Five-Star Collection... Coleman Hawkins

Coleman Hawkins

The High And Mighty Hawk

Of all the hundreds of records Coleman Hawkins made during his magnificent career, this LP comes very close to the top in terms of musical excellence. It is perhaps the best of all the albums which Stanley Dance produced for the Felsted label when he visited New York at the beginning of 1958, for Dance caught Hawk at a time when he was not only on top form but also wanted to play. Hawk chose the rhythm section himself and agreed with Stanley Dance on the choice of trumpeter (although the tenor player's first choice was actually Ray Copeland). Although Hawk was not, primarily, a blues player he could and did play the blues when the occasion arose but surely never better than those majestic seventeen choruses he rolls out on the opening Bird of prey blues. And if you want to hear the correct way to play a flawless ascending arpeggio on the saxophone then listen to the opening theme statement of Robert Mellin's My one and only love. *Alun Morgan*

 

The high and mighty Hawk, Coleman Hawkins — "who I think was the greatest influence and stimulated the greatest change in saxophone style very abruptly".

Thus Duke Ellington after mentioning Sidney Bechet, Johnny Hodges and Charlie Parker in a discussion on improvisation (vide "The Book of Jazz" by Leonard Feather).

In terms of personal accomplishment and influence, Hawk will be second only to Duke and Louis Armstrong in most lists of Jazz giants. Like them, he is really beyond category, but unlike them, he had no early mentors, no Doc Perry, no King Oliver, to guide his first exploratory steps. The tenor sax, as he is at pains to emphasize, was not introduced into jazz by him, but it was in jazz only on sufferance until he finally emancipated it while a member of the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra. Then the rough, staccato style, full of slap-tongued notes, gave way to one that was flowing and more subtly swinging. From then on, until Lester Young entered the scene with Count Basie, Hawk was the supreme arbiter of tenor fashion, and one who did so much towards raising the status of his instrument that eventually it came to have the dominant solo role in jazz.

For more than three decades, Hawk has met every challenge, home and away. Always willing to meet any competition, "cutting contests" were for him a kind of exercise, sparring rounds from which he profited, but where the full resources had seldom to be employed. Superbly confident, and alertly interested in all new musical developments within jazz, he is a thinking musician who assimilates what he regards of value and spurns the trite and hackneyed. His association with boppers and self-styled "modern" musicians was an example of his adventurous outlook, although in many ways he had antedated them. He recalls for instance, how he was accused of wrong notes in his 1939 version of Body and Soul by "a lot of people who didn't know about flatted fifths and augmented changes".

Yet while other styles and stylists have come and gone, the essentials of Hawk's style have endured unimpaired — the big, full tone, the warmth of utterance, the expressive phrasing with its marvellous feeling for the beat, the spontaneity and originality of his improvisations, and the unfailing, surging swing. It is a style, of course, eminently suited to a "Mainstream" series such as this, and the four musicians chosen to play with him here provide the kind of sympathetic, stimulating and thoroughly professional support he most esteems. *Stanley Dance (from the liner notes)*

To be brief and maybe a little dogmatic about it, I think this is the Hawkins' record that some of us have been waiting for.

Hawkins is a phoenix: he seems to be re-born periodically as a major jazzman. (Of course, it's quite possible that it is only our ears that are re-born). The current Hawkins was announced, I think, at Newport in '56, and was recorded on Columbia (CL933). Since then no recording quite captured what he was doing at his best, although Riverside 12-233 came very close. This record does it; it preserves one of those rare occasions which most jazz performances necessarily only imply.

Everyone involved seems to have known it. Clayton's imagination is constant; he invents fine melodies throughout nearly every solo and executes them personally and with that taste and sense of relevance that never seems to leave him. Hank Jones, a nearly perfect complement here to the implicit lyricism and rhythmic strength of both Hawkins and Clayton, seems almost to use all the life and invention he has been holding back over at Capitol, and shows more originality in his ideas than he has on records in some time. Sheen plays with an understanding of Hawkins' rhythmic conception that a few drummers have and it seems a release for both of them.

Hawkins has a style based on his knowledge of what notes are in chords and what nearby notes can be added to them, of course, It is not at all strange that he is personally out of sympathy with the other major tenor school, founded by Lester Young, which approaches improvisation compositionally and, rather than opening chords, writes new melodies with a knowledge of intervals. Hawkins' way can lead to overly decorative playing and here on One and Only Love I think nearly does. On the other hand, it can lead to truly cohesive and functional improvisation-on-theme and I would be willing to use You've Changed as an excellent example of just how it can. His rhythms, almost always and still basically alternating heavy/weak heavy/weak, can lead to monotony but he knows how to break through the pattern and re-create it by contrast. Bird of Prey and Miss G.P. show how.

But these things, like Hemingway's short sentences or Armstrong's four-bar units, are only Hawkins' means, and at the right moments are only, for him, necessary ways of creating that mysterious whole we call art.

When he is being an artist, he does not seem to be using them but re-creating them both as a means and a part of a new entity.

The Hawkins here of Bird of Prey, Miss G.P., You’ve Changed does that and does it with ideas, a power, and sure sense of pace that could challenge anyone and enlighten us all.

*Martin Williams (Down Beat, April 16, 1959 [5 stars])*

1 - Bird Of Prey Blues

(Coleman Hawkins)

2 - My One And Only Love

(Guy B. Wood, Robert Mellin)

3 - Vignette

(Henry "Hank" Jones)

4 - Ooh-Wee, Miss G.P.!

(Coleman Hawkins)

5 - You've Changed

(Bill Carey, Carl T. Fischer)

6 - Get Set

(Henry "Hank" Jones)

Coleman Hawkins (tenor sax), Buck Clayton (trumpet),

Hank Jones (piano), Ray Brown (bass), Mickey Sheen (drums).

Recorded in New York City, February 18 and 19, 1958