The History of Jazz (36 page)

In 1932, Fletcher Henderson began advertising his star soloist as the “World’s Greatest Tenor Saxophonist.” It was a fitting title, and Hawkins was no doubt pleased at the recognition. But morale in the Henderson band was low, work was sporadic, and the leader often ineffective or disorganized. Meanwhile, Hawkins was increasingly active in other settings. In 1933, he undertook his first sessions as leader and also performed on a series of memorable sides with trumpeter Henry “Red” Allen. The following February, Hawkins participated in an interracial session, alongside Benny Goodman, and a few days later made his last recording as a member of the Fletcher Henderson band, ending an eleven-year tenure.

The final break came when Hawkins was offered the opportunity to perform in England by Jack Hylton, an influential British bandleader and booking agent. Hawkins requested a short leave of absence from the Henderson band—in one or two months, he promised, he would be back. In fact, Hawkins would spend most of the decade overseas and would not see Henderson again for six years. From England, Hawkins soon journeyed to the continent, where he played in Holland, Denmark, Switzerland, Norway, and France. Like many American jazz musicians before and since, Hawkins enjoyed the tolerant and receptive attitude of the European audiences. At his arrival in Copenhagen, five thousand fans gathered at the railway station to greet him. A few of them carried Hawkins, who was seated on an ornate chair, to his waiting taxi. A similar entourage awaited his arrival in Oslo, where Hawkins was presented with flowers, and young ladies struggled to get a glimpse of the visiting celebrity. In England, the periodical
Melody Maker
, which had long lavished praise on Hawkins, enlisted him to contribute three articles outlining the secrets of his jazz saxophone method. While working in Switzerland, he learned to ski and toyed with the idea of becoming a vocalist.

Some fifteen years had elapsed since James Reese Europe, Will Marion Cook, and Sidney Bechet had brought the sounds of hot African American music overseas. In the interim, the European audience for jazz had grown more sophisticated, more fanatical. Around the time of Hawkins’s arrival, a coterie of ardent supporters— Hugues Panassié, Charles Delaunay, Robert Goffin, and others—were taking the lead on a variety of fronts to promote jazz music on the continent. Their activities extended to founding
Le Jazz Hot
, often cited as the first jazz magazine (although Sweden’s
Orkester Journalen
predated it by two years)—which made its debut only a few weeks after Hawkins arrived in Paris; the first issue was printed on the back of a program for Hawkins’s concert at Salle Pleyel—as well as to establishing venues for performance, producing recordings, undertaking historical and discographical research, and exhorting their contemporaries to treat jazz seriously as an art form. Their efforts would shape the European taste for jazz and eventually be felt back in the United States.

But European participation in the jazz world was no longer merely as a passive, if receptive, audience. As Hawkins soon saw, European jazz musicians had made enormous strides by the mid-1930s. Although the vast majority were little more than imitators of models from America, a few artists of the highest order were drawing on local traditions and fusing them with jazz to create vibrant new hybrids. Of these pioneers of European jazz, the Quintette du Hot Club de France, featuring guitarist Django Reinhardt and violinist Stéphane Grappelli, had attained an especially rare degree of inspiration, establishing itself as one of the most important jazz groups of the day.

The band’s instrumentation revealed a fresh break with the traditions of American jazz. In place of the brass, reed, and percussion elements so prominent in African American music, the Quintette employed a violin, three guitars, and bass. But the distinctive character of this group went beyond its reliance on strings instead of horns. Reinhardt and Grappelli brought a specifically European perspective— drawing on gypsy music, classical composition, and local folk traditions—to bear on their jazz work. The band’s repertoire was drawn from disparate sources: a swing version of a Bach concerto movement or a bolero inspired by Ravel might be juxtaposed with pop compositions by George Gershwin or Noel Coward, or coexist alongside a New Orleans warhorse such as “Tiger Rag.” This was music that respected no national boundaries, as nomadic as Reinhardt’s gypsy forebears. The cross-cultural roots of the Quintette were felt also in the style of improvisation, especially Reinhardt’s. With a fresh lyricism, he cut through the clichés of early American jazz guitar, discarding the banjo-inspired syncopations and ponderous rhythms in favor of more a fluid approach, one that was both melodically inventive and rhythmically inspired. Grappelli, for his part, thrived in this context, but this artist demonstrated, in later decades, that his violin could adapt to almost any type of setting, jazz or otherwise. During the course of a career that spanned more than a half-century, Grappelli would create an impressive, diverse body of work that found him in collaboration with modernists (Gary Burton, McCoy Tyner), classicists (Yehudi Menuhin, Yo-Yo Ma), practitioners of roots music (David Grisman, Mark O’Connor), and, of course, traditionalists from his own generation (Earl Hines, Bill Coleman).

Born in Belgium on January 23, 1910, and raised in a gypsy settlement outside Paris, Jean Baptiste “Django” Reinhardt was playing professionally even before his teens. He enjoyed little formal education in music—or in other areas, for that matter: Reinhardt was illiterate and signed his name with an X. But he picked up an odd assortment of skills—in billiards, in fishing, in music—at which he greatly excelled. His musical pursuits began with violin and eventually gravitated to the guitar. In 1928, Django’s left hand was severely injured in a caravan fire, essentially depriving him of the use of two fingers. Yet Reinhardt’s music would show few signs of compromise with this disability, other than a reliance on chords that use just two or three fingers—emphasizing sixths and ninths in a manner that has been often been imitated by later performers working in this style. Django’s supple guitar technique stood out for its speed and assertiveness, and at a time when this instrument was seen more as an accompanist than as a significant solo voice in jazz bands, Reinhardt demonstrated his skill in constructing horn-oriented single-note lines. His rhythmic approach was equally distinctive, and the rapid up-and-down strumming style of accompaniment, known as
la pompe
, has become a trademark of Gypsy jazz—or
jazz manouche
, the French name by which it is often known.

Reinhardt’s earliest recordings, accompanying an accordionist and slide whistle player, are far removed from the cosmopolitan jazz of his later years, but by the time of the first Quintette session in 1934, he had come to terms with the African American idiom. On “Dinah” he intermingles bouncy triplets and bluesy asides with forceful octaves, setting a standard for ease of execution and invention that would be amplified in later Quintette recordings such as “Djangology,” “Limehouse Blues,” “Chicago,” and “Minor Swing.” In time, the influence of Ravel, Debussy, and Gershwin would impart an impressionist tinge to Reinhardt’s jazz, revealed in his exploration of whole-tone scales and in the languorous beauty of his most famous composition, “Nuages.”

Reinhardt would not tour overseas until after World War II. But by then he had already played with many of the luminaries of jazz during their European visits and had developed an international reputation. Before the war, Reinhardt had recorded with Benny Carter, Coleman Hawkins, Dickie Wells, and members of the Duke Ellington band. Ellington remained a great admirer of Reinhardt’s—Duke lauded him as “among the few great inimitables of our music”
⁹
—and when the guitarist decided to tour the United States in November 1946 it was in tandem with the Ellington band. Here he adopted an electric guitar and performed in large auditoriums, including Carnegie Hall. Returning to France, Reinhardt continued to play in small clubs and undertake occasional recordings. At his death in 1953, attributed to a cerebral hemorrhage, he was only forty-three years old.

Grappelli and Reinhardt had parted ways at the outbreak of World War II, the violinist staying in England, where the band had been on tour, while Django returned to France. A few weeks earlier, Coleman Hawkins had departed for the United States, arriving stateside only days before Germany’s invasion of Poland. The rise of Nazism did not bode well for jazz musicians in Europe. Hawkins himself had been denied the right to perform in Germany because his appearance with white musicians was deemed unsuitable. Reinhardt, for his part, managed to continue his career under the Nazi occupation but was forced to submit his song selections to the local censorship bureau before each performance. Indeed, jazz took on surprising political significance in this charged environment, with W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” getting rechristened as “La Tristesse de Saint Louis”—by musicians who hoped that a French-sounding name might avoid a crackdown by authorities—while Reinhardt’s “Nuages” was adopted by some partisans as a defiant alternative anthem after the authorities banned “La Marseillaise.”

Hawkins encountered a much different set of challenges back on his native soil. After an absence of five years, he needed to reestablish himself at home in the face of tenorists who had risen to prominence during his European sojourn. Chu Berry, with a rough-and-tumble sound akin to Hawkins’s, was among the best of these new aspirants to the throne. Berry had served in the Fletcher Henderson band in the mid-1930s before joining Cab Calloway in 1937, with whom he remained until his death in a car accident in 1941. The Calloway association paid well, but Berry’s hard-swinging approach might have been better served in another setting—one wonders what magic might have resulted had Berry accepted Ellington’s job offer in the mid-1930s. Ben Webster, who would soon join the Ellington band, also had drawn inspiration from Hawkins, but parted ways from his role model with a breathier, unhurried tone that would become even more languid with the passing years. Webster stepped back from the harmonic acrobatics of Hawkins and the linearity of Young in favor of a celebration of sound. Like a Japanese shakuhachi master, Webster sought the essence of music in texture and timbre, not in well-tempered notes. But the most pressing challenge to Hawkins came again from Lester Young, whose playing had become more confident and distinctive in the intervening years since their Kansas City encounter.

Shortly after his return to New York, Hawkins sought out Young in a jam session at the Famous Door. Their tenor battle was front-page news in
Downbeat
, and the jazz world debated who had emerged the victor. Within days of this engagement, Hawkins matched up with a number of the other top players of his day as part of a Lionel Hampton session that also included Chu Berry, Ben Webster, Benny Carter, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Christian. But the most prominent sign that Hawkins was ready to meet all challengers came on October 11 when he kicked off a series of recordings for RCA’s Bluebird label with a version of “Body and Soul” that became an instant hit with both the general public and musicians. “It’s the first and only record I ever heard of that all the squares dig as well as the jazz people,” Hawkins later remarked. “I don’t understand how and why.” Certainly Hawkins made no compromises to popular tastes in his whirlwind sixty-four-bar solo. It briefly touches on the melody in the opening seconds before taking off into a marvelously fluid thematic development, rich in harmonic implication and rigidly logical in construction, yet infused with an undercurrent of lush romanticism. Not only was this Hawkins’s finest moment, but with “Body and Soul” the tenorist created what is undoubtedly the most celebrated saxophone solo from the first half of the twentieth century.

At the peak of his career, Hawkins remained indecisive in his musical commitments. The next few years found him trying his hand at a wide range of formats: fronting a big band, participating in the Dixieland revival, engaging in small-combo sessions akin to the “Body and Soul” date, and exploring the possibilities of modern jazz. Hawkins’s flirtation with bebop stands out as one of the most intriguing chapters in his biography. Among the earliest bandleaders to recognize the importance of the new idiom, Hawkins featured Dizzy Gillespie (as well as Max Roach, Oscar Pettiford, and Don Byas) on a momentous session from February 1944, which is usually acknowledged as the first modern jazz record date. A short while later, Hawkins hired pianist Thelonious Monk, at a time when the latter’s eccentricities and modernist leanings made him
persona non grata
on most bandstands. Hawkins’s advocacy of modern jazz continued the following year when the tenorist brought the first bebop band to the West Coast, predating the more celebrated Gillespie-Parker Los Angeles engagement by some ten months. During the postwar years, Hawkins further enhanced his progressivist credentials with another first: a jazz recording of unaccompanied saxophone. He first attempted this on a promotional demo disk made for the Selmer company, a leading manufacturer of saxophones—in a two-part variation that includes Hawkins’s improvisation over the chord changes of Monk’s “‘Round Midnight”; he followed this performance with a commercial recording of solo saxophone, released under the title “Picasso.” In time, the jazz world would accept that horn players could perform without the support of a band, but though many would follow down this path, few were better suited for this approach than Hawkins, whose harmonically charged manner of improvisation allowed the listener to feel the pull of the chord changes even when no accompanist was on hand to spell them out.

Yet, for all his avant-garde leanings, Hawkins’s conception of melodic improvisation never really adapted to the changed musical landscape of modern jazz. His deeply analytical musical mind allowed the tenorist to navigate through intricate bop-oriented charts, but his phrasing and conception remained rooted in the Swing Era. Some have tried to enshrine him as a progenitor of bebop, but Hawkins (much like Benny Goodman) never really mastered the characteristic rebalancing and subdivisions of the beat that set apart true bop tenorists such as Dexter Gordon, Teddy Edwards, and Sonny Rollins. The idea of modernism often seemed to hold more appeal for Hawkins than its actual execution. To the end, Hawkins enjoyed lingering near the cutting edge—sessions from his last decade find him in the company of Sonny Rollins, Randy Weston, Paul Bley, and Joe Zawinul. But Hawkins was just as quick to retreat to traditional settings, and some of his most satisfying late-career recordings are alongside veterans such as Ben Webster, Roy Eldridge, and Duke Ellington.