of 29 far behind.(DeVeaux, 63) This reality must have been as depressing as it was flattering though, for Coleman Hawkins had always been one for progress. Hawkins once commented on progress in music stating:Its the only field where advancement meets so much opposition. You take doctors look what medicine and science have accomplished in the last twenty or thirty years. Thats the way it should be in music thats the way it has to be.(DeVeaux, 42)So, when he got off the boat from Europe, he had been looking for a younger crowd attuned to a harmonically more advanced style, which he had found by 1944. In fact, in February of 44, Bean led a band that included Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, Budd Johnson, Clyde Hart, and others in what are considered to be the first bop recordings.(Kernfeld, 506) Bean also included Thelonious Monk, in what was Monks first recording, on an album later that year. When asked about bebop in an interview in 1956, he responded, Thats what they shouldve been playing when I came back in 39! After breaking up with Pettiford and McGhee (who as an ensemble appeared in the film The Crimson Canary) over some money issues apparently Hawkins had been hording the money made from gigs which McGhee found out about via some documents in an open briefcase during a gig at Billy Bergs (DeVeaux, 406) Bean eventually returned to the East Coast in late 1945. Bean then joined a Jazz at the Philharmonic tour which took him right back to California in April of 1946. Amidst the next five years, Hawkins would routinely join these tours for at least a few concerts, spending most of his time with his own groups in New York. Hawkins returned to Europe in May of 1948, late in 49, in 1950, and again in 1954 as part of Illinois Jacquets tour of U.S. service bases.(Kernfeld, 505) He also made many individually triumphal return trips to Europe. On one such trip, Hawk responded disdainfully to a reporters questions about his e...
