Coleman Hawkins, legendary jazz tenor saxophonist, was born on 21st Nov. 1904

Coleman Hawkins was born in St. Joseph, Missouri on November 21st 1904, moving to Topeka, Kansas where he attended High School. He learnt piano and cello from an early age, but took up the saxophone before he was ten, and studied harmony and composition at high school. By his early teens he was playing to audiences around Kansas. He joined Mamie Smith's Jazz Hounds in 1921, touring with them for a couple of years before moving to Fletcher Henderson's Orchestra, with whom he stayed for over a decade, playing alongside Louis Armstrong during 1924-5. In 1934, he took up an offer to join Jack Hylton's Band in the UK and played in Europe, often as a soloist until WWII, working with Django Reinhardt and Benny Carter in 1937. He returned to the USA in 1939, and that recorded his memorable version of "Body and Soul", notable for its interpretation of harmonic structure. He tried without success to put a big band together, then formed a group with Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Max Roach and Oscar Pettiford, in 1944 making what are widely regarded as the first bebop recordings with Roach and Dizzy Gillespie. He continued playing with various bands and recording on an independent basis for the next dozen or more years, splitting his time between New York, where he was a regular at the Village Vanguard, and touring Europe, as well as performing at many jazz festivals, including Newport. He was remarkable in that he was associated over the years with a variety of stylistic strands of jazz, from early swing through to bebop and modern, and was comfortable playing in any jazz environment, and was also recognized as one of the great interpreters of ballads. He pretty much stopped recording by the mid-60s and died of pneumonia in May 1969 in New York. Acrobat has a collection of his recordings on catalogue - for details click here.