Music: Play the Way You Feel

“Good playing, precise playing,” says Coleman Hawkins, “has no date—it goes on and on forever.” Tenorman Hawkins should know what he is talking about.

The man who gave the saxophone to jazz has been blowing a wicked wind for 40 years—and the melodic breeze shows no signs of slackening. Having survived several shifts in jazz taste—swing to bebop to cool—Hawkins remains the busiest tenorman around. As fans at the Ohio Valley Jazz Festival in Cincinnati could testify last week, his swaggering saxophone has lost none of its ingenuity.

Dapper and erect at 58, Hawkins dominates the bandstand. Body swaying slightly, he shuts his eyes as he uncoils his long, looping solos with their artfully building figurations, their insistently driving rhythms, their soaring air of abandon. In such numbers as Groovin’ or Moonglow, Hawkins’ sax capers in a loose-jointed way that mirrors the musician’s pleasure; in Think Deep, say, or When Day Is Done, the style remains as virile as ever, but the tone becomes even warmer and more open-throated—mellow in a manner that Saxophone Inventor Adolphe Sax (1814-94) would never have believed.

It was the big tone, the rhythmic stride and the air of unfettered delight that made Hawkins an immediate success when he broke in with the old Fletcher Henderson band in 1923. A St. Joseph (Mo.) boy, Hawkins was only 19; he had been playing the sax since he was nine, had been making good money working proms and club dates from his mid-teens. (“I never played for $5 a night in my life,” says Hawkins with pride. “I was always a rich musician.”) As the first jazzman of any real talent to play the tenor sax, Hawkins quickly built a reputation and an ardent following. He added to both in 1939 when he and his own nine-piece band cut Body And Soul, one of the most famous jazz disks ever recorded. Hawkins stayed as active in the bopping ’40s as he had been in the swinging ’30s, which would seem to lend weight to his theory that “there has been no evolution in jazz; it’s the same old stuff interpreted and played differently. Laymen make a big deal about such-and-such a style, but it’s all a matter of what a man is thinking.”

When Stan Getz and his cool tenor made the scene in the late ’40s, Hawkins was Out with the Ins. But that, too, passed. Hawkins is back In, so busy recording and hopping about the U.S. and Europe that he rarely has time to sit down to listen to his collection of classical records. The secret, he says, is to play the way you feel: “If I felt like climbing, I’d sound like I was climbing a mountain.”