Coleman Hawkins

Soul is one of the best records Hawkins ever made, which is saying a great deal. Ray Bryant's piano is perfectly calibrated: harmonic suggestions rather than harmonic assertions, leaving the melodic space to Hawkins while expanding the landscape underneath. Kenny Burrell's guitar adds a second textural layer that most Hawkins quartet dates don't have, comping with a warmth that thickens the sound without crowding it. The combination is almost telepathic by the end of the date.

The title track is a blues that Hawkins plays with a directness that can be startling if you've only known him from the more formally arranged records. He doesn't ornament here. He doesn't demonstrate. He just plays the blues with the authority of someone who was there when it was being invented, and the feeling is direct and unmistakable.

What Prestige captured on this date was Hawkins at his most unguarded, the formal side set aside in favor of pure expression. Bryant, Burrell, Wendell Marshall on bass, and Osie Johnson on drums understand what's being asked of them and deliver it without hesitation. Soul is the record you play for someone who thinks Coleman Hawkins is a museum piece.

Charlie Shavers was one of the most technically accomplished trumpet players of the swing era, a man who could play faster and higher than almost anyone, and whose sense of humor in the music was always evident. He brings all of this to Hawk Eyes, which gives the date a more extroverted quality than the quieter Prestige sessions. Hawkins responds in kind, playing with more edge than usual.

Ray Bryant is an underrated pianist in the context of Hawkins recordings. His gospel-inflected voicings bring a different harmonic color than the more bebop-oriented pianists Hawkins often worked with, and it suits the blues-based material well. The interaction between Bryant's left hand and Hawkins's low register on the slower numbers is one of the quiet pleasures of this record.

Hawk Eyes isn't Soul, but it's a very good record from a productive period. Hawkins sounds engaged and energized by the company, and Shavers is genuinely his equal as a soloist rather than a sideman in the conventional sense. The interplay between them is what makes this worth returning to.

This is among the greatest small-group recordings in jazz history and the best argument for the summit-meeting format that Norman Granz developed at Verve. Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster were the two defining voices on the tenor saxophone, different in almost every way that mattered: Hawkins dense and harmonic, Webster breathy and melodic, one approaching the instrument from the inside of the chord, the other from the air around it.

The Oscar Peterson Trio provides an accompaniment that would have been extraordinary at any session. Peterson in this period was the greatest all-around jazz pianist working, and with Ellis and Brown behind him, the rhythm section is essentially faultless. They do not play conservatively in deference to the older style of the soloists; they swing hard, and Hawkins and Webster respond with some of the most inspired playing of their late careers.

The ballads are where this record achieves something close to perfection. When Hawkins and Webster play together on a slow tune, the sound is a kind of argument about what the tenor saxophone is for, and both sides are right. There is a moment midway through the record where the two horns intertwine on a melody and the effect is so natural and so complete that you wonder how any single-tenor recording can compete.

Moodsville was a Prestige subsidiary dedicated to exactly the format the name implies: small-group jazz at low temperature, designed for late evenings and close listening. Hawkins returned to the label several times over the next few years, and At Ease is the first and in some ways the best of these sessions, partly because Tommy Flanagan was still the pianist and partly because the material is consistently well chosen.

The word 'ease' is accurate. There's nothing on this record that Hawkins is reaching for; it's a musician playing at the level he has maintained for thirty years, secure enough in his craft that relaxation and quality are the same thing. The improvisations are generous without being discursive, the tone is warm and full, and the interactions with Flanagan have the quality of a conversation between two people who enjoy each other's company.

This is the record for a late Sunday afternoon. It asks nothing of you beyond the willingness to sit still and listen, and in return it gives you an hour in the company of one of the greatest musicians the music ever produced, at his most comfortable and least guarded.

Eddie Lockjaw Davis was the obvious choice for a two-tenor summit with Hawkins: a hard, muscular player whose sound had a rawness that complemented rather than duplicated Hawkins's density. Where Hawkins pressed from the inside of the tone, Lockjaw attacked from the outside, and the contrast in their approaches over shared chord changes is one of the pleasures of this record.

Ron Carter's presence on bass is notable. He was twenty-three years old at this session and already fully formed as a bassist, his intonation perfect, his time unmovable, his harmonic sensibility already pointing toward the work he would do with Miles Davis. For Hawkins, who had been playing with rhythm sections for decades, Carter must have been a revelation.

Tommy Flanagan is again essential, providing a harmonic foundation that serves both tenors without favoring either. Night Hawk is the kind of two-tenor record that makes the format seem obvious: of course you put two of the great voices on the instrument in a room together, give them a rhythm section this good, and let them talk. The conversation is worth the price of admission several times over.

The second Moodsville date is a quintet rather than a quartet, and the addition of Kenny Burrell's guitar changes the texture considerably. Ronnell Bright's piano is leaner and more harmonically explicit than Tommy Flanagan's work on At Ease, and with Burrell filling the harmonic space between them, the overall sound is warmer and more layered.

Hawkins sounds genuinely relaxed here, which is not always a given even on records that promise it. There's a looseness in the phrasing that suggests he's enjoying himself, playing tunes he knows well without being on autopilot about it. Ron Carter and Andrew Cyrille, both young musicians at this point, bring a rhythmic alertness that suits the intimate format.

The Hawk Relaxes is a slightly lighter record than At Ease, but it's still a very good late-period Hawkins date, and the guitar-piano combination gives it a distinctive character within the Moodsville series.

The Village Gate in 1962 was still the kind of room where you could put three masters of the swing era on a bandstand and draw a crowd that knew what it was hearing. The atmosphere on this live recording is warm and celebratory, and the playing has the slightly elevated quality that a live audience often produces in musicians who are otherwise working in studios.

Johnny Hodges was the most distinctive alto saxophonist of his generation, the sound so immediately recognizable that a single phrase was enough to identify him. His alto against Hawkins's tenor is one of the more interesting instrumental contrasts on the record: Hodges all surface and lyric elegance, Hawkins all interior weight and harmonic logic. Roy Eldridge provides the extroversion both of them tend to hold back on their own recordings.

The record doesn't quite reach the heights of the studio meetings, partly because the material is more loosely organized and partly because live recordings of this era often sacrificed some of the sonic detail that made the best studio work so effective. But the energy is real, and the interplay between three major improvisers in a room full of people who came specifically to hear them is not something you can fake.

The Broadway songbook format was irresistible to jazz producers of this era: a coherent program, familiar tunes, and a guaranteed market for older listeners who recognized the melodies from the original productions. Hawkins brings his usual craft to the material, but the concept constrains him more than some of the more open-ended sessions.

Tommy Flanagan is back, which always improves a Hawkins date, and Major Holley's bass playing adds a warmth that Eddie Jones and Wendell Marshall rarely matched. The rhythm section is excellent. The tunes are more of a mixed bag, some of them wearing their age better than others, and the program lacks the variety that makes the better Moodsville dates memorable.

Good Old Broadway is a comfortable rather than essential record. It will satisfy anyone who wants to hear Hawkins in late-career form working through standards, but it doesn't offer the creative surprises that the best sessions in this period delivered.

Richard Rodgers's 1962 Broadway musical No Strings was an unusual show, a love story set in Paris with no string instruments in the pit orchestra, which gave the music a different texture from the lush orchestrations Rodgers had favored throughout his career. The premise of a jazz version of this material was reasonable, and Hawkins was a logical choice for the project.

The problem is that the material isn't quite strong enough to sustain a full album. A few of the songs are genuinely lovely, and Hawkins plays them with his characteristic intelligence, but the program has a slightly dutiful quality that the better Moodsville dates avoided. It feels like a project rather than a musical statement.

Given the personnel, which is again Flanagan, Holley, and Locke, the playing is never less than professional. But this is one of those records that demonstrates a truth about Hawkins: his gifts were most evident when the material challenged him. Commissioned Broadway adaptations rarely did.