Coleman Hawkins (1904-1969) Class of 2004 Coleman Hawkins made the tenor saxophone. "There's nobody plays like me," he said, "and I don't play like anybody else." Before Hawkins, the saxophone was treated as a instrument of little importance to the sound of jazz. He turned it into one of the central solo voices in jazz, and his huge sound – tender and hard-driving by turns but always warm and all-encompassing – set the standard for generations of tenor players. The richness of the musical ideas that seemed to spill effortlessly from his mind daunted his fellow musicians. So did the delight he took in outplaying anyone who dared challenge him. He first rose to prominence between 1923 and 1934 as the star soloist in Fletcher Henderson's pioneering big band, and then helped spread the message of jazz in Europe. In 1939, he returned home and recorded a magisterial version of "Body and Soul" that drifted away from melody toward the fresh harmonies that would characterize bebop. Photo credit: Herman Leonard