Our Lindy 3 and 4 teachers this block are a rotating cast of teachers from the Amsterdam-based collective The BackBeat. Just like two years ago when we had Julia and Peter (also sometimes known as DJ Syncopeter) they will share an album of the week (approximately) every week by artists they care about, including some historical context and fun trivia. This made us really enthusiastic about learning more about the cultural background and music, so we thought we’d share the love by putting all of them on our website.
This week’s AOTW is Very Saxy · Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis · Buddy Tate · Coleman Hawkins · Arnett Cobb
Listen to the album on Spotify
Listen to the album on YouTube
The album brings together four tenor saxophone heavyweights — Coleman Hawkins being a super-heavy one — spanning two to three generations of jazz players, with the notable and inspired addition of Shirley Scott at the organ, whose soulful, bluesy comping provides the perfect rhythmic and harmonic cushion for the horns.
Coleman Hawkins
Eddie Davis, Buddy Tate, and Arnett Cobb are all part of the post-war diaspora of players who came of age and matured within the great swing orchestras — Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, Fletcher Henderson, Benny Goodman — and who eventually helped navigate and shape the evolution of jazz into bebop, hard-bop, soul-jazz, and rhythm and blues in the decades that followed. Each of them carries that big-tent, deeply swinging vocabulary, yet each brings a distinct personal voice honed over decades on bandstands and in recording studios.
Recorded in 1959 — a year that also gave us Kind of Blue and Giant Steps — the album sits beautifully at an inflection point in jazz history. It still manages to capture the visceral momentum of swing while opening the door to more harmonically adventurous forms. The balance between bebop influences (particularly in Davis and Hawkins, who could navigate complex changes with elegance and authority) and the more direct, stomping, crowd-rousing sonorities of Cobb gives the record a rich internal tension that keeps it consistently engaging.
The format is that of a jam session in the finest sense: the players battle, converse, trade ideas, and push one another, all while maintaining an accessible, crowd-pleasing energy that never sacrifices joy for cleverness. This is jazz as social music, as sport, as celebration.
If you love saxophones and unabashed, full-blooded improvisation, this is close to paradise — some of the finest tenor voices in jazz history, flexing across six-minute-plus uptempo vehicles of seemingly endless soloing. A joyful, swinging — a perfect addition to any beginner’s jazz playlist.
Thank you very much for sharing this with Federico!
