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... ed at the Golden Gate Ballroom, the Savoy, and the Apollo Theater. His dance band also toured some, but did not last long. Hawk resumed working in the small group genre in ' 41. The next two years he devoted to playing mostly in Chicago and the Midwest until retuning to New York in ' 43. Between the demise of his dance band in ' 40 and the three years following, Hawkins appeared in only one commercial recording session.
However, in the thirteen months from December, 1943 and the end of ' 44, Coleman Hawkins recorded nearly one hundred tunes on two dozen separate recording sessions and nine different labels. On nearly all of these sessions he was listed as band leader, and on all of them was prominently featured as a soloist. (Deveaux, 306) Around 1948, Bean recorded the amazing unaccompanied solo, Picasso, a feat way beyond most of his contemporaries and successors. As bebop declined rapidly in the early fifties, Hawkins found it difficult to find gigs and personal satisfaction in the regular work he did find in the United States and Canada. In 1954, as he turned fifty, he complained that while the musical language of jazz continued to progress, the public's understanding failed to follow: "The state of the music business now is just as bad as, or even worse, than it's ever been. The musicians today are fine... but I don't think we have a listening public. " (Deveaux, 448) By the late 1950 s, Hawkins had hardened his tone and developed a fierce approach to the blues.
His playing had gradually become more harsh, a transformation vividly shown by his "extraordinarily violent solo in March' Along from Tiny Grimes' Blues Groove, " (Sadie, 322) and culminating in his "rhythmically complex treatment of Body and Soul in 1959. " (Kernfeld, 506) Hawkins continued to appear at all the major jazz festivals began in the mid-fifties, often leading a group with Roy Eldridge, if the money was right. Eldridge later complained: "That man's done me out of a lot of work. If Hawk don't like the bread, he won't take the gig. And he don't know no word but thousand dollars!" (Deveaux, 448) Other than the festivals, Hawk found a substitute for the 52 nd street of days gone by in the Metropole, a noisy midtown Manhattan bar that ran an all-day jazz program. The venue was a strange set-up with a narrow stage so that the band had to play ranged in a straight line; but the intermission time was nice for Hawk, giving him plenty of time to relax at a nearby neighborhood tavern and enjoy his whisky or brandy. During the sixties, Coleman Hawkins appeared in films and on television.
He had now become a regular playing at the Village Gate and the Village Vanguard with a quartet consisting of himself, Tommy Flannigan, Major Holley, and Eddie Locke. (Kernfeld, 506) Hawkins began to dislike the direction the jazz scene had begun to turn in the previous few years though. He complained about the avant-garde movement saying, "I don't hear anything in what they " re playing, just noise and crap. " (Deveaux, 449) The avant-garde movement of the 1960 s had brought about an attack on the very principles of the craft of "precise playing" he had based his career for four decades. What the journalists were calling the "New Thing" made little sense in direction compared to the obvious step from swing to bebop. Hawkins commented in 1964: "They " re playing 'Freedom' and they " re playing 'Extensions', whatever they are. Man, I don't know what they are. These guys are looking for a gimmick, a short cut.
There is no short cut. " (Deveaux, 449) This disconnectedness from the jazz scene may have been what drove Hawkins to begin his destructive drinking binge, or as biologists call it, intro punitive behavior: "a 'self-destructive process' triggered when an individual is excluded socially from a group. " (Deveaux, 449) Perhaps, if he had not begun to self-destruct he could have slipped into the field of pedagogy. In 1967 the very year he collapsed while playing in February in Toronto and again while on the last tour of Norman Ganz's Jazz at the Philharmonic in June he even mused, "Some kind of way I've got to teach these boys how to play. " (Deveaux, 449) Unfortunately, Coleman Hawkins had begun systematically drinking himself to death by the mid- 1960 s. By the end, 19 May 1969, friends who had not seen Hawk in years barely recognized his frail and unkempt frame. The once proud and ferocious artist had decayed to an unsatisfied and tragic end. To quote the last paragraph of Deveaux's epilogue: Yet many individual lives in jazz in American culture are unsatisfying and incomplete, even tragic. For every Dizzy Gillespie, basking in later years in the autumnal glow of a life well led, there is a Charlie Parker, leaving behind a tangle of unfulfilled ambition.
Coleman Hawkins's story reminds us that jazz itself is unfinished business, undergoing the painful process of outliving its own time and watching its social and aesthetic meanings drift into new, unfamiliar formations as the original context for its creation disappears. Hawkins first made his major moves during the swing era but by the end of his life had made a much more profound affect on the world of jazz. My own understanding of how jazz has progressed over the years has been greatly enhanced through the research of the artist. His career spanned some four decades during which time the artform was pushed and evolved tremendously. He saw, participated in, and helped to develop major steps in the growth of jazz. From Blues stylings, to swing, to bebop.
And arguably his most important contribution is his placement of the tenor saxophone on the jazz map as an integral instrument in the artform. Bibliography: Works Cited Deveaux, Scott. Birth of Bebop, The. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1997 web 2 / 18 / 00 web 2 / 18 / 00 Kernfeld, Berry. New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, The.
Vol. II London: The MacMillan Company, 1988 Sadie, Stanley. New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, The. Vol. II New York: The MacMillan Company, 1928
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