The Jazz Life — Dinosaurs in the Morning: Whitney Balliett
A Book about Jazz and Jazz Musicians
Back in 1962, when Whitney Balliett’s book, Dinosaurs in the Morning, was first published in the US, Jazz was serious stuff: an important part of life, and not just the musical side of life, but life, in fact it had become — with the arrival of machine-gun fast Bebop in the late 1940s — an art form, which took most of the older musicians a bit by surprise, having spent the last fifteen years or so playing in the well paid big Swing Bands. They also knew that playing in small groups (most of the swing bands had disbanded after the war) the money wasn’t going to be as good. The less imaginative began to change their playing styles, learning new techniques, new jargon, and the apparent necessity of wearing dark glasses, which was a bit precarious in ill-lit smokey clubs. The best embraced the changes, becoming damn near indispensable.
One of the best of these was the tenor sax player Coleman Hawkins, ‘Bean’, who never went in for dark glasses, preferring a rather classy trilby hat instead. Balliett, in a piece from 1957,writes:
“ Hawkins, in fact, is a kind of super jazz musician, for he has been a bold originator, a masterly improviser, a shepherd of new movements, and a steadily developing performer. A trim, contained man, whose rare smiles have the effect of…
