Body and Soul — Coleman Hawkins Tenor Saxophone Transcription

Music by Johnny Green · Recorded 11 October 1939 · Two choruses · Tenor solo only

Coleman Hawkins — Biography

The Father of the Tenor Saxophone

Coleman Randolph Hawkins was born in St Joseph, Missouri on 21 November 1904. He started piano at five, moved to cello at seven, and settled on a C-melody saxophone at nine; he studied harmony and composition at high school in Topeka. Almost nobody in jazz at that point regarded the tenor saxophone as a serious solo instrument, and the fact that Hawkins arrived at it through piano and cello rather than through the dance band explains a good deal about how he played it.

At around sixteen he joined Mamie Smith's Jazz Hounds, billed as “Saxophone Boy” — he was a minor, so Smith had to become his legal guardian for him to tour. He made his recording debut in May 1922. From 1923 to 1934 he was with Fletcher Henderson's orchestra, the decade in which he essentially invented the role of the jazz tenor soloist.

In 1934 he left for Europe, intending a short visit, and stayed five years. He played in London with Jack Hylton — the same bandleader who had made the very first recording of Body and Soul in 1930 — and recorded with Django Reinhardt and Benny Carter. He came home in 1939 because of the war, opened at Kelly's Stable on 52nd Street with his own band, and found a scene that had moved on without him.

Weeks before the session there was a famous late-night contest with Lester Young at Puss Johnson's Tavern in Harlem — the older master against the younger player whose lighter, cooler sound was rewriting the instrument. Down Beat reported that the two tangled for an hour and it stopped because Young had had enough. Billie Holiday, who was in the room, told the same magazine the opposite: that Young cut Hawkins, and most people who saw it agreed. Two eyewitness accounts, flatly contradictory, in consecutive issues.

What Hawkins did next settled the argument on his own terms. And he kept moving: in 1944 he led the session with Dizzy Gillespie, Don Byas, Oscar Pettiford and Max Roach that many historians call the first bebop recording date, and he gave early work to Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis. His own account was characteristically unbothered — Parker and Gillespie were “far out” to a lot of people, he said, but it was just music to him. He died in New York on 19 May 1969, aged 64.

The Session — 11 October 1939

Bluebird B-10523, Recorded as a Favour

RCA Victor's studio on East 24th Street, New York, supervised by Leonard Joy. The band was booked to record three titles: Meet Doctor Foo, Fine Dinner, and She's Funny That Way with a vocal by Thelma Carpenter. Body and Soul was the fourth, and it was not on the plan.

By Hawkins' own account, Joy called him over and asked him to do it as a favour, because a listener had rung from Trenton having heard him play it at Kelly's Stable and wanted it on a record. Hawkins said he had another song he would rather do. Joy told him he could do that one another time.

There was no written arrangement — the session sheet lists it simply as a head arrangement. The band was Hawkins on tenor, with Tommy Lindsay and Joe Guy on trumpets, Earl Hardy on trombone, Jackie Fields and Eustis Moore on altos, Gene Rodgers on piano, William Oscar Smith on bass and Arthur Herbert on drums. The horns play a quiet sustained cushion; Rodgers gives four bars of introduction and then, for the rest of the record, plays little more than block chords on every beat. Everything else is Hawkins.

It was issued on Bluebird B-10523, coupled with Fine Dinner, and it sold more than 100,000 copies in six months — extraordinary for an instrumental ballad with no vocal and no big band behind it. Hawkins never really understood why. It was the only record he knew of, he said, that the squares liked as much as the jazz people did, and he could not see how, because he had been making notes all the way rather than playing a melody for anybody.

In 2004 the Library of Congress added the recording to the National Recording Registry. The essay accompanying it goes further than most: Hawkins' record, it suggests, is arguably the second most important recording in the history of jazz improvisation, after Louis Armstrong's West End Blues.

About the Solo

Two Choruses, and Almost No Melody

The transcription covers Hawkins' two complete choruses — 64 bars, at crotchet equals 100, written in E♭ major for tenor and sounding in D♭ concert. The form is the standard 32-bar AABA, with the bridge lifting into a different key entirely; the lead sheet page covers the harmony and why that modulation matters.

The famous thing about this solo is what is missing from it. Hawkins gestures at the melody for a few bars at the opening and then leaves it alone completely, improvising continuously through both choruses from the harmony rather than decorating the theme. In 1939, on a commercial recording of a popular song, that was close to unheard of. He got away with it because Body and Soul was so well known that no listener could possibly lose their place — the tune is present in the audience's head even though it is absent from the record.

What replaces the melody is a slow, deliberate accumulation. The opening phrases are spacious and vocal, sitting close to the chords. As the first chorus develops, the lines get denser and the note values shorter; by the second chorus he is running semiquaver figures through the changes, reaching further from the harmony and using the full range of the horn. The intensity builds fairly steadily all the way to the last eight bars, which is where the record peaks, and then the closing cadenza — marked as such in the score, with a fermata — releases it.

Read the score with the chord symbols and the logic is unmistakable. Hawkins is not playing licks over changes; he is composing lines out of the harmony, using the altered dominants and the passing diminished chords as material rather than as obstacles. That is the reason the record is usually described as pointing towards bebop. Five years later he would be on the session that many people call the first bebop date, and this solo is the evidence that he had been heading there for some time.

One detail worth listening for, which the transcription cannot show you: Gene Rodgers' piano behind him is almost entirely block chords on every single beat. There is no rhythmic conversation, no comping in any modern sense. Hawkins generates the entire rhythmic and harmonic interest of two and a half minutes of music on his own, against a metronome with chords attached. It is a much harder thing to do than the record makes it sound.

For a sense of the opposite pole of tenor playing in exactly the same period, Illinois Jacquet's Flying Home solo was recorded less than three years later — the same instrument, the same era, and a completely different theory of what it is for.

Was It Really Improvised?

The Argument That Has Never Been Settled

This is the most interesting question about the record, and the sources genuinely disagree.

The case that it was worked out. Hawkins had been playing Body and Soul nightly at Kelly's Stable for weeks. He knew exactly what he was going to do with the tune, and a number of writers have concluded that what sounds like spontaneous invention was substantially prepared in advance. The solo's architecture — the steady, unbroken build across two choruses to a climax in precisely the right place — is not obviously the shape of something invented on the spot.

The case that it wasn't. Others who followed him closely maintain that he never played the same version twice, at Kelly's Stable or anywhere else. On that account, the reason the take works is not that it was planned but that he had internalised the harmony so completely that the shape came out right whatever he played.

What Hawkins said. He described himself as “making notes all the way” — which reads much more like a description of improvising than of executing something rehearsed, though he was talking about why the public liked it rather than about his method.

The likeliest answer is the one that dissolves the question. He had extremely well developed material and he assembled it freshly. That is what most experienced improvisers actually do, and the fact that we still argue about it eighty-odd years later is a measure of how completely the seams are hidden.

It matters practically, too. If you approach this solo as a fixed composition you will learn the notes and miss the point. If you approach it as a demonstration of how thoroughly someone can know a set of changes, you will get something out of it that transfers to your own playing.

How to Practise It

Five Things That Actually Help

The notes are not the hard part of this solo. The hard part is making it sound like music rather than like a very accurate exercise.

1. Learn the changes first, away from the solo. The harmony moves quickly and the bridge changes key. Every line Hawkins plays is a response to a specific chord, and if you do not know which chord you are on, you are just reading dots. Work through the lead sheet until the sequence is secure before you start.

2. Sing the opening with the record. Before you play a note, sing along with the first eight bars until you can do it accurately. It forces you to hear his phrasing as shape rather than as rhythm notation, which is exactly the thing that gets lost when people learn this from the page.

3. Practise it far slower than written. At 100 beats per minute every note is completely exposed — there is nowhere to hide an uneven run or a poorly placed note. Work at half speed until the semiquaver figures are even, then bring it up gradually.

4. Treat the written rhythms as approximations. Hawkins plays with a lot of rubato and notation can only get so close to it. Once you have the notes, put the score down and match the record by ear. If you play the rhythms exactly as written you will sound stiff, and it will not be your fault or the transcription's.

5. Map the arc before you perform it. The solo builds steadily across both choruses to the final eight bars and the cadenza. Mark where the intensity steps up, and hold something back early so that there is somewhere left to go. Players who start at full expressive intensity have nothing to do by the second chorus.

If you would like help with any of this — ballad phrasing and rubato are much easier to work on with someone listening — saxophone lessons are available in South East London and online. You can also browse the rest of the free saxophone transcriptions on this site.