[Dixielandjazz] Hawkins and Dixieland

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

I'm not sure about the founders of Blue Note records, but certainly some other 
German exiles from Nazism combined a passion for jazz with a disdain for Bach, 
Beethoven, Brahms as Buergerlich or Bourgeois -- and it makes a bizarre contrast 
to think of that and of the contrast with Johnny Chilton's picture of Hawkins in 
Holland in the 1930s pining because he couldn't get on a train and hear Gunther 
Ramin et al. playing the music of his beloved Bach in Leipzig.  

Hawkins does turn up on some Henry Allen sessions from I think the 1950s, where 
his mastery of harmony and love of Bachian counterpoint were no obstacle. One of 
these albums has some lovely individual clarinet from Earle Warren.  The 
question isn't so much whether a veteran swing player played in a different 
style, as how far say Eddie Barefield gigging around 1950 (and on a Storyville 
CD) was to a real if not enormous degree extending the music. 


The Benny Carter-Hawkins-Django recordings from Paris in the 1930s are classics. 
Benny of course reconstited the ideas in the later Further Definitions set with 
Phil Woods and Charlie Rouse (Rouse was an interesting saxophonist, 
incidentally, right out of Hawkins, but simply limiting the harmonics of his 
sound to fit into a different harmonic and rhythmic context).
I felt positively transported when the big band got together for Benny Carter's 
week at the Glasgow Jazz Festival a number of years ago delivered the same 
concluding orchestrated concluding chorused from the 1930s -- and Bennie Wallace 
brought that back for his Hawkins centenary concert in Berlin, not OKOM for a 
lot of people who contribute to this list, but very impressive indeed with 
arrangements other than the one by Wallace from the son of Gerald Wilson.  In an 
extended solo Wallace even manages to deliver something like a Southern Baptist 
Bach invention. 

I hope others will like me be looking forward to Ken Mathieson's Benny Carter 
realisation with Alan Barnes due out on CD.