Print
Email
Look It Up
AT A GLANCE
Hawkins, Coleman Randolph
3 articles on Hawkins, Coleman Randolph
Hawkins, Coleman Randolph
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 649 Includes: Bibliography1904?–1969
Jazz musician, called the “father of the tenor saxophone,” whose career spanned the years from early swing to post-bop jazz. Famous for his landmark 1939 recording of “Body and Soul” and as sideman in the big bands of Mamie Smith and Fletcher Hamilton Henderson, Jr., Coleman Hawkins is credited with bringing the tenor saxophone into the Jazz ensemble. When Hawkins began his long musical career in the early 1920s, the saxophone was, according to jazz historian Joachim Berendt, in “the category of strange noise makers.” No previous player had explored the instrument's potential for carrying a song's melody, for mimicking the human voice, or for use in tonal experimentation.Hawkins, known to his contemporaries as “Hawk” or “Bean,” changed all that. Born in St. Joseph, Missouri, toKansas ...
Read full articleHawkins, Coleman
Source: African American National Biography
Word Count: 2130 Includes: Further Reading | Obituary:(21 Nov. 1904–19 May 1969), jazz tenor saxophonist, was born Coleman Randolph Hawkins in St. Joseph, Missouri, the son of William Hawkins, an electrical worker, and Cordelia Coleman, a schoolteacher and organist. He began to study piano at age five and the cello at seven; he then eagerly took up the C-melody saxophone he received for his ninth birthday. Even before entering high school in Chicago, he was playing professionally at school dances. Recognizing his talent, his parents sent him to the all-black Industrial and Educational Institute in Topeka, Kansas. His mother insisted that he take only his cello with him. During vacations, however, Hawkins played both cello and C-melody saxophone in Kansas City theater orchestras, where the blues singer Mamie Smith heard him in 1921.Smith hired ...
Read full articleHawkins, Coleman
Source: American National Biography Online
Word Count: 2258 Includes: Bibliographyjazz tenor saxophonist, was born Coleman Randolph Hawkins in St. Joseph, Missouri, the son of William Hawkins, an electrical worker, and Cordelia Coleman, a schoolteacher and organist. Hawkins began to study piano at age five and the cello at seven; he then eagerly took up the C-melody saxophone he received for his ninth birthday. Even before entering high school in Chicago, he was playing professionally at school dances. Recognizing his talent, his parents sent him to the all-black Industrial and Educational Institute in Topeka, Kansas, his mother insisting that he take only his cello with him. During vacations, however, Hawkins played ...
Read full article