Herschel Evans
Herschel Evans died of heart disease in New York on February 9, 1939, not yet thirty, after three years inside Count Basie's orchestra where his thick, vibrato-soaked tenor was traded nightly against Lester Young's cooler tone -- a contrast fans still call one of swing's defining duels. He almost didn't play tenor at all: as a boy in Kansas City, his older cousin, trombonist and guitarist Eddie Durham, talked him out of alto saxophone and into the horn that made his name. Evans left almost no interviews; nearly everything known of him survives secondhand, through Basie bandmates who, decades later, told a jazz historian what they remembered of "the Texan." Pianist and critic Ethan Iverson, drawing on Basie's autobiography, writes that Coleman Hawkins heard Evans's defining feature, "Blue and Sentimental," in Europe and crossed the ocean looking for him, only to learn he was already dead.
The Handbook of Texas Online is blunt about it: in Kansas City, Evans's older cousin, trombonist and guitarist Eddie Durham, "persuaded him to switch from alto to tenor sax, the instrument that ultimately established Evans's reputation." The Denton Record-Chronicle's later genealogical research turns up the same detail retold rather than freshly confirmed -- both likely trace to one original account -- but nobody disputes it. Durham never touched a saxophone himself; what he handed his younger cousin wasn't a sound to imitate, only a decision. Everything Evans built afterward, he built on an instrument someone else chose for him.
listen forNothing here rhymes by design. On "Countless Blues," cut with the Kansas City Six in 1938, listen for Durham's ringing, amplified single-note lines -- among jazz's first prominent electric-guitar solos, a year before Charlie Christian made the instrument famous. On "Blue and Sentimental" that same year, Evans's tenor is thick, throaty, drenched in vibrato, nothing like his cousin's clean guitar tone. That gap is the point: what Durham gave Evans wasn't a style to copy, only the horn itself, and the sound Evans built on it was entirely his own.
Evans left no interview naming Hawkins, so the claim rests on one credentialed witness: WKCR jazz historian Phil Schaap, who spent the 1970s interviewing Basie alumni about "the Texan." Schaap's verdict is that the earthy, moaning Texas Tenor style Evans pioneered was still, at bottom, "emulative of the first school of tenor saxophone -- Coleman Hawkins' conception." Wikipedia repeats a broader version of the claim across a whole generation of players, but its footnotes don't resolve to a checkable source -- so what's verified here is one historian's judgment, not a chorus of them.
listen forCue Fletcher Henderson's 1926 "The Stampede": Hawkins breaks from the ensemble in big, swooping, arpeggiated runs that treat the tenor as a virtuoso lead voice, not a section horn -- the sound the next generation measured itself against. Three years later, on Troy Floyd's "Dreamland Blues, Part II," a teenaged Evans takes his first identified recorded solo reaching for that same thick, rolling attack, rougher and less assured. Schaap, who interviewed the Basie players who remembered it, calls the resemblance only "hints" of the mature Evans still to come.