HAWK BOX:

Doc Cheatham, though best known as one of jazz's most enduring trumpeters, doubled on soprano saxophone at the start of his career. I once asked him why he didn't keep up with the instrument, and he told me, "The 1920s wasn't the time for the sax--seemed like nobody was playing it back then." The first great saxophonist was Coleman Hawkins, a musician from Missouri only a year older than Cheatham. At the time Hawkins made his first recording, at age 16 in 1921, there was no role model for him on the instrument. Yet by the time he recorded his landmark solo on "Body and Soul" 17 years later, Hawkins had altered the landscape of jazz and American vernacular music. He had almost single-handedly transformed the sax from an orphan horn into the very symbol of jazz itself.

And that wasn't even the half of it: "Classic Coleman Hawkins Sessions 1922-1947," a new boxed set from Mosaic Records, shows that Hawkins's greatest accomplishment was in perfecting the very concept of harmonic improvisation. The first great improvisers had shown that solo improvisations could be played with drama, personality and even a kind of movie-star charisma. But Hawkins took it a step further: Finding that playing variations on a song's melody could get you only so far, he also improvised on the chord changes.

With harmonic progression as his starting point, Hawkins showed how he could extend an improvisation almost indefinitely. Not only were all saxophonists in his debt, but so were Art Tatum, Django Reinhardt and nearly every musician of the 1940s and '50s. Not until the '60s did jazzmen begin to look beyond chord changes for inspiration.

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