In spite of all that is written, said and done, this great, big, incontrovertible fact stands out,—the Negro is progressing, and that disproves all the arguments in the world that he is incapable of progress. j a m e s w e l d o n j o h n s o n
There’s no such thing as bop music, but there’s such a thing as progress. c o l e m a n h a w k i n s
Alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley remembered it later as a child-hood moment that set the direction for his life. His father took him to see the Fletcher Henderson band at the City Auditorium in Tampa, Flor-ida. Featured in the band was the imposing tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins. ‘‘Man, it was a great day for me,’’ said Adderley. ‘‘I think he was the most interesting looking jazz musician I’ve ever seen in my life.
He just looked so authoritative. I kept looking at him. I never did look at Fletcher. I said, ‘Well, that’s what I want to do when I grow up.’ ’’
Adderley was neither the first nor the last musician to be impressed by Coleman Hawkins. In a field in which charismatic figures were no rarity, Hawkins had a special quality. Hawk, or Bean—as he was affec-tionately nicknamed—was not a particularly striking or flamboyant man.
And yet his quiet dignity and utter confidence in his abilities commanded respect, even awe—at least from musicians, who were in the best position to judge Hawkins’s artistic achievement. In a familiar anecdote, a younger musician encountering Hawkins for the first time in the 1960s reportedly told Adderley that the older saxophonist made him nervous: ‘‘Man, I told him Hawkins was supposed to make him nervous. Hawkins has been making other sax players nervous for forty years.’’
Hawkins’s place as one of the founders of jazz is secure. He was among the earliest generation of jazz musicians, the men and women who
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College of Musicselfconsciously created a new art form. He is often called the father of the tenor saxophone, the first to discover the expressive potential of an instrument previously thought to have a limited emotional range, and therefore the patriarch of a lineage that extends through John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, and other moderns to the present.
In the sweep of jazz history, Hawkins is usually classified as a swing musician. This label not only narrows the focus to a particular phase of his career, but also suggests that the artistic attitudes and techniques he acquired during that time served as his compass for the remainder of his life. It also strongly implies that his moment of significance was limited to a specific historical moment: the Swing Era, when his distinctive ap-proach to improvisation was widely accepted as the model for all saxo-phonists and the standard against which they were measured.
‘‘Body and Soul,’’ recorded in 1939, shortly after his return from a self-imposed five-year exile in Europe, remains Hawkins’s best-known record and a landmark in the history of jazz recording, not least for the fact that it was simultaneously a commercial success and admired and studied by musicians. But Hawkins is represented by hundreds of other recordings, from his pre-1934 solos with Fletcher Henderson to the flood of records for various independent labels in the early 1940s. Each combines a con-fident and assertive manner with a bracing, complex harmonic language that anticipated many of the innovations later associated with bebop, including the so-called flatted fifths. With each recording, his reputation as an innovator grew. ‘‘Coleman Hawkins was the saxophonist then,’’
remembers pianist Billy Taylor. ‘‘Hawk was most highly respected,’’
agrees bassist Milt Hinton. ‘‘He seemed to be the most creative man of the era. Everybody just thought he was the top man.’’
This stature, however, did not long outlive bebop. After 1945 Haw-kins’s influence declined, and his standing in jazz history automatically became problematic. Even in his last years, as he matched himself against John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and Sonny Rollins, he was considered less a full participant in contemporary musical life than an icon—a living legend—of the art.
Hawkins’s decline in status is not unexpected. A history of style usually boils down to a history of innovation: novel techniques that stand out against the background of common practice and can be shown, after the fact, to point to the future. Only stylistic ‘‘advances’’ give shape and momentum to such a historical narrative. It follows that the cutting edge must be kept sharp. With jazz, the pace of change has been particularly brisk. Major artists are routinely and unsentimentally shunted from the
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3 7vanguard to obsolescence before they reach middle age, their later work marginalized or forgotten, their historical role diminished.
Such seems to have been the fate of Coleman Hawkins. In 1944, as he approached his fortieth birthday, his prestige and influence were at their peak. This moment of glory was overshadowed, however, by the on-slaught of bebop, and with it, his reputation as innovator vanished. He is now remembered as making only a brief appearance on the periphery of the bop revolution, despite having been very much on the scene. Even the comforting role of paterfamilias to the younger generation has been denied him. The swing tenor saxophonist universally acknowledged to have served as source and inspiration for the emergent idiom is not Haw-kins, but Lester Young.
The frequent rhetorical pairing of Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young has the air of a cautionary tale, with Young’s rise coming at the expense of Hawkins’s decline. The issue is rhythm: specifically, the ‘‘logical rhyth-mic change’’ that Martin Williams saw as the mainspring of stylistic evolution in jazz. If evolution in jazz is about rhythm, then the ‘‘cool’’
rhythmic language pioneered by Young is a touchstone. As ‘‘the most gifted and original improviser between Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker’’ (in Williams’s reading), Lester Young is the conduit between the path-breaking innovations of early jazz and the revolution of the 1940s.
His improvised solos, full of ironic understatement and witty, unpredict-able manipulation of phrase lengths and rhythmic motives, contrasted starkly with the earnest effusions of Hawkins’s playing. Young’s rhyth-mic approach anticipated the future, as Hawkins’s more ponderous idiom did not. As tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon, who came of age in the mid-1940s, put it: ‘‘Hawk was the master of the horn, a musician who did everything possible with it, the right way. But when Pres [Lester Young] appeared, we all started listening to him alone. Pres had an en-tirely new sound, one that we seemed to be waiting for.’’
Some musicians date the passing of the mantle even earlier, to an in-cident in 1933 in which Hawkins, still a soloist with the Fletcher Hen-derson band, found himself locked in a marathon after-hours jam session at the Cherry Blossom in Kansas City with Ben Webster, Herschel Evans, and Lester Young. Mary Lou Williams was rousted from her sleep at four in the morning to relieve the exhausted piano players: ‘‘Get up, pussycat, Hawkins has got his shirt off and is still blowing.’’ The event, now a staple of jazz folklore, found Hawkins struggling for hours to shake off the competition until finally giving up, tearing off in his Cadillac to make the next job in St. Louis. Mary Lou Williams, herself a historian (she
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College of Musicdevoted much of her later life to jazz education) had no trouble drawing the moral from this ritual combat: ‘‘Yes, Hawkins was king until he met those crazy Kansas City tenor men.’’
As the critic Jed Rasula has noted, jazz historians are fond of such
‘‘primal torch-passing scenes’’: colorful anecdotes that seem to embody the abstract workings of history. In this case, the story is all the more compelling for being somewhat in advance of events. Hawkins, after all, remained king for a good while longer, his reputation hardly dam-aged by this obscure encounter in the provinces. But the handful of participant-observers at the Cherry Blossom had seen the future. Through the telling and retelling of the story, later generations have joined them as privileged insiders, better attuned to the true workings of history than the majority of those who lived through it. Hawkins’s day had passed almost before it had begun.
Thus, Hawkins’s encounters with the bebop revolution have been re-duced to mere historical curiosity. Dizzy Gillespie has put it more gen-erously than most: ‘‘Hawkins had the great taste in music to understand my generation and to come with us.’’ But the image is still oddly skewed—deliberately so, perhaps, given Gillespie’s penchant for self-mocking humor: the young unknowns as the leaders, the forty-year-old
‘‘most creative man of the era’’ as the follower. In early 1944, when Hawkins became increasingly involved with the bop generation, the word bebop did not yet exist. Over the course of the year, Hawkins systemat-ically employed musicians from the emerging underground. A recording session under Hawkins’s leadership in February of that year featured Gillespie and Max Roach, while his working bands for 1944 included such well-known bebop pioneers as Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke, and Os-car Pettiford, as well as others now more obscure: Howard McGhee, ‘‘Lit-tle Benny’’ Harris, Vic Coulsen.
For his early encouragement of bebop musicians, Hawkins has been given his due. Unlike others of his generation, whose attitude toward bop ranged from hostility to resentment to bemused indifference, Hawkins championed the music, earning him a degree of loyalty (Thelonious Monk remained a lifelong friend) and respect. The title of a tune from a 1946 recording session, which included J. J. Johnson, Milt Jackson, Fats Navarro, and Max Roach, pays tribute to the relationship between the older saxophonist and his young prote´ge´s: ‘‘Bean and the Boys.’’
To make sense of this relationship, one must move beyond the com-pelling simplifications that dominate jazz history. Music cannot be re-duced to a narrative of stylistic development, just as the complexity of a
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3 9life lived in music cannot be flattened into a set of musical characteristics.
This dictum is especially true for bebop, a movement that reflected the totality of the artist’s consciousness.
For the bop musicians, Hawkins had a special relevance. As keen-eared aspiring artists, they paid close attention to Hawkins’s musical legacy, appropriating some elements while rejecting others. But they also un-derstood these details of craftsmanship as part of a broader picture, in-separable from the qualities of personality and intellect that informed the achievements of an extraordinary elite: black jazz musicians in midcen-tury America.
Hawkins shared many traits with the Dukes and Counts of that elite:
the unshakable confidence of the successfully self-taught man, a tireless professional ambition, and a sense of dignity, tending toward inner re-serve, under even the most trying of circumstances. Still, even among his peers, Hawkins stood out. The quality that arrested the attention of the youthful Cannonball Adderley was Hawkins’s sense of purpose. This quality found its most obvious manifestation in his restless exploration of technical resources, but it cannot be reduced to them. It was both social and musical. The peculiar combination of personal traits and musical abilities that marked Hawkins—steely ambition, a strong intellect, and virtuosity—characterized the bebop revolution as well. He was, as Sonny Rollins has recently put it, one of its most prominent ‘‘role models’’: the prototypical progressive jazz musician.
Jazz and Progress
The word progressive makes many people in the late twentieth century uncomfortable. It calls to mind an ideology of continuous and irreversible betterment, one singularly out of sync with contemporary thought and experience.
In particular, it is grating to find notions of progress applied to the arts.
To claim progress in the fields of science and technology is one thing.
Some may argue whether such ‘‘advances’’ actually improve life, but few disagree that new solutions to old problems have rendered previous ef-forts obsolete. Old technologies are discarded without a second thought:
the slide rule and the typewriter may have equipped one generation, but to the next, they become puzzling curiosities. In the arts, however, such wholesale dismissal of the past seems unthinkable. As museums attest, the old retains its power and actively shapes the sensibilities of the present.
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College of MusicWithin the arts, music is a special case. Compared with the tangible objects of the visual arts, music is an inherently evanescent art, more process than product. Music notation, of course, was invented centuries ago as a corrective. Written music embodies musical structure indepen-dent of any given performance and makes the category of a ‘‘work’’ pos-sible. But it took time for the reification of music as composition to take effect. The museum-like quality of the ‘‘classical’’ European repertory dates back no earlier than the nineteenth century. Only in the past hun-dred years has the music of the past, the canon of ‘‘timeless’’ masterpieces, come to dominate the present and undermine any notion of music’s ev-anescence. Before this time, music was created primarily for current value: to be used and discarded. No one gave much thought to what generations beyond the reach of memory might have done, or to what future generations might think.
For jazz, the more modern technology of recording served a function parallel to that of notation. Jazz was a music created, like any other, for immediate consumption. Through recording, particular performances of music were transmuted into durable artifacts capable of outlasting the particular circumstances of their creation. Recordings were not necessar-ily treated with reverence: like other products of mass-market capitalism, they were meant to be used up. But some survived, in attics and junk shops, to be picked over in later years by eager record collectors.
Jazz history itself grew out of discography, a rational system of clas-sification devised to help collectors sort the ‘‘classic’’ jazz recordings from the ephemera of popular culture. This process led to the wholesale rescue of jazz recordings from planned obsolescence and gradually to the jazz consumers’ consciousness of the music as an art form. Today recordings are seen as jazz’s museum, housing works of lasting value. It follows that new additions to the museum do not displace the old. The innovations of subsequent decades, whether by Charlie Parker or Ornette Coleman, do not diminish the value placed on contributions by King Oliver or Duke Ellington, but rather furnish another wing in the museum. The process is value neutral: growth, not progress.
It would be a mistake, however, to read this ideology back into the circumstances of the musicians who created the recordings. At the outset of Hawkins’s career, jazz was not art music, but dance music. While record collectors shivered in private ecstasy listening to their favorite treasures, others gathered in large public spaces to enjoy dancing to the finest music they could find. Dance music is by nature ephemeral—which does not mean that it is unimportant or inartistic, but simply that it tends not to
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4 1survive its time. In popular music, continual change is essential, as in sartorial fashion. It is a marker of generational identity, and every gen-eration has the privilege of mocking its predecessor as hopelessly out-dated and unhip. For those growing up in the first half of the century, surrounded by the ongoing triumphs of technology, it was virtually ir-resistible to associate change with progress.
Hawkins broke into the music business in the early 1920s as a callow teenager in rumpled, ill-kept clothes that earned him the nickname
‘‘Greasy,’’ but quickly evolved into a dapper sophisticate, keenly sensitive to the imperatives of fashion. To his horror, his involvement with the dance music of the Jazz Age, captured on dozens of recordings with the Henderson band, later became the fetish of jazz collectors and critics.
They delighted in playing these recordings in his presence, and the mor-tified Hawkins acted as if he had just been shown faded photographs of his youthful self in clownishly outmoded attire. The mature Hawkins thought of himself as perpetually young, perpetually in step, and hated admitting to a past. Confronted with evidence of it, he immediately coun-tered with the notion of progress.
That Hawkins was not alone in this regard is evident in the French critic Andre´ Hodeir’s complaint, from the mid-1950s, that musicians of the swing generation ‘‘naively believed their music better than that of their predecessors, just as they would have judged a 1938 automobile faster and more comfortable than a 1925 model.’’ Hawkins, who insisted on owning the latest-model Cadillac, would have appreciated the analogy, but would probably have objected to being characterized as naive. His sense of progress in music was grounded not simply in a chauvinism of the up-to-date, but in an awareness of undeniable improvements in things that could be objectively measured. Musicians played faster, ex-tended the ranges of their instruments, had better control over intonation and timbre (which is not to say that they conformed to European stan-dards, but that any deviations from those standards were intentional).
They had, on the whole, a sounder grasp of the intellectual components of music: the ability to translate musical notation into sounds and sounds into musical notation, a working knowledge of the syntax of tonal har-mony, and a carefully calculated rhythmic assurance that made the dance music of the 1920s seem comparatively awkward and stiff. All of these skills had become the minimum professional equipment for musicians in the 1930s and 1940s, and counted as progress—real, hard-won achieve-ment.
Jazz critics continually held up earlier jazz for admiration, but Hawkins
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College of Musicwas pained at the thought. ‘‘It’s like a man thinking back to when he couldn’t walk, he had to crawl,’’ he complained after rehearing one of his solos twenty years later. That art, out of all areas of human endeavor, should be singled out and denied the possibility of systematic improve-ment made him indignant: ‘‘That’s amazing to me, that so many people in music won’t accept progress. It’s the only field where advancement meets so much opposition. You take doctors—look what medicine and science have accomplished in the last twenty or thirty years. That’s the way it should be in music—that’s the way it has to be.’’
The analogy between science and art that Hawkins suggests seems im-probable, but as generations of scholars have discovered, the work of science historian Thomas Kuhn offers some intriguing points of com-parison. In science, entire fields are occasionally transformed, or brought
The analogy between science and art that Hawkins suggests seems im-probable, but as generations of scholars have discovered, the work of science historian Thomas Kuhn offers some intriguing points of com-parison. In science, entire fields are occasionally transformed, or brought