Ken Burns JAZZ Collection: Coleman Hawkins

Amazon.com Coleman Hawkins had one of the longest creative careers in jazz, and this compilation, spanning every decade in which he recorded (and accompanying Ken Burns’s 10-part documentary Jazz), emphasizes that his imagination was as enduring as his ruggedly bristling tenor saxophone sound. In the 1920s he was virtually the creator of jazz saxophone playing, freeing it from the mushy sound it had in dance bands. By the time “Bean” recorded his tune “Queer Notions” with Fletcher Henderson in 1933, he was already playing with elements of atonality in his music. 1939’s “Body and Soul” is a breakthrough in the development of the jazz solo, a masterpiece of sustained harmonic invention. While many of his generation resisted the bebop revolution of the 1940s, Hawkins was a notable sponsor, among the first to hire its exponents and to record tunes like Dizzy Gillespie’s “Woody ‘n’ You” and Thelonious Monk’s “I Mean You.” In the later years of his career, he played across a broad spectrum of jazz. There’s a sublime meeting here with fellow swing tenor giant Ben Webster over a Latin beat on “La Rosita.” Max Roach’s “Driva Man” was one of the first works of explicit social protest in jazz. And Duke Ellington wrote the concluding “Self Portrait of the Bean” for Hawkins for a 1962 session in which they belatedly joined forces. –Stuart Broomer