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Published: Monday, 27 January 2025 at 20:14 PM
Best jazz saxophonists of all time, ranked – and the albums you need to add to your library now
A musician playing the saxophone is one of the most iconic images of jazz music, and one of the genre’s most iconic sounds. Here’s oour personal take on the best jazz saxophonists ever.
Contents
- Best jazz saxophonists: 16 to 11
- Jazz saxophonists: the top ten
- Best saxophonists: the top five
- And the greatest jazz saxophonist of all time is…
Best jazz saxophonists: 16 to 11
16. Dexter Gordon (1923-1990)
Because he stood over six feet, Dexter Gordon was known as ‘Long Tall Dexter’. But the nickname might also have referred to the influence he cast over young tenor players in the 1940s and ’50s: Gordon’s mix of Lester Young’s lithe invention and Coleman Hawkins’s harmonic depth, leavened with Charlie Parker’s brilliance, inspired a generation of saxophonists, including John Coltrane.
He started early. When he joined Lionel Hampton’s band in 1940 he was just 17, and already a roguish charmer. Once, late for a gig, he walked on stage blowing when his solo spot came, bringing the house down. He became a bebop star, playing with the likes of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and, from 1947-52, established a tenor duo with Wardell Gray, performing celebrated saxophone battles.
Later years: imprisonment, a comeback, and an Oscar nomination
But that partnership, and Gordon’s prospects, came to an end with his imprisonment on drugs charges from 1952-54. A second conviction kept him inside from 1956-60. That this huge upheaval in his career didn’t diminish his talent was revealed in a series of prime recordings, such as Go! from 1962.
But no sooner had it appeared than Gordon upped sticks for Europe, where he remained until 1976. His return to the US was a triumph, a rediscovery of a jazzman at a time when jazz was at a low ebb. Gordon became a hero again, though his time in the limelight was curtailed by ill health.
Yet he made one final comeback as a movie star, playing the lead in the 1986 film Round Midnight. His fictional character could have been himself, an ageing tenor battling the demons of the jazz life, and the showman-saxist won an Oscar nomination as Best Actor, in a last bow before his death in 1990.
Though Gordon’s career may be the stuff of legend, its substance shines through albums like Go!. It was his own favourite, brimming with confidence and the prodigality of his gifts. Here are the huge sounds, shifting from R‘n’B honk to sinewy grace, the lines remoulding the beat and the chords – above all the creative momentum, shaping a solo in ways you could never have predicted. As Dexter himself put it, Go! is what jazz people mean when they talk about somebody ‘saying something’.
The Dexter Gordon album you need
Go! (1962, Blue Note)
15. Gerry Mulligan (1927-1996)
Just occasionally, a jazz style strikes a chord with a mass audience. In the summer of 1952, the Gerry Mulligan Quartet became the talk of Los Angeles, and the buzz quickly spread nationwide and beyond, thanks to Time magazine and recordings. The group’s novelty was its line-up: Mulligan’s baritone sax and Chet Baker’s trumpet were backed by bass and drums – without piano.
To listeners bored by the blare of big bands, or the manic intricacies of bop, the quartet was a breath of fresh air, blending witty ensembles, inspired solos, and propulsive swing. They excelled at intuitive counterpoint and rhythmic sparring, and their interlocking lines encompassed rich unisons, quirky dissonance and subtle resolutions.
The Mulligan sound was indisputably hip yet winsome, the epitome of West Coast cool. Mulligan and Baker looked the part as well: Mulligan a skinny, crew-cut 25 year-old, Baker even younger, with the deceptive, choirboy aspect which made him the James Dean of jazz. Equally appealing was their repertoire, from such classic Mulligan originals as ‘Walkin’ Shoes’ to standards such as ‘My Funny Valentine’ and ‘Frenesi’.
After Chet Baker
Musically, Mulligan was the prime mover, with the quartet building upon his career as composer and player. After he and Baker parted company he forged ahead with various groups, preferring big bands, devoting much of his energy to them until his death in 1996. The most successful of the large Mulligan ensembles was his Concert Jazz Band.
Formed in 1960, it displayed the same playful swing as his quartet. The group can be heard in a live gig at New York’s Village Vanguard, featuring his quick-witted exchanges with trumpeter Clark Terry on ‘Blueport’, spontaneously challenging each other with quotes from tunes with place names in the title, to their audible delight.
That kind of sheer pleasure in jazz is the recurrent motif in the Mulligan career, regardless of format. Included in the Jeru compilation, are the group with Baker and its successor with valve-trombonist Bob Brookmeyer, driving a Parisian crowd euphoric. Mulligan’s music can still have that effect on anybody.
The Gerry Mulligan album you need
Jeru (2005, Living Era)
14. Sidney Bechet (1897-1959)
All his life, Sidney Bechet was a confirmed, even cantankerous individualist. Though one of the supreme jazz soloists, he always insisted that he played ‘ragtime’, as the music was called in the New Orleans of Bechet’s boyhood. He was inveterately restless, too, pursuing opportunities and adventure through America, Europe and as far as Russia by the mid-1920s.
Wherever he went, he astonished audiences with a passionate, sweeping invention that proclaimed the revolutionary musical potential of jazz. After hearing Bechet in London in 1919, the conductor Ernest Ansermet wrote a remarkable review, praising this ‘extraordinary clarinet virtuoso’, whose unique way of playing ‘is perhaps the highway the whole world will swing along tomorrow’.
It was in London that Bechet found the instrument with which he would blaze his most spectacular trail. As contrary, challenging and powerful as Bechet himself, the soprano sax was little more than a novelty until he took it up; thereafter, his mastery was so complete that he defied anyone to follow him. The horn’s penetrating sonority, especially impelled by Bechet’s huge tone and imperious vibrato, made his musical presence all the more imposing. He dominated every group he played in, brushing aside hapless trumpet players.
‘His style is one of the most readily identifiable in jazz’
The Bechet style is one of the most readily identifiable in jazz, and it stamps his authority on every track in the Ken Burns Jazz CD. Here he is, locking horns with his New Orleans contemporary and fellow genius Louis Armstrong, delivering the ‘Characteristic Blues’ which, in London, inspired Ansermet’s vision of the future, turning George Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’ into a growling, gut-bucket lament. ‘Blue Horizon’ is a clarinet masterpiece – six eloquent choruses creating a single majestic arc – while ‘Love for Sale’ shows Bechet tackling a contemporary standard. ‘Shake It and Break It’ demonstrates his up-tempo authority.
That same energy animates the tune ‘Shag’. Decades after it was recorded, a critic played it to the 1960s’ saxophone giant, John Coltrane. He was amazed, exclaiming, ‘Did all those old guys swing like that?’ Bechet did, and he’s still setting the pace.
The Sidney Bechet album you need
Ken Burns Jazz (2000, Columbia / Legacy)
13. Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderley (1928-1975)
Some critics disapproved of Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderley. During a difficult time for jazz, in the 1960s and ’70s, the alto saxophonist flourished with effortless authority and genial appeal; his funky brand of ‘soul jazz’, rooted in blues and gospel, struck a happy chord with listeners more familiar with rock, only confirming purist suspicions.
His arrival on the New York scene in 1955 was the stuff of legend. Fresh from Florida, this roly-poly young man astonished the locals with his virtuosity. ‘Cannonball’ (a childhood corruption of ‘cannibal’, due to his large appetite) became overnight heir apparent to the recently deceased Charlie Parker. As one of his awestruck rivals put it: ‘He was the baddest thing we’d ever heard.’ The Adderley style combined Parker’s fluency and fire, the elegance of Benny Carter and the jump-band energy of Louis Jordan. As a southerner, Adderley was steeped in the blues, yet commanded musical sophistication with thorough academic training.
All these qualities commended him to Miles Davis, who recruited him for his immortal band of 1957. Cannonball’s ebullience provided a perfect complement to John Coltrane’s mystic striving and Davis’s piquant lyricism, enshrined in some of the great Davis recordings. The association led to one of the altoist’s best discs as well, when Davis agreed to participate as a sideman in a session led by Adderley.
‘The Adderley joie de vivre is manifest throughout’
Somethin’ Else shows both men in top form, backed by an all-star rhythm section, achieving a remarkable unity of feeling. The Adderley joie de vivre is manifest throughout, tempered with a concern for space and structure which reveals the Davis influence, making memorable solos on ‘Autumn Leaves’ and ‘Love for Sale’.
After two years with Davis, Adderley left to form his own band, which had an instant hit with a live album in San Francisco. It encapsulates the group’s appeal – a hard-swinging, infectious ensemble, freewheeling solos and plenty of audience interaction. It continued until the altoist’s death from a stroke in 1975, confirming, in the words of Miles Davis, that ‘Cannonball had a certain kind of spirit’, which enlivened everything he touched.
The Cannonball Adderley album you need
Somethin’ Else (1958, Blue Note)
12. Sonny Stitt (1924-1982)
When Charlie Parker died in 1955, a journalist suggested to Sonny Stitt that he might be ‘the new Bird’. Stitt’s reply was unequivocal: ‘Ain’t no new Bird, man’, he snapped. ‘Bird’s dead’. In fact, he’d been a close friend of bebop’s founding father, and a key member of the inner circle that included Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis. But as an alto saxophonist, though his style had its own brilliance, he was inevitably seen as a Parker clone.
To disarm comparison, in the late 1940s Stitt switched to tenor sax, forming famous partnerships with the likes of pianist Bud Powell, and from then on alternated effortlessly between the two horns. Effortlessly and tirelessly: a fellow muso once observed that if you gave Stitt too much space, no one else would get a look-in. ‘He’ll play 20 choruses on alto, take a drink of water, then play 20 on tenor!’
Fluency and fire were his trademarks, along with a footloose attachment to the life of the itinerant soloist. Sonny spent virtually his whole career on the road, fronting local rhythm sections all over the world, startling listeners and critics with his unflagging appetite for performance. He died, pushing 60, in 1982, a few days after returning from a gig in Japan.
‘The greatest tenor battle ever recorded’
Stitt’s restless lifestyle is reflected in his recorded legacy: it’s hard to choose a representative disc by somebody who turned out over 100 for some 30 labels. But one of the most admired is Only the Blues, in which Stitt leads trumpeter Roy Eldridge, the Oscar Peterson Trio and drummer Stan Levey in a warm sympathetic celebration of the essence of jazz, reissued on Fresh Sound.
But The Eternal Triangles displays Stitt at his most thrilling. A double-CD of all-star encounters led by trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, its highlight is a 14-minute showdown featuring Stitt and his namesake, tenor giant Sonny Rollins, which has been called the greatest tenor battle ever recorded. At a breakneck tempo, with Rollins at the height of his powers, Stitt stands up to him every step of the way, not giving an inch in authority and inspiration – a proper monument to a jazz gladiator who just loved to play.
The Sonny Stitt album you need
The Eternal Triangles (2009, Fresh Sound)
11. Benny Carter (1907-2003)
All too often, the popular image of jazz obscures its musical quality. Jazz players are supposed to be hard-living eccentrics, to the detriment of those who simply concentrate on perfecting their art and taking care of business. One victim of such woolly stereotyping was Benny Carter, a great jazz man and consummate professional whose majestic career lasted almost until his death in July 2003, just short of his 96th birthday. Yet any lack of public acclaim was compensated for by the esteem of his peers, expressed in honours and his nickname, ‘The King’.
Beginning in the 1920s, Carter forged a reputation as one of the most original alto saxists in jazz, developing a supple, sophisticated style at a time when the sax was still considered a novelty. The same approach distinguished his burgeoning talent as arranger-composer. While much ensemble-writing of the time was crude and block-like, Carter achieved a fluent grace, full of surprises and finely-honed musicality.
As player and writer, he was a key figure on the New York scene, and, in 1935, went to Europe, where he worked as a staff arranger for the BBC and organised bands and sessions with local musicians, as well as such star compatriots as Coleman Hawkins. He pursued the same busy round of activities on his return to the US in 1938.
‘A once and future King’
Although always ranked at the highest level as a saxophonist – and remarkably, he was almost as skilled as a trumpeter – Carter found his time taken up with commercial writing assignments. The 1943 film Stormy Weather marked his Hollywood breakthrough, and he became the first black musician to attain eminence in the prejudiced world of the studios.
Carter’s career in movies and TV sometimes meant suspending his first love, playing jazz. But he never abandoned it, and over the years recording projects, gigs and concerts served notice that the King’s creativity and virtuosity continued unabated. A classic Carter disc is Further Definitions, from 1961, made with his fellow giant Coleman Hawkins and two younger contemporary saxophonists. Throughout, he is clearly in charge, showing the musical richness jazz can offer in the hands of a master – a once and future King.
The Benny Carter album you need
Further Definitions (1961, Impulse!)
Best jazz saxophonists: the top ten
10. Ben Webster (1909-1973)
Though Ben Webster’s career didn’t begin with Duke Ellington, it’s fair to say that his fame did. Alone among the name bands of the Swing era, Ellington had never had a star tenor saxophonist, and the advent of the big-toned Webster sound, ranging feely from tough to tender, gave the ducal palette an invaluable new colour. From 1939 to 1943, Webster was a key player in Ellington’s greatest ensemble, showcased in all kinds of settings, most famously, perhaps, his rasping rampaging solo on ‘Cottontail’.
But despite his identification as an Ellingtonian, the tenorist was always his own man, developing a unique style which, till his death in 1973, made him one of the most distinctive voices in jazz. And with Webster, ‘voice’ was the operative word. Though a proud disciple of Coleman Hawkins, he recast Hawk’s massive tone and harmonic subtlety in highly personal terms creating an intense, individual, even quirky expression.
‘Each performance was a kind of existential event’
In a Webster solo, the music came unmistakably from the man and the moment, as he interspersed lush sonority and melodic sweetness with gasps, sighs, cries and growls. Each performance was a kind of existential event, a matter of complete involvement, with whatever sound feeling impelled as it came through his horn.
Despite his reputation for uptempo flights, following his ‘Cottontail’ heroics, ballads and easy grooves were Webster’s true forte, and vintage examples abound in the Verve Jazz Masters compilation devoted to his work. ‘That’s All’ is one of his greatest hits, the melody caressed and customised, the line held back and ornamented with little arpeggiated peaks and varied with different timbres of vibrato, so that every breath, every attack becomes part of the whole, enshrining a poignant lyricism.
The same sense of a personal story explored and expressed comes through his famous duet with Gerry Mulligan on Billy Strayhorn’s ‘Chelsea Bridge’: Webster’s reading of the theme suggests passion lurking just below the surface – a reflection of the tenorist’s own sometimes turbulent character.
But in any company, in any mood or tempo, Webster stands out as a master of the jazz principle that, as a musician once put it, ‘Everyone must know your voice’.
The Ben Webster album you need
Ben Webster meets Oscar Peterson (1960, Verve)
9. Lester Young (1909-1959)
Billie Holiday liked to claim it was she who dubbed Lester Young ‘Pres’ – acknowledging his status as president of the tenor saxophone – just as he named her ‘Lady Day’. Since they were famous soulmates, it makes a nice story, but in fact Young’s nickname went back to his early years. Before he startled East Coast audiences with the Count Basie band in the late 1930s, he had already become a local legend with territory bands in the south-west – the tall, gently eccentric tenor man who held his horn at a 45-degree angle and poured out a seemingly endless stream of ideas.
His sound was as original and fluent as his invention. Instead of the chocolatey, orotund attack of the reigning tenor king, Coleman Hawkins, Pres was quick-witted and allusive, with a light, buoyant, subtly inflected tone. Whereas Hawkins could seem almost scholastic, grinding through the chord changes, Pres created melodies with all the spontaneity of brilliant conversation, taking a motif and tossing it in every direction, on his way to realising a deftly perfect whole.
The most dazzling debut in jazz history
When he made his first recordings – with Basie in 1936 – his talent was fully mature: his solos on ‘Lady Be Good’ and ‘Shoe-Shine Boy’ constitute the most dazzling debut in jazz history. The driving beat of the Basie band suited him and he responded with a series of masterpieces. His protean style signalled new possibilities for the coming generation: the teenage Charlie Parker spent the summer of 1937 absorbing his recorded solos.
In the 1940s, with the triumph of bop and the emergence of a legion of Young-worshipping tenor men – epitomised by Stan Getz – the dominance of Pres’s influence was confirmed. His own playing continued to develop, becoming more probing and laconic. But after 1950, heavy drinking began to take its toll of his life and art, leading to his reclusive death in 1959.
Lester Young demonstrates that jazz is important not as novelty or ideology, but as music of rare distinction, and the splendid four-CD survey of his work to 1949 on Proper, The Lester Young Story, chronicles a unique and indispensable artist.
The Lester Young album you need
The Lester Young Story (Proper)
8. Johnny Hodges (1907-1070)
For decades, audiences knew they were about to witness a piece of jazz history when Duke Ellington announced, ‘And now it’s time for Johnny Hodges’. Ellington once said that his alto saxophonist created ‘a feeling of expectancy’ just by sitting in the midst of the saxophone section. Of the imposing gallery of ducal stars, Hodges radiated the greatest lustre, his sound the most gorgeous colour in Ellington’s kaleidoscopic orchestral palette.
He excelled at tenderness and sensuality. Such Ellington classics as ‘Warm Valley’, or ‘Come Sunday’ (from the suite Black, Brown and Beige) are masterpieces shared between composer and saxist. But Hodges was equally a master of funky blues and subtle swing. Listeners were smitten by what Ellington called his ‘tonal charisma’, from his first appearance with the band in 1928 until his death in 1970.
Throughout that time, leader and soloist had a close, if understated, relationship. In contrast to the Duke, Hodges was a taciturn figure pouring out his beauty, initially inspired by his mentor, Sidney Bechet.
‘The world’s greatest saxophone player’
While Bechet inspired the commanding power of Hodges’s tone, Hodges’s style was all his own, with a cool, supple attack that could suddenly swell into one of the scooped glissandos that were his best-known trademark, plus nimble fingers and articulation. His pre-eminence was recognised by his peers in every generation. Charlie Parker paid wry homage to his lyricism by dubbing him ‘Lily Pons’, after the Metropolitan Opera soprano. To John Coltrane he
was simply ‘the world’s greatest saxophone player’.
The young Coltrane revelled in the chance to experience Hodges’s mastery first hand, playing with the group that Hodges led from 1951-55, during a sabbatical from the Ellington fold. That band contributes several tracks to a 4-CD set on Properbox by units under Hodges’s name from 1937-52, mostly featuring the altoist’s Ellington colleagues and the Duke himself, in a laid-back feast of ballads, riffs and blues.
For a later taste of Hodges and his boss in symbiotic form, listen to Back to Back from 1959, with an all-star band stretching out superbly on all shades of blues.
The Johnny Hodges album you need
Back to Back (with Duke Ellington; 1959, Verve)
7. Stan Getz (1927-1991)
Popular success is often a mixed blessing for jazz musicians, and Stan Getz is an interesting example. Already a veteran of leading swing bands, the 20-year-old saxist made his mark in 1947 with a famous solo on Woody Herman’s ‘Early Autumn’.
Though only eight bars long, its floating lyricism established the distinctive Getz sound. During the 1950s he was one of jazz’s biggest names, and in the early ’60s he achieved commercial status when he became synonymous with the infectious, tuneful rhythms of the bossa nova.
But the more bankable he became, the more purists tended to sneer. Getz’s style was dismissed as a mere imitation of the great Lester Young and ‘emotionally anaemic’, criticism which intensified with the rise of the genres of hard bop, fusion and free. Yet Getz continued to follow his own course and talent, equally indifferent to jazz fashion and top-40 formulae. The result was the gradual acknowledgement of his stature. When he died from cancer in 1991 – having played virtually to the end – he was not just a star, but an immortal.
From dreamy crooning to luminous meditation
One of the virtues of the Getz compilation in Verve’s Jazz Masters series is its revelation of complexity and development. ‘Body and Soul’, from 1952, epitomises the dreamy crooning of his early ballad phase, but ‘It Never Entered My Mind’, from a 1957 concert, is in another league, a luminous meditation from the first notes of the melody.
Four years later he featured in one of the most successful unions of jazz and strings, the suite Focus, with arrangements by Eddie Sauter. Getz named this his favourite among his albums, and a high point is the glowing ‘Her’, in which he creates as much a self-portrait as a portrait of a woman.
Perhaps predictably, the Jazz Masters disc begins and ends with the tenorist in bossa nova mode. ‘Desafinado’ and ‘The Girl from Ipanema’, may have made him the darling of the pop charts, but he still displays unflagging creative power as well as appealing buoyancy. Indeed, every track here shows the saxophonist remaining true to his jazz calling.
Pop stars want to be popular. Stan Getz wanted to be himself, and his lifelong quest has left us riches.
The Stan Getz album you need
Verve Jazz Masters Vol. 8: Stan Getz (Verve)
6. Eric Dolphy (1928-1964)
Free jazz is a problematic concept. To some people, freedom is the essence of the music, its whole point. To others, jazz is a particular language, informing feeling and creativity, and true musical freedom depends on engaging structures that concentrate expression. Which may be what that radical mover-and-shaker Charles Mingus meant when he growled, ‘You can’t improvise on nothin’, man.’
One of the most compelling answers to the free jazz conundrum was posed by a player who spent part of his all-too-brief career as a Mingus sideman. Eric Dolphy blazed across the scene in the early ’60s, known first as an alto saxist, but also performing with distinction on flute, clarinet and bass clarinet, which he established as a potent jazz instrument. On all his horns he was a dazzling soloist, compounding a brilliant technique and a personal sound, often incorporating vocalised textures – whoops, cries and ecstatic, leaping intervals. Yet even at his most daring, a dynamic form was palpable.
His use of chord structures was striking, when his fellow exponents of what was called ‘the new thing’ were abandoning them. He liked harmonic patterns, adapting them to his own creative purpose. As he put it, ‘I don’t think I “leave the changes” as the expression goes; every note I play has some reference to the chords of the piece.’
‘The mood of spontaneous interaction never flags’
That sense of underlying shape and direction, at one with a passionate spirit of musical adventure, gives his disc Out to Lunch a rare quality. Recorded in February 1964, four months before his sudden death at 36, it shows the range of his musical vision, including tributes to both Thelonious Monk and the avant-garde classical flautist Severino Gazzelloni.
Dolphy’s colleagues – Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Bobby Hutcherson on vibes, Richard Davis on bass and the teenage drummer Tony Williams – share his convictions, approaching each piece not as a preconceived formula but as an expressive occasion. The mood of spontaneous interaction never flags, generating the mix of immediacy and insight, individual voices and collective inspiration that makes Out to Lunch perennially fresh.
The Eric Dolphy album you need
Out to Lunch (1964, Blue Note)
Best jazz saxophonists: the top five
5. Coleman Hawkins (1904-1969)
There seems to be a curious resistance, in some quarters, to the idea that jazz is a conscious art – that jazz musicians practise and work at their styles over a lifetime, expanding and refining. This is not to deny the importance of spontaneity, but jazz’s famous ‘sound of surprise’ always involves committed preparation, as players cultivate the personal voice they bring to any musical encounter.
A supreme example of that conviction was the tenor king, Coleman Hawkins, once dubbed ‘the man for whom Sax invented the saxophone’. When ‘Hawk’ began his early career in the early 1920s, the sax was a novelty instrument, skittery and staccato. Within a few years, he had not only demonstrated its full expressive potential, but established his own definitive way of playing. His massive tone, supple technique and commanding improvisations reduced would-be rivals to imitators.
‘A career virtually unparalleled in its ambition and breadth’
No serious stylistic alternative would emerge for more than a decade and, even then, Hawkins would maintain his eminence. His status reflected both his gifts and his determination to develop them: the Ken Burns CD devoted to him surveys a career virtually unparalleled in its ambition and breadth. In ‘The Stampede’ (1926), with Fletcher Henderson’s band, he is already a master, slashing his way through an uptempo solo as if sculpting in sound. His ballad chorus on ‘If I Could Be With You One Hour Tonight’, in 1929, is astonishingly modern, subsuming chords and barlines into a free, rhapsodic flow.
And a decade later, after a five-year sojourn in Europe, Hawkins set the standard for jazz ballads with ‘Body and Soul’, a masterpiece of harmonic subtlety and storytelling. Younger musicians esteemed him for his musical and personal sophistication, and the interest was mutual. Hawk hired them, making some of the first bop recordings, including ‘Woody’n’You’ with Dizzy Gillespie.
Unprecedented in 1948, the track Picasso is a solo homage to a man the saxophonist admired as a kindred spirit. There is a similarity between Picasso’s ever-shifting perspective and the harmonic quest of Hawkins; and the musician, like the painter, produced a body of work that retains all its dynamic force.
The Coleman Hawkins album you need
Body and Soul (1996, RCA)
4. Sonny Rollins (b.1930)
One way or another, Sonny Rollins has been out on his own for half a century. Since the death of John Coltrane in 1967, he has reigned pretty much unchallenged as king of the tenor players. But even while Coltrane was alive, and there was an abundance of formidable talent in jazz’s golden age of the 1950s and ’60s, Rollins stood apart, master of a style of unique, even wilful power.
He was never interested in the approved bebop practice of ‘running the changes’, which threatened to turn jazz into a quasi-mechanical exercise. His angular, energetic attack came from an early love of rhythm and blues and calypso. Fluent or sardonic, his tone could express winey lyricism or hoarse guffaws. He was just as unorthodox in his choice of material, which encompassed vaudeville tunes and Edward MacDowell’s ‘To a Wild Rose’.
‘Rollins’s creative stamina is legendary’
Rollins’s creative stamina is legendary. Hour-long medleys and mammoth cadenzas evolved their own logic. Every solo he plays takes on the quality of a personal adventure, embracing both player and audience. At their best, they yield a kind of massive, multi-faceted coherence impossible to predict yet somehow inevitable and utterly fulfilling.
The record which first established Rollins’s reputation – and which he still cites as a favourite – is Saxophone Colossus. Made in 1956, with his then employer Max Roach on drums, plus pianist Tommy Flanagan and bassist Doug Watkins, it remains a classic.
The awesome construction of his solo on ‘Blue Seven’ was hailed by a critic as a definitive example of Rollins’s principle of ‘thematic improvisation’. This was not a technique worked out in advance but a kind of supercharged motif development elaborated on the spot. The same artistry illuminates the exuberant calypso ‘St Thomas’ showing the gargantuan sense of swing that he brings to every musical encounter.
In a multitude of moments on other discs and on any given evening, Rollins can create an experience of jazz invention unmatched by anyone alive. For he is still, as the British tenor star Courtney Pine recently put it, ‘the baddest player on the planet’.
The Sonny Rollins album you need
Saxophone Colossus (1956, Prestige)
3. Ornette Coleman (b. 1930)
When Ornette Coleman’s album Free Jazz burst on the scene in 1961, an appalled critic declared ‘the banshees are upon us’. The alto saxophonist was used to hostile reactions. Years before, working with a rhythm and blues band in his native Texas, he had suffered the indignity of being paid not to play. Later, in Los Angeles, musicians had left the stand when he tried to sit in. All the while, though, he remained true to his conviction that ‘jazz should express more kinds of feeling than it has up to now’, which he pursued by ‘working with pitch and reaching for the sound of the human voice’.
By the late 1950s, he had begun to attract the attention of such influential admirers as John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet. Lewis discerned in the altoist’s radical, homespun style not mere subversion but a creative instinct. As Coleman put it, ‘Once I found I could make mistakes, I knew I was on to something.’
‘A blues-drenched cry in which vehicle and expression were one’
What he was on to was an alternative to the conventions of bop – the repetitious chord patterns, the rigid division of labour between rhythm section and horns, the unvarying format of theme then solos. In its place, Coleman offered an organic concept which returned to the vocal roots of jazz – a blues-drenched cry in which vehicle and expression were one, generating a melodic line that went wherever the emotion of the moment took it.
Though his approach was called ‘free’, it depended on the finely honed responses of the altoist and his quartet to their material and each other. A good place to begin appreciating that unique interaction is The Shape of Jazz to Come from 1959. Here can be found all the Coleman virtues, including such superb compositions as ‘Lonely Woman’, a yearning portrait of a lady with a rhapsodic melody arching over an agitated cymbal beat and meditative plucked bass.
‘Eventually’ is a bubbly, boppish tune with a jack-in-the-box quality and enormous swing, while ‘Congeniality’ combines bop, blues and lyricism, jagged dissonance and childlike consonance. As always, Coleman’s music conforms not to prescription or expectation, but to his searching, celebrating, wholly original voice.
The Ornette Coleman album you need
The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959, Atlantic)
2. Charlie Parker (1920-1955)
It’s been said that modern jazz began with Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker. Though that statement clearly over-simplifies things, the alto saxophonist did make the greatest impact of all the players who, from the early 1940s, transformed jazz with the style known as bebop.
Arriving in New York from Kansas City, the young Bird amazed his contemporaries with his blazing technique and protean imagination, supplanting the simple rhythmic and harmonic patterns of earlier jazz with extended sequences, daring and complex. As Parker sideman John Lewis put it, ‘Everything I heard Charlie Parker play was perfect… [it] was like being near fire.’
The exhilaration of discovery, of breathtaking inspiration and brilliant execution, suffuse the records Parker made before his premature death in 1955 (he had an appetite for excess of all kinds, especially drugs). While some of his followers were accused of being coldly technical, turning out sewing-machine lines of notes, a Parker solo always exudes the essential jazz energy, rooted in funky blues and insinuating swing, plus an uncanny, storytelling sense of structure. And, perhaps surprisingly, in view of the complaints of detractors that bebop was discordant and violent, Bird’s music is shot through with an engaging lyricism, no matter what the mood or tempo.
‘The perpetual genius of a unique jazz voice’
As with any major artist, exposure to Parker’s work en bloc only heightens respect for his achievement. Hence an eight-CD set of all his recordings from 1944 to 1948 is a treasure trove. But for a single-CD survey, the Ken Burns Jazz disc would be hard to beat. Here is one of the early big band solos which startled the jazz world, examples of the classic quintet sides with fellow-innovator Dizzy Gillespie which made ‘Bird and Diz’ the definitive bop combination, and discs with the altoist’s later group featuring the young Miles Davis.
Also included are the harrowingly poignant ‘Lover Man’ Parker made only hours before a drug-related breakdown and a scintillating ‘Just Friends’ with strings. But every track reveals the perpetual genius of a unique jazz voice. In the words of the graffito that appeared on New York walls after his death, ‘Bird Lives’.
The Charlie Parker album you need
Ken Burns Jazz (2000, Verve)
Best jazz saxophonists: and the greatest of all time is…
1. John Coltrane (1926-1967)
Leading our list of best jazz saxophonists is a name you will surely know.
It’s hard to convey the impact John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things made on its release in 1961. The title track caused a sensation. Coltrane’s quartet transformed an innocuous waltz from The Sound of Music into a kind of cosmic vision, with the leader’s soprano saxophone wailing like an eerie call to prayer over pianist McCoy Tyner’s hypnotic modal chords, Steve Davis’s ostinato bass and Elvin Jones’s relentlessly seething drums.
This was a bold alternative to conventional improvisation which was still largely based on standard chord structures over a beat. Just when the intellectual intricacies of bebop seemed exhausted, along came Coltrane, spearheading the way back to pure emotion.
My Favorite Things proved prophetic for more than just the future of jazz. Its Eastern-sounding timbre and trance-inducing length perfectly suited the rock culture of the ’60s and helped encourage the rise in popularity of world music. In jazz, Coltrane’s harmonic daring gave impetus to the trend toward free improvisation.
‘It shows Coltrane at a key stage of a lifelong spiritual quest’
But aside from its significance as a cultural moment, My Favorite Things retains its importance as a work of art, and a testament to Coltrane’s gifts and commitment. The album shows him at a key stage of a lifelong spiritual quest, expressed in his musical development. His legion of imitators often overlooked the technical command that informed his improvisations. He practised endlessly: among saxophonists he was known as ‘an eight-or-ten-hour-a-day man’. And no one in jazz knew more about chord structure, or could negotiate them with greater fluency.
Coltrane’s purpose was not to subvert form, but to extend its possibilities; the other tracks on My Favorite Things demonstrate his invention in more conventional material. On tenor, there’s a searing version of ‘Summertime’ and an angular reworking of ‘But Not For Me’; on soprano, a yearning ‘Every Time We Say Goodbye’, in which Coltrane’s lyricism recalls the man he dubbed ‘the world’s greatest saxophone player’, Duke Ellington’s nonpareil altoist Johnny Hodges.
My Favorite Things marks a pinnacle both in the jazz tradition and in the career of one of its great masters.
The John Coltrane album you need
My Favorite Things (1961, Atlantic)