In the 1910s the saxophone was a vaudeville punchline, played stiffly like an oversized clarinet and compared to a dying farm animal. This episode follows Coleman Hawkins, born in St. Joseph, Missouri in 1904, who silenced that laughter. Piano at four, cello at seven, saxophone at nine, professional gigs by 14 and college-level harmony classes at Washburn College as a teenager gave him a foundation his peers lacked, earning him the nickname Bean for his encyclopedic knowledge of chords. The hosts argue that his childhood cello training is the skeleton key to his sound: he forced a brass tube to mimic the sweeping vibrato of a bowed string.

From Mamie Smith’s Jazz Hounds to star soloist in Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra, Hawkins absorbed Louis Armstrong’s relaxed swing when the trumpeter joined in 1924 and became the king of the tenor by the early 1930s. A 1934 London invitation turned into a five-year European stay, playing with Django Reinhardt, while back home Lester Young, Ben Webster and Chu Berry crowded the lane he had created. His answer on returning in 1939 was Body and Soul, a throwaway session take that abandons the melody after four bars and improvises purely on the chords, a recording historians treat as the blueprint for bebop. We cover his 1944 sessions with Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach and Thelonious Monk, his unaccompanied solo recordings, work with Coltrane, Duke Ellington and Max Roach’s We Insist, and his decline and death in 1969.

• Competing theories on the nickname Bean and why the brainy explanation fits best
• How arpeggios let Hawkins imply chord structures the rhythm section was not even playing
• Why a five-year absence nearly cost him his crown, and how one accidental recording reclaimed it
• The 1944 comparison to Picasso and why he welcomed bebop’s young rule breakers instead of resisting them
• Lester Young’s concession and Miles Davis’s credit for teaching him how to play ballads