he said, “have been in jam sessions, but I don’t want to talk about them. There were always other people involved.
“A big kick of another kind was when I opened at the Palladium in London with Jack Hylton [in 1934]. It was my first experience of an audience in Europe. And it was a huge stage. Just to walk out there was something! And then I was very well received.
“London and Paris were great metropolitan cities when I first went there,” he reflected. “If you were good or if you were bad, you were treated accordingly, and that was that. But since those days, New York has become a very cosmopolitan city, too.
“When I came back here the first time [July, 1939], I was disappointed with what had happened in the music. Charlie Parker and Dizzy were getting started, but they needed help. What they were doing was ‘far out’ to a lot of people, but it was just music to me. Joe Guy was playing their way when he started with me in 1939.
“Another kick was when I opened with my own big band at the Golden Gate in 1940. They wouldn’t let us off the stand. I enjoyed that period very much, and being leader didn’t worry me. The band was very good—too good in some ways. We had fine arrangements by Andy Gibson, Buster Tolliver, and Buster Harding. And every now and then I wrote one.
“I always used to write when I felt like it. I remember writing an arrangement of ‘Singin’ In The Rain’ for Fletcher Henderson when that song was popular. I don’t think Smack was recording then, because we never made a record of it. I also wrote a theme for him. We didn’t give it a name, but it was written for the saxes and rhythm, including tuba.
“Since my own band broke up, I haven’t worked regularly with a big band, and I like blowing with a big band just as much as with a small combo. I don’t know how it is, but I never have played with Duke’s band. I’d like to. I hope I can record with him some day.
“A date I did in November was one I’ll remember. Benny Carter came into New York to do some work with Basie before going on to Europe again, and we recorded together for Impulse! with the same instrumentation we used on a session in Paris in 1937, the one where we made ‘Crazy Rhythm’ and ‘Honeysuckle Rose.’ We made those titles again, but this time we had Phil Woods and Charlie Rouse. They can play, those two, and read!
Hawkins has said, “Nobody likes home town.” Sometimes it rings true in Hawkins’ case. He doesn’t seem to be appreciated adequately in his own country. He is, after all, one of the greatest musicians jazz has produced and an aristocrat in his profession. In club after club he stands, detached, serene, distinguished, listening with a slightly benign smile as others play, a figure of evident intelligence and sophistication.
Then he begins to blow. Sometimes the audience listens appreciatively, and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it continues its unknowing babble and ignores the quality of the music. A poor audience deserves a poor performance, but it doesn’t get it. Eyes closed, Hawk is immediately in flight. DB
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