Just a little smidgen of a novel.
Coleman Hawkins.
Now, who knows Coleman Hawkins?
This is a sharp audience.
Coleman Hawkins has been dead since the early '70s,
but he invented the jazz saxophone.
And I tell that to people, and they look at you all funny,
but it's true.
Before Coleman Hawkins started playing the way that he started
playing, the saxophone was looked upon as sort
of a novelty instrument.
In fact, Adolphe Sax--
I don't know how many people know this, some of you
must know it.
But Adolphe Sax, the inventor of the saxophone,
didn't want colored people playing it.
He felt that this was like sacrilege,
that he didn't want any Negro lips touching his horn.
This is true.
This is all true.
And the irony, of course, is obvious,
that you see a saxophone, you think of Black people now.
But when the saxophone was first introduced to jazz,
it was used as a novelty instrument in the same way
that the trombone was a clownish instrument for a long time.
If you listen to early Dixieland records or early jazz records
in the '20s, the sax is played in a style that
used to be called slap tounging, pa pa ta, pa pa ta pa ta
ta, very staccato, very hokey.
You see it sometimes in hip cartoons.
The animated cartoons of the '60s and '70s,
they have these clownish saxophone players, closer
to what they call now the Yakety Sax kind of thing
that, say, David Sanborn would do with Boots
Randolph or something.
Coleman Hawkins stopped that.
He just one day decided to play the horn a different way.
And he started playing the horn in a style that
has been known ever since as the jazz saxophone.
I'll give you an example, say, the way the trombone was used.
I know that all of us, whatever your age,
you've seen a cartoon at one point or another--
it's some kind of a documentary narrative for kids
or something-- where you'll hear a trombone
and the soundtrack will say, "whamp, whamp, whamp."
And the guy off the screen will say
"And that's one little chipmunk that'll
never stray from its home again," that kind of thing.
That's the role that the early saxophone played.
Well, Coleman changed all that.
He also changed a lot of things.
In 1939, when he came back to the United States
after a long stay in Europe, and then as now,
Native American art like jazz is followed
with a good deal, more avidness abroad than it is here.
I had a taxi driver who was a Black guy this last spring,
I had just met Max Roach in the lobby of this hotel I
was staying at in Washington, DC,
and my head was reeling when I got in the taxi.
And I said, "Gee, you know who I just met?"
He said, "Who?"
I said, "Max Roach."
He said, "Max Roach, Max Roach."
He said, "Who is that?"
I said, "Well, he's this great jazz drummer."
He says, "Oh."
He says, "You know, Black people don't know nothing about jazz
these days.
You know, like, it's really a shame, you know,
our art form and all that, and Black people
don't know anything about it."
I said, "Yeah."
He says, "Yeah."
He says, "I don't know anything about it."
[LAUGHTER]
So Coleman Hawkins came back in 1939, made this record called
"Body and Soul."
And things were never the same because--
well, you can listen to the record for yourself.
You probably have heard it through the Manhattan transfer,
which does a version using Eddie Jefferson's words to that solo.
And, of course, like everything that's
startlingly new at the time, it eventually becomes commonplace.
And everybody forgets that somebody had to invent it.
This is my involvement with "Body and Soul."
"Body and Soul," Coleman Hawkins, 1939.
My father, who used to bicycle 30 miles one way
to court my mother, had this record among his dust needle
78s.
He'd already worn out several copies
before I learned to love it from memory,
never knowing until much later what a cause it had stirred.
Imagine it's 1939.
You talk about a hell-raising year.
That one had to take the cake with Hitler taking
Czechoslovakia, Bohemia, Moravia, and Poland;
with Stalin taking Finland and Poland, poor Poland;
Franco taking Spain; Great Britain and France
declaring war on Germany; Mussolini taking Albania;
Stalin and Hitler signing their infamous non-aggression pact
that would splinter and split all the left-leaning parents
of kids I would later meet at college and beyond.
My own folks, peasants and proles, knew next to nothing
about the left wing, or the right wing for that matter,
of anything but chickens.
But they did know right from wrong.
Politics to them had something to do
with money and power, which, in white Mississippi,
were one and the same.
History and truth are so easily misconstrued.
Even dates, names, facts and figures can lie.
Art's an art, figure's a figure all for the white man,
none for the nigger.
Depending on who's doing the dating, doing the naming,
doing the figuring, the telling of truth
is the poet's proper domain.
And in the head-whipping nations of this darkening, fact-ridden
world, people still look to poets and the music
they make for light, sweet light, illuminating everything,
everywhere.
If it's true that in this alleged 1939,
the New York World's Fair World of Tomorrow
ran for five straight months, and that TVA got the Supreme
Court go ahead, and that TV in the US
was first broadcast publicly from the Empire State Building,
covering the opening of that same World's Fair,
then it's equally fair to imagine Coleman Hawkins
in that crowded year.
In October, the Golden Gate Bridge closed down for repairs,
while on the 11th day of that same month,
Hawkins, just back from a rewarding stay
in war-hungry Europe, repaired to the RCA Victor New York
Studios with some musical friends
and cut "Body and Soul," just like that
in the shadow of the Empire State Building.
You can even picture him slouched in front of one
of those weighty, old condenser boom mics, surrounded by smoke,
suspended and beheaded, thinking something like, well,
let's see how what I'm feeling is going to come out
sound in this time so we can get this session wrapped up,
and get back to the gig, and really do some blowing.
After the take, he probably remembered
how he'd performed this wee hours ballad better
a hundred times before.
"I'll get it down yet," he told himself,
"but this will have to do for now."
And children, that was that.
When the record came out, saxophonists
all over the world hearing it and sensing that things would
never be the same, started woodshedding Hawkins
and passioned licks in their closets and on the stand.
Why do you have to go and do that?
Of course, everybody fell in love with it.
My father would play it, take it off, play something else,
then put it back on.
This went on for years.
What was he listening for?
What were we listening to?
What did it mean?
What were all those funny throaty squawks, and sighs,
and cries all about?
I knew what a body was, but what was a soul?
You kept hearing people say, well, bless his soul.
You thought you knew what they meant,
but really you could only imagine, as you must now.
You knew what they meant when they said, bless her heart,
because you could put your hand to your heart
and feel the beat.
And your aunt Ethel sometimes fried up chicken hearts along
with gizzards, livers, and feet.
But a soul was unseeable, that animals have souls, too,
that birds, dogs, cows, mules, pigs, snakes, bees.
And what about other stuff?
Like corn, okra, creeks, rivers, moonlight, sunshine, trees,
the ground, the rain, the sky.
Did white folks have souls?
Was a soul something like a breeze?
Something you couldn't picture or grab
but could only feel like you could
the wind off the gulf when the day cooled down,
or the way the ground would tremble
when the train roared past across the street
from where we lived?
39, 40, 50, a hundred, thousands,
who's to say how many chilled Octobers have befallen us?
Each one engraved in micro moments
of this innocent utterance, electrically
notated, but, like light in a photograph,
never quite captured in detail, only in essence.
Essence, in this instance, his private song,
is you hearing your sorrow and joy blown back
through Coleman Hawkins and visibly connected to you
and played back through countless bodies, each one
an embodiment of the same soul force.
All poetry is about silent music, and visible art,
and the clothing of time for the ages.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.