f days gone by in the Metropole, a noisy midtown Manhattan bar that ran an all-day jazz program. The venue was a strange set-up with a narrow stage so that the band had to play ranged in a straight line; but the intermission time was nice for Bean, giving him plenty of time to relax at a nearby neighborhood tavern and enjoy his whisky or brandy. During the sixties, Coleman Hawkins appeared in films and on television. He had now become a regular playing at the Village Gate and the Village Vanguard with a quartet consisting of himself, Tommy Flannigan, Major Holley, and Eddie Locke.(Kernfeld, 506) Hawkins began to dislike the direction the jazz scene had begun to turn in the previous few years though. He complained about the avant-garde movement saying, I dont hear anything in what theyre playing, just noise and crap.(DeVeaux, 449) The avant-garde movement of the 1960s had brought about an attack on the very principles of the craft of precise playing he had based his career for four decades. What the journalists were calling the New Thing made little sense in direction compared to the obvious step from swing to bebop. Bean commented in 1964: Theyre playing Freedom and theyre playing Extensions, whatever they are. Man, I dont know what they are. These guys are looking for a gimmick, a short cut. There is no short cut.(DeVeaux, 449) This disconnectedness from the jazz scene may have been what drove Hawkins to begin his destructive drinking binge, or as biologists call it, intropunitive behavior: a self-destructive process triggered when an individual is excluded socially from a group.(DeVeaux, 449) Perhaps, if he had not begun to self-destruct he could have slipped into the field of pedagogy. In 1967 the very year he collapsed while playing in February in Toronto and again while on the last tour of Norman Ganzs Jazz at the Philharmonic in June he even mused, Some kind of way Ive got to teach these boys how to play.(DeVeau...
