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The Tenor Saxophone |
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Goodman and Dorsey; Eddie Miller (Bob Crosby, off and on since 1936) and Boomie Eichman (Tommy Dorsey, 1946-52).
Of indeterminate category were several swing era bandleaders. Georgie Auld (Artie Shaw and Goodman, 1938-42), a bandleader intermittently since 1939, showed a Freeman influence on his early records, moved to a Hawkins-Webster mood, and in recent years has shown himself one of the most versatile of tenor men, capable of excellent work in the cool Getz style.
Other tenor playing leaders have included Charlie Barnet, whose volatile solos have been heard with his own band for a quarter-century, and Tex Beneke (Glenn Miller, 1938-42), a soloist of limited ability who enjoyed a tremendous fan following in the early *40s.
The so-called "cool school" of tenor saxophonists, which in the past decade has acquired more adherents than the Hawkins dynasty or the Freeman college, owes its charter to Lester Young, who as a member of the Basie band from 1936-40 exercised an influence as indigenous to his era in jazz as Hemingway's to the modern novel. "Pres", as he is called among musicians, pioneered in the move away from the full, lush tone and the dotted-eighth-and-sixteenth-note-rhythmic approach, favoring instead a hol-lower, pipe-like and somewhat laconic sound and a tendency to make great use of rubato and to play long passages of evenly-phrased eighth notes. Dick Wilson, a tenor man with Andy Kirk's band, showed similar tendencies in his remarkable solos, and before his death in 1941 showed promise of becoming a strong influence.
After Young came the deluge. The middle '40s marked the period of gestation. Fledgling tenor men, who a few years earlier would have turned automatically to Hawkins for inspiration, now used "Pres" as the model In the middle '40s there was a preliminary flowering of new tenor men with Young ideas. Among the first were Allen Eager, whose fleet improvisations livened the sets at many a 52nd Street club from 1945; and Stan Getz, whose early records reveal a rougher and thicker sound, though he soon evolved into a successful Young disciple.
Getz was one of a series of young tenor men who made the Woody Herman band an incubator of cool jazz. Though it was |
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