Listening to Prestige 543 - Coleman Hawkins

LISTEN TO ONE: The Sweetest Sounds

Coleman Hawkins died in 1969, and made his last recording (fittingly called The Greatest Jazz Concert in the World) in 1967, so this was pretty much the stretch run for the Hawk, but he was prodigiously productive. In 1962 alone he recorded eight albums as leader: three for Prestige, two for Verve, and three for Impulse! He also appeared on albums by Kenny Burrell and Shelly Manne. I doubt that there are many jazz musicians who can approach that level of productivity

This is the second of his Prestige outings, like the first one a Moodsville venture, and like the first focused on the Broadway musical. However, while the first (Good Old Broadway, recorded January 2)

featured familiar and beloved tunes from Broadway's storied past, this one focused on a recently opened show, No Strings, with a score by Richard Rodgers which produced no memorable songs at all.

That's a little unfair. Rodgers had not declined as a composer, but the era of Broadway show tunes becoming hit songs was over. While Broadway-to-Top-Forty had still been a common occurrence in the 1950s -- "Hernando's Hideaway," "Hey There," etc. There were crooners like Eddie Fisher and Patti Page and the Ames Brothers still regularly making the charts in those days, and even a rare Rogers and Hammerstein flop, Pipe Dream, could yield a Billboard chart hit with Fisher's version of "Everybody's Got a Home but Me." 

By comparison, 1962 saw two successful musicals, No Strings and Stop the World--I Want to Get Off, and one smash hit, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and the three of them together produced one song, Sammy Davis Jr.'s "What Kind of Fool Am I?" that even dented the charts.

No Strings not only produced no hits, but except for "The Sweetest Sounds," which got a boost from being recycled into the television musical Cinderella, there have been precious few recordings of any of the songs beyond original cast albums, and except for "Sweetest Sounds" and "Loads of Love," which were included on an Original Jazz Classics double CD called Coleman Hawkins -- On Broadway, none of these songs has had an afterlife in the reissue world.

Which doesn't make them bad songs. and doesn't make this any less of a musically satisfying outing from Hawkins and his musicians. It just means you're not likely to find it anywhere, except for YouTube, which seems to manage to find everything,

When you record ten albums in a year, and over two dozen in what is supposed to be your twilight years, a decade that you are supposed to be at best a footnote to, some of the music is going to get lost in the shuffle, even though it has every right to be heard and appreciated. So it's good to dust this one off, and the rewards are there for the listening.

The album was recorded in two sessions, on March 30 and again on April 3, and I suspect that might have been unintended. The March 30 session ends with a version of  "Maine" that is marked in the session log as "Rejected by Prestige," and the April 3 session begins with "Maine," so something must have happened to make them cut the first session short.

No Strings was the first show for which Rodgers wrote both music and lyrics. Tommy Flanagan, Major Holley and Eddie Locke had appeared on Hawkins's previous Broadway album for Prestige Moodsville, and they were his regular working band during those days. The album, The Jazz Version of No Strings, was a Moodsville release. Esmond Edwards produced.