People will tell you that Coleman Hawkins was the Henry Ford of the tenor sax. After Ford, everybody was going around driving in a Model T; after hearing Hawkins, everybody had to get a saxophone. Hawkins was the first to create great art using that particular mess of plumbing, and he left an entire industry in his wake. The saxophone remains a part of every musical era after Dixieland: big band, swing, rhythm and blues, rock ‘n’ roll. It is as much a dominant icon of American culture and industry as the automobile.

Yet today a Model T is strictly a museum piece, which could never hope to compete with its modern descendants. The recordings of Hawkins, made from the 1920s to the 1960s,during one of the longest careers in jazz, are still cherished as one of the greatest bodies of work in all American music and can hold their own with any newer product. The career of Hawkins, who would have been 100 this year, is being celebrated this week at the Blue Note with a week’s worth of concerts starring some of the best saxophonist of today, including Eric Alexander, Joe Lovano, Dewey Redman, and Lew Tabackin. His November 21 birthday is also being commemorated by BMG’s “Coleman Hawkins: The Centennial Collection” (Bluebird 82876-60086-2).

Coleman Randolph Hawkins (1904-66) grew up in Kansas City, Mo., where he studied piano and cello before switching to tenor saxophone in his midteens. He was unusual among early jazzmen in that he attended college (Washburn College in Topeka) and made a thorough study of harmony. He was an early exponent of harmonic improvisation in jazz, and, on his famous “Body And Soul,” was among the first to show that the music could be a series of extended variations on chord changes, barely hinting at the original melody.

In 1921, Hawkins was playing a theater in Kansas City when blues singer Mamie Smith, touring the Midwest with Her Jazz Hounds, hired him and gave him his first chance to record. Upon arriving in New York, he soon began working with bandleader Fletcher Henderson, who led what is generally regarded as the first great jazz big band. Hawkins shared solo space in the Henderson band with Louis Armstrong. That great trumpeter galvanized and inspired the band; Hawkins became his saxophonic equivalent. And in the same way that almost every jazz trumpeter has a little Louis in him, every saxophonist owes something to The Hawk.

The BMG compilation includes three watershed performances from November 1929. Hawkins recorded “Wherever There’s a Will, Baby” with McKinney’s Cotton Pickers. “If I Could Be With You (One Hour Tonight)” and “Hello Lola” are two amazing statements from the all-star studio group known as the Mound City Blue Blowers, which included great clarinetist Pee Wee Russell and another 2004 centennialite, Glenn Miller. Hawkins was also brilliantly showcased on 16 titles with a Hendersonian combo co-led by himself and trumpeter Red Allen.

Throughout these recordings, Hawkins’s conception of the instrument is already complete. His sound is vigorous and fully formed. His solos sound as if they could have been crafted several generations later. In fact, they still seem to belong more to jazz’s future than its past.

Hawkins shaped his career as well as he did his solos. He joined Henderson at age 20 and stayed for a decade. Then, at 30, he left the United States for an extended visit to Europe, returning before he turned 35. By the time he returned in 1939, the saxophone, and the tenor in particular, had become the dominant voice of American music.

Hawkins’s continental sojourn was quite unprecedented. Various jazz and black orchestras had already worked overseas, but Hawkins was likely the first jazzman to be presented as a serious virtuoso musician. (Armstrong had played in Europe, but he was regarded more as a singing entertainer and bandleader.) The many recordings Hawkins made in Europe from 1934 to 1938 are extraordinary: The other players aren’t on his level (who was?), but accompanied by such Euro-swing bands as Jack Hylton (in England), Michel Warlop (France), and the feisty Dutch band called the Ramblers, Hawkins produced a brilliant series of bravura saxophonic showcases.

When Hawkins returned to the states, he must have felt like Billy the Kid: Every time he turned around, there was another hot shot waiting to draw on him. But his skill in musical combat was unparalleled, and he vanquished all challengers (though the jury’s still out on his legendary encounter with Lester Young). Somehow Hawk succeeded in becoming both jazz’s most notorious battler and its most generous father figure, encouraging younger players on all instruments. He solidified his position, and that of his instrument, with his masterful 1939 recording of “Body and Soul” – two choruses of harmonically based and dramatically-driven absolute majesty.

Hawkins was an elder statesman before he was middle-aged. Yet he constantly expanded his horizons. In his application of harmony, he was naturally sympathetic with the new generation of players who were developing the language of modern jazz, chiefly Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk, and he later led some of the earliest bebop recording sessions. The blues was never one of his strongest points, but (as Dan Morgenstern has pointed out) in the second half of Hawkins’s career he listened to his own disciples, such as Charlie Parker, and became a substantially better blues player.

Hawkins’s playing in the 1950s and 1960s was not only bluesier and fiercer but more mellow. Some of his best later playing is on a series of ballad albums done both with small combos (“The Hawk Relaxes”) and in more ambitious orchestral and string settings (“The Hawk in Hi-Fi”).There are also delightful albums of sambas and showtunes. He played with fellow swing vets like Roy Eldridge or Buck Clayton, and with upstarts like Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk, and John Coltrane. He died in 1969, just short of his 65th birthday.

The BMG “Centennial” package includes a major bonus in the form of a 20-minute DVD, containing five numbers from late 1950s video appearances by Hawkins. They’re all great, but the last one, from 1961, is really something to see. It’s a thrill just to see Hawkins, in a suit and a fedora that he never takes off, lift the tenor out of the case and assemble it. He then tears into “Lover Man” with a vengeance, reminding us that he’s a fighter as well as a lover. Even in the way he looked and walked and put the strap around his neck, Coleman Hawkins was everything a great jazzman ought to be.

The Essential Coleman Hawkins

Coleman Hawkins was one of the most prolific jazz stars of all time, and was in front of the recording microphone continually for nearly 50 years. The listing below is a mere sampling of some of the best and most representative anthologies of the Hawk in full flight.

THE CENTENNIAL COLLECTION

(Bluebird 82876-60086-2) Assembled and annotated by Dan Morgenstern, this CD and DVD combo does as good a job as possible of boiling the Hawk’s career down to 70 minutes. Framed by the original classic “Body and Soul” and a worthy re-addressing of that standard with full orchestra from 1956, the set samples Hawk in virtually every context and stage of his career – though unfortunately, BMG doesn’t own any of the 1930s Euro-Hawk. Bluebird has also reissued the great 1956 orchestral album “The Hawk in Hi-Fi” (Bluebird 09026-63842) with tons of alternates.

THE BEBOP YEARS

(Properbox 1014) This four-CD set collates the bulk of Hawk’s recordings from his return to the United States to the end of the 1940s. The music is actually an amalgam of both late swing and early bop. The great players of several generations, from Count Basie to Miles Davis, mix it up on more than 88 tracks.

THE GENIUS OF COLEMAN HAWKINS

(Verve 314 539 065-2) The best of the many albums he made in the 1950s and 1960s for producer Norman Granz, spotlighting the Hawk in a program of standards and blues. This is the way I like to hear him, with no other horns, just the great rhythm section of Oscar Peterson’s Quartet.

THE BEST OF COLEMAN HAWKINS

(Prestige 5704) A rather ambitious title for a modest single-disc offering, but this newly released collection does indeed gather some of the best work from one of Hawkins’s best periods, the late 1950s and early 1960s sessions owned by Fantasy.

COLEMAN HAWKINS & ROY ELDRIDGE AT THE OPERA HOUSE

(Verve 314 521 641-2) Taped live in Chicago and Los Angeles in 1957, this is my choice for those who want to hear the Hawk sparring with a worthy opponent.

Finally, there are a couple albums that ought to be brought back into print. Even before “Body and Soul,” Hawkins had a fruitful relationship with Victor, and French RCA once issued a four-LP series of his complete work for the label. I wish someone would make that available again, and over here. Likewise, 1962’s “No Strings,” one of many where Hawk focuses on a single Broadway show, would be my choice for the next Hawkins reissue in Fantasy’s long running Original Jazz Classics series.