Coleman Hawkins
Coleman Hawkins essentially invented the tenor saxophone as a jazz instrument in the late 1920s. By the time the LP era began in the early 1950s he had already been a leading voice for two decades. The records that follow document the late chapter of one of the longest and most influential careers in jazz: small-group ballad dates, the Ben Webster summit, the Moodsville and Prestige sessions of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the Impulse! recordings that closed it out. Twenty-three albums across three eras. Browse below.
Browse by Era
Each era page covers a distinct period in Coleman's career, with full reviews, personnel details, Apple Music audio previews, and album art for every record.
Seven albums from the first half of the LP era. Decca, Savoy, RCA Victor, Vik, Riverside, Felsted, and Verve dates that show Hawkins moving easily from swing-era settings into the modern small-group format that would define the rest of his career.
Nine records covering Hawkins's late-career peak across Prestige, Moodsville, Verve, and Columbia. The Ben Webster encounter, At Ease, the Village Gate live date, and the ballad sessions that captured the most personal playing of his long career.
Seven records spanning the Impulse! years and the final Pablo session. The Duke Ellington summit, the Sonny Rollins meeting, Today and Now, Wrapped Tight, and Sirius, released after his death in 1969 from a recording made the same year. The closing chapter of one of the longest careers in jazz.
Seven landmark Hawkins records embedded as full-album videos: The Hawk Flies High, Encounters Ben Webster, Duke Ellington Meets Coleman Hawkins, Night Hawk, The Hawk Relaxes, Today and Now, and Sonny Meets Hawk!
Open the Coleman Hawkins video page →Coleman Hawkins, 1904–1969
Coleman Randolph Hawkins was born November 21, 1904, in St. Joseph, Missouri. He played piano and cello before settling on the tenor saxophone, an instrument that had no real jazz tradition when he picked it up in the late 1910s. He joined Fletcher Henderson's orchestra in 1924 and stayed for nearly a decade, and the playing he did with that band defined the tenor saxophone vocabulary for the next two generations.
His 1939 recording of "Body and Soul" is the most analyzed tenor solo of the swing era, and it announced a harmonic sophistication that anticipated bebop by four years. Hawkins led one of the first bebop sessions on record (the 1944 date that introduced Dizzy Gillespie and Don Byas to the format), and he stayed engaged with the modern players through the rest of his career.
The LP-era catalog reviewed here begins with the 1952 Decca date The Hawk Talks and runs through the 1965 Impulse! session Wrapped Tight. The 1959 Verve summit with Ben Webster and the Moodsville ballad records of 1960 to 1962 are widely considered the high point of his late period. Sirius, recorded in 1966 and released by Pablo in 1974, closes the catalog.
His final years were difficult. Heavy drinking and declining health led to an emaciated appearance and unreliable playing by the mid-1960s. He died in New York City on May 19, 1969, at sixty-four.