Coleman Randolph Hawkins was born November 21, 1904, in St. Joseph, Missouri, and took his first name from his mother Cordelia's maiden name. He started piano at four, added cello at seven, and had moved to the saxophone by nine; by fourteen he was working dates around eastern Kansas. He went to high school in Chicago and then at Topeka High School in Kansas, and later said he had studied harmony and composition for two years at Washburn College in Topeka while still a schoolboy. In 1921 the blues singer Mamie Smith heard him in a Kansas City theater pit band and hired him for her Jazz Hounds, the band he joined full time in 1922 and left in 1923, by which point he had settled in New York City. His nickname "Bean" attached itself in these years and nobody has ever satisfactorily explained it: the competing theories point to the shape of his head, a habit of pleading poverty, and the size of his harmonic vocabulary.

Hawkins made his first records with Fletcher Henderson in August 1923, and when Henderson turned the group into a permanent orchestra in January 1924 he was its star tenor, a chair he held until 1934, doubling on clarinet and bass saxophone. What changed him was the arrival of Louis Armstrong in the band in 1924. Hawkins abandoned the clipped, slap-tongued attack of his earliest solos for Armstrong's relaxed legato phrasing, and by 1925 he was a major soloist; his 1926 solo on "The Stampede" became the model younger tenor players copied off the record. Alongside the Henderson book he cut sides with McKinney's Cotton Pickers, backed blues singers, recorded a series of small-group dates with Henry "Red" Allen for the American Record Corporation's Perfect, Melotone, Romeo and Oriole labels, and in November 1929 joined the Mound City Blue Blowers for "Hello Lola" and "One Hour," among the earliest racially integrated sessions on record and the first place his ballad playing is fully formed. He was also featured on a Benny Goodman session for Columbia on February 2, 1934.

In late 1934 Hawkins accepted an invitation from Jack Hylton to come to London, and he stayed in Europe for five years, freelancing across the continent as a visiting star. The most famous product of those years is a Paris date in April 1937 with Benny Carter, Django Reinhardt, Stephane Grappelli, Alix Combelle and Andre Ekyan that produced "Crazy Rhythm" and "Honeysuckle Rose." He came home in 1939 to a scene that had moved on without him, with Lester Young, Ben Webster and Chu Berry established and a lighter conception of the tenor in fashion. On October 11, 1939, at his only session for Bluebird, he answered with two choruses of "Body and Soul," recorded almost as an afterthought with a nine-piece band including Gene Rodgers on piano. He states the melody recognisably for four bars and then leaves it alone, improvising on the chords and their upper intervals for the rest of the record. Coupled with "Fine Dinner" as Bluebird B-10523, it became the biggest hit of his life, an unlikely one for an instrumental with no tune in it, and has been described ever since as one of the first tremors of bebop.

The 1940s made that description literal. After a short-lived big band in 1940 Hawkins settled into the clubs of 52nd Street, and on December 23, 1943, he cut "The Man I Love" and "Sweet Lorraine" for Signature with a quartet including Oscar Pettiford. On February 16, 1944, he led the Apollo session that produced "Woody 'n' You," widely cited as the first bebop record ever made, with Dizzy Gillespie, Don Byas, Clyde Hart, Pettiford and Max Roach. That October he led another date with Thelonious Monk at the piano, Edward Robinson on bass and Denzil Best on drums, Monk's first appearance on record. Nothing in Hawkins's own harmonic method needed adjusting to play this music, and he spent the decade hiring the musicians who were inventing it: a young Miles Davis in his working band, a 1945 Hollywood sextet with Howard McGhee, Sir Charles Thompson, Vic Dickenson and Best that Capitol issued as Hollywood Stampede, and 1946 dates with J.J. Johnson and Fats Navarro. He toured with Norman Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic through 1946 to 1950, worked a short-lived 1948 Chicago trio with the violinist Stuff Smith and the pianist then still known as Herman Blount, later Sun Ra, and in 1948 recorded "Picasso," the first unaccompanied saxophone solo committed to record, issued the following year in Granz's boxed anthology The Jazz Scene.

By the early 1950s the lighter Lester Young line had won the argument among young tenor players and Hawkins was widely written off as a period figure. He kept working, and the middle of the decade brought a full-scale renaissance. He formed a hard-swinging quintet with the trumpeter Roy Eldridge, appearing with him at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival, and in a single extraordinary run of months in 1957 recorded The Hawk Flies High for Riverside with a modernist sextet of Idrees Sulieman, J.J. Johnson, Hank Jones, Barry Galbraith, Pettiford and Jo Jones; met Ben Webster over an Oscar Peterson rhythm section in Hollywood on October 16 for Coleman Hawkins Encounters Ben Webster; and on June 26 joined Monk's septet date Monk's Music, sharing the tenor chair with John Coltrane and taking "Ruby, My Dear" as a feature with the rhythm section alone. On December 8 that year he appeared on the CBS television broadcast The Sound of Jazz alongside Lester Young, Webster, Eldridge and Billie Holiday.

The 1960s kept him in circulation, mostly at the Village Vanguard with a quartet of Tommy Flanagan, Major Holley and Eddie Locke. He played the opening movement of Max Roach's We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite in 1960, one of the first records to tie jazz explicitly to the civil rights movement, and returned to Roach's circle for Abbey Lincoln's Straight Ahead in February 1961. At Bob Thiele's suggestion Impulse! finally put him in a studio with Duke Ellington on August 18, 1962, for Duke Ellington Meets Coleman Hawkins, with Johnny Hodges, Lawrence Brown, Ray Nance and Harry Carney in support; the same label produced the quartet album Today and Now three weeks later and the bossa nova set Desafinado. In July 1963 he and Sonny Rollins, who had grown up on his records, made Sonny Meets Hawk! for RCA Victor, an abrasive and much-argued-over session in which the older man is frequently the more adventurous of the two. Wrapped Tight, recorded in February and March 1965 with Barry Harris on piano, is the last leader album released in his lifetime.

After 1965 Hawkins declined quickly. He drank heavily, stopped eating properly and largely stopped recording, cutting his final leader date in December 1966 for Norman Granz, issued after his death as Sirius, and making a last effective appearance with Jazz at the Philharmonic in early 1969. He passed away of liver disease on May 19, 1969, at Wickersham Hospital in Manhattan, aged 64, and is buried in the Yew Plot at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. He was survived by his wife Dolores and three children, Rene, Colette and Mimi. John Chilton's biography The Song of the Hawk followed in 1990.

Hawkins did not simply play the tenor saxophone better than his predecessors: he decided what the instrument was for. Before him it was a vaudeville novelty and a cheap substitute for the trombone in marching bands, and the critic Joachim Berendt's summary is the one everybody quotes, that there were tenor players before Hawkins but the instrument was not an acknowledged jazz horn. What he brought was a huge vibrato-laden tone, an arpeggiated method of improvising built on a complete command of chord substitution and passing harmony, and a refusal to imitate clarinet phrasing, which is what every other saxophonist of the early 1920s was doing. That approach produced the swing-era tenor sound almost single-handedly, running directly through Chu Berry, Ben Webster, Herschel Evans, Buddy Tate and Don Byas and from them to Illinois Jacquet, Paul Gonsalves, Lucky Thompson and Arnett Cobb, and it also produced the harmonic vocabulary the boppers needed, which is why the first bebop record was made under his name and not theirs. Lester Young, whose lighter tone was the only real alternative anyone offered, told The Jazz Review in 1959 that Hawkins was the president of the tenor saxophone and that he was only the second; Miles Davis said that hearing Hawkins taught him to play ballads. The line reaches well past the swing era: Sonny Rollins named him his main influence, Archie Shepp and David Murray built free-jazz tenor sounds on his big swing-era tone, and Harry Allen and Grant Stewart have made careers out of the vocabulary he left. By 1965 the traffic was running both ways, with critics hearing John Coltrane's influence in the last records of the man who had recorded with him eight years earlier.