The technique of Coleman Hawkins: rhythm, harmony, melody, development

Sonny Rollins estimates that even in the 21st century, the music of Coleman Hawkins ‘is in everybody that’s playing saxophone’. The instrumental technique Hawkins developed for the tenor saxophone has been adopted, in some way or the other, by most jazz saxophonists. But Hawkins was also a master of the theoretical principles governing tonal music and of their application within the confines of improvised swinging music. This second aspect of his technique is the subject of this thesis, which deals principally with four parameters: rhythm, harmony, melody, and development. Chapter 1 presents Hawkins’s ties with Western classical music, his improvisational method, and his role as an influential model for an approach to jazz improvisation focusing on swing and tonality. At the heart of any attempt to say something of a technical nature about improvised music lies the question of the rapport between the act of improvisation, by definition cast in the moment, and the music resulting from it, which since the end of the 19th century can be recorded and fixed. These two phenomena have been conceptualised using the terms ‘process’ and ‘product’, and in Chapter 2 I discuss the scholarship dedicated to them. The core of the thesis is devoted to in-depth analyses of the techniques observable in selected recordings by Coleman Hawkins. Although these techniques act simultaneously in the creation of Hawkins’s improvisations, it is useful to approach them in turn. Chapters 3 to 5 each focus on Hawkins’s treatment of one of the fundamental parameters of tonal music, drawing from three performances: ‘Just One More Chance’, ‘Don’t Blame Me’, and ‘I Can’t Get Started’. For each of these parameters one main technique is treated. Chapter 3 considers the rich variety of rhythmic figures available to Hawkins, and proposes that his preference for compound metre subdivision is the hermeneutic key to understanding his rhythmic approach. Special attention is given to his usage of sextuplets, and to the superimposed 6/4 metre that they sometimes project. Chapter 4 is devoted to harmony, exploring how Hawkins managed the voice-leading potentials contained in a song. It emphasises the care given to horizontal movements of a contrapuntal nature, challenging the oft-repeated notion that Hawkins is a chord-oriented improviser principally invested in a vertical conception of harmony. Chapter 5 examines the frequent application of theme and variation procedures resulting in a tight connection between Hawkins’s improvisations and the original melody of the song. Examining the same three ballads from rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic perspectives reveals that, in a number of passages, Hawkins actively works on two or three of these parameters at once. In Chapter 6, I explore how Hawkins develops chosen materials over a few consecutive phrases, in examples drawn from several performances not used in the previous chapters. Development is also considered throughout chapters 3 to 7 in another form: Hawkins, in many of his solos, revisits what he has played eight, twelve or sixteen bars before (depending on the form) in the same section of a song, thus working out variations that operate cyclically, rather than in close succession like those surveyed in Chapter 5. Chapter 7 brings together all the techniques observed in chapters 3 to 6 by examining how Hawkins uses them in a single performance of ‘You Go to My Head’. In Appendix I, I propose some ways to practise these techniques in order to incorporate them into one’s own playing