x, 449) Unfortunately, Coleman Hawkins had begun systematically drinking himself to death by the mid-1960s. By the end, 19 May 1969, friends who had not seen Hawk in years barely recognized his frail and unkempt frame. The once proud and ferocious artist had decayed to an unsatisfied and tragic end. To quote the last paragraph of DeVeauxs epilogue:Yet many individual lives in jazz in American culture are unsatisfying and incomplete, even tragic. For every Dizzy Gillespie, basking in later years in the autumnal glow of a life well led, there is a Charlie Parker, leaving behind a tangle of unfulfilled ambition. Coleman Hawkinss story reminds us that jazz itself is unfinished business, undergoing the painful process of outliving its own time and watching its social and aesthetic meanings drift into new, unfamiliar formations as the original context for its creation disappears. As Gary Taylor has recently argued, cultural memory begins with death: the death of the creator. The search for meaning is left up to the survivors. It is up to us to decide how to tell the story, how best to represent the struggle and achievement of artists whose lives belong to the past but whose music continues to live in the present. In the process, we will decide what jazz will mean in the century ahead....
