rm a big band and played at the Golden Gate Ballroom, the Savoy, and the Apollo Theater. His dance band also toured some, but did not last long. Hawk resumed working in the small group genre in 41. The next two years he devoted to playing mostly in Chicago and the Midwest until retuning to New York in 43. Between the demise of his dance band in 40 and the three years following, Bean appeared in only one commercial recording session. However, in the thirteen months from December, 1943 and the end of 44, Coleman Hawkins recorded nearly one hundred tunes on two dozen separate recording sessions and nine different labels. On nearly all of these sessions he was listed as band leader, and on all of them was prominently featured as a soloist.(DeVeaux, 306) In 1945, when Bop was beginning to surface heavily on the East coast, Hawk was in California performing and recording with Howard McGhee and 23-year-old Oscar Pettiford. Hawk had immersed himself in the bebop style by this point. He was well known for div[ing] in with all four feet, as one musician put it.(DeVeaux,308) A Down Beat reporter once followed Bean on a stereo-shopping expedition and remarked: Hawkins usually thinks about something new a long time before he acts. Then when he does, he acts so rapidly and with such economy of announcement or motion that others sometimes mistake it for haste or lack of proper consideration.(DeVeaux, 308)Hawkins sudden change of style was nothing out of the blue. He had apparently been thinking about the state of jazz for some time. Leonard Feather, a reporter from Esquire magazine wrote in 1944: Today you may find a tenor sax man in Joe Deakes band who can make music just as great as anything Coleman Hawkins did in 1929. While it may have been quite satisfying to Bean that his contemporaries had just then caught up with what he was doing in 1929, he had spent the past fifteen years ensuring that the Hawk of 44 had left the Hawk...
