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One of the Blue Note label's definitive hard bop artists, tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley remains somewhat underappreciated for his straightforward, swinging style. Any characterization of Mobley invariably begins with critic Leonard Feather's
assertion that he was the "middleweight champion of the tenor
saxophone," meaning that his tone wasn't as aggressive and thick as John Coltrane or Sonny Rollins, but neither was it as soft and cool as Stan Getz or Lester Young. Instead, Mobley's
in-between, "round" (as he described it) sound was controlled and even,
given over to subtlety rather than intense displays of emotion. Even if
he lacked the galvanizing, mercurial qualities of the era's great tenor
innovators, Mobley
remained consistently solid throughout most of his recording career.
His solo lines were full of intricate rhythmic patterns that were
delivered with spot-on precision, and he was no slouch harmonically
either. As a charter member of Horace Silver's Jazz Messengers, Mobley
helped inaugurate the hard bop movement: jazz that balanced
sophistication and soulfulness, complexity and earthy swing, and whose
loose structure allowed for extended improvisations. As a solo artist,
he began recording for Blue Note in the latter half of the '50s, and hit
his peak in the first half of the '60s with hard bop cornerstones like Soul Station, No Room for Squares, and A Caddy for Daddy. Henry "Hank" Mobley
was born on July 7, 1930, in Eastman, GA, and grew up mostly in
Elizabeth, NJ. Several family members played piano and/or church organ,
and Mobley himself learned piano as a child. He switched to the saxophone at age 16, initially modeling his style on players like Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Dexter Gordon, Don Byas, and Sonny Stitt. He soon started playing professionally in the area, and built enough of a reputation that trumpeter Clifford Brown recommended him for a job without having heard him play. That job was with Paul Gayten's
Newark-based R&B band, which he joined in 1949, doubling as a
composer. He departed in 1951 and joined the house band at a Newark
nightclub, where he played with pianist Walter Davis, Jr. and backed some of the era's top jazz stars. That led to a job with Max Roach, who hired both Mobley and Davis after performing with them; they all recorded together in early 1953, at one of the earliest sessions to feature Roach as a leader. Meanwhile, Mobley continued to gig around his home area, playing with the likes of Milt Jackson, Tadd Dameron, and J.J. Johnson, among others; he also served two weeks in Duke Ellington's orchestra in 1953.
Mobley spent much of 1954 performing and recording with Dizzy Gillespie. He left in September to join pianist Horace Silver's group, which evolved into a quintet co-led by Art Blakey and dubbed the Jazz Messengers. Their groundbreaking first album for Blue Note, 1955's Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers, was a landmark in the genesis of hard bop, with its sophisticated solos and bright, almost funky rhythms. Mobley led his first session for Blue Note, The Hank Mobley Quartet,
in 1955, and recorded for Savoy and Prestige during 1956. In the middle
of that year, the original lineup of the Jazz Messengers split, with Blakey keeping the name and Silver forming a new group. Mobley stayed with Silver
until 1957, by which time he had begun to record prolifically as a
leader for Blue Note, completing eight albums' worth of material over
the next 16 months. Some of his best work, such as Hank Mobley and His All Stars and The Hank Mobley Quintet,
was cut with a selection of old Messengers mates. Not all of his
sessions were released at the time, but some began to appear as import
reissues in the '80s. Often composing his own material, Mobley was beginning to truly hit his stride with 1958's Peckin' Time, when a worsening drug problem resulted in an arrest that took him off the scene for a year.
Upon returning to music in 1959, Mobley oriented himself by rejoining Art Blakey in the Jazz Messengers for a short period. His comeback session as a leader was 1960's classic Soul Station, near-universally acknowledged as his greatest recorded moment. Mobley cut two more high-quality hard bop albums, Roll Call and Workout, over 1960-1961, as well as some other sessions that went unreleased at the time. In 1961, Mobley caught what looked to be a major break when he was hired to replace John Coltrane in Miles Davis' quintet. Unfortunately, the association was a stormy one; Mobley came under heavy criticism from the bandleader, and wound up leaving in 1962. He returned to solo recording with 1963's No Room for Squares,
often tabbed as one of his best efforts, before drug and legal problems
again put him out of commission during 1964. Energized and focused upon
his return, Mobley
recorded extensively during 1965, showcasing a slightly harder-edged
tone and an acumen for tricky, modal-flavored originals that challenged
his sidemen. At the same time, Dippin' found a funkier soul-jazz sound starting to creep into his work, an approach that reached its apex on the infectious A Caddy for Daddy later that year.
Mobley
recorded steadily for Blue Note through the '60s, offering slight
variations on his approach, and continued to appear as a sideman on a
generous number of the label's other releases (especially frequent
collaborator Lee Morgan). 1966's A Slice of the Top found Mobley fronting a slightly larger band arranged by Duke Pearson, though it went unissued until 1979. After cutting the straightforward Third Season in 1967, Mobley embarked on a brief tour of Europe, where he performed with Slide Hampton. He returned to the U.S. to record the straight-ahead Far Away Lands and Hi Voltage that year, and tried his hand at commercially oriented jazz-funk on 1968's Reach Out. Afterward, he took Hampton's advice and returned to Europe, where he would remain for the next two years. 1969's The Flip was recorded in Paris, and Mobley returned to the States to lead his final session for Blue Note, Thinking of Home, in 1970 (it wasn't released until ten years later). He subsequently co-led a group with pianist Cedar Walton, which recorded the excellent Breakthrough in 1972.
Sadly, that would prove to be Mobley's
last major effort. Health problems forced him to retire in 1975, when
he settled in Philadelphia. He was barely able to even play his horn for
fear of rupturing a lung; by the dawn of the '80s, he was essentially
an invalid. In 1986, he mustered up the energy to work on a limited
basis with Duke Jordan; however, he died of pneumonia not long after, on May 30, 1986. During Mobley's heyday, most critics tended to compare him unfavorably to Sonny Rollins, or dismiss him for not being the innovator that Coltrane was. However, in the years that followed Mobley's death, Blue Note hard bop enjoyed a positive reappraisal; with it came a new appreciation for Mobley's highly developed talents as a composer and soloist, instead of a focus on his shortcomings.
As one of the founding members of the
original Jazz Messengers, tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley was part of a
brilliant innovation. Bebop's second generation of players had pulled
the music into a tailspin of virtuosity. But there was a new
inspirational sound taking hold, with roots in gospel and blues. By
combining the best of bebop with the soulful new thing springing up,
Horace Silver, Art Blakey, Kenny Dorham, Hank Mobley and Doug Watkins
fashioned a sound with a percussive, street feel inspired by the hot
steam grates and pavement they walked, the propulsive drive of the lives
they were leading. Mobley was born in Eastman, Georgia, but was
raised in Elizabeth, New Jersey, near Newark. Early in his career, he
worked with Dizzy Gillespie and Max Roach. He took part on one of the
landmark hard bop sessions, alongside Blakey, Silver and trumpeter Kenny
Dorham. The results of these sessions were released as “Horace Silver
and the Jazz Messengers.” They contrasted with the classical pretentions
of cool jazz, with Mobley's rich lyricism being bluesier, alongside the
funky approach of Horace Silver. When The Jazz Messengers split in
1956, Mobley continued on with pianist Horace Silver for a short time,
although he did work again with Blakey several years later. During
the 1960s, he worked chiefly as a leader, recording 25 albums for Blue
Note Records, including “Soul Station” and “Roll Call” between 1955 and
1970. He performed with many of the most important hard bop players and
formed a particularly productive partnership with trumpeter Lee Morgan.
Mobley also spent a brief time in 1961 with Miles Davis,
during the trumpeter's search for a replacement for John Coltrane. He
is heard on the album “Someday My Prince Will Come” (alongside Coltrane,
who returned for the recording of some tracks), and some live
recordings (In Person: Live at the Blackhawk and At Carnegie Hall).
Though criticized by some for not having the improvisational fire of
Coltrane, Mobley was still a major voice on tenor saxophone, known for
his melodic playing. Mobley was forced to retire in the mid-1970s
due to lung problems. He worked briefly with Duke Jordan before his
death of pneumonia in 1986.
One of the Blue Note label’s definitive hard bop artists, tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley remains somewhat underappreciated for his straightforward, swinging style. Any characterization of Mobley invariably begins with critic Leonard Feather’s assertion that he was the “middleweight champion of the tenor saxophone,” meaning that his tone wasn’t as aggressive and thick as John Coltrane or Sonny Rollins, but neither was it as soft and cool as Stan Getz or Lester Young. Instead, Mobley’s in-between, “round” (as he described it) sound was controlled and even, given over to subtlety rather than intense displays of emotion. Even if he lacked the galvanizing, mercurial qualities of the era’s great tenor innovators, Mobley remained consistently solid throughout most of his recording career. His solo lines were full of intricate rhythmic patterns that were delivered with spot-on precision, and he was no slouch harmonically either. As a charter member of Horace Silver’s Jazz Messengers, Mobley helped inaugurate the hard bop movement: jazz that balanced sophistication and soulfulness, complexity and earthy swing, and whose loose structure allowed for extended improvisations. As a solo artist, he began recording for Blue Note in the latter half of the ’50s, and hit his peak in the first half of the ’60s with hard bop cornerstones like Soul Station, No Room for Squares, and A Caddy for Daddy.
Henry “Hank” Mobley was born on July 7, 1930, in Eastman, GA, and grew up mostly in Elizabeth, NJ. Several family members played piano and/or church organ, and Mobley himself learned piano as a child. He switched to the saxophone at age 16, initially modeling his style on players like Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Dexter Gordon, Don Byas, and Sonny Stitt. He soon started playing professionally in the area, and built enough of a reputation that trumpeter Clifford Brown recommended him for a job without having heard him play. That job was with Paul Gayten’s Newark-based R&B band, which he joined in 1949, doubling as a composer. He departed in 1951 and joined the house band at a Newark nightclub, where he played with pianist Walter Davis, Jr. and backed some of the era’s top jazz stars. That led to a job with Max Roach, who hired both Mobley and Davis after performing with them; they all recorded together in early 1953, at one of the earliest sessions to feature Roach as a leader. Meanwhile, Mobley continued to gig around his home area, playing with the likes of Milt Jackson, Tadd Dameron, and J.J. Johnson, among others; he also served two weeks in Duke Ellington’s orchestra in 1953.
Mobley spent much of 1954 performing and recording with Dizzy Gillespie. He left in September to join pianist Horace Silver’s group, which evolved into a quintet co-led by Art Blakey and dubbed the Jazz Messengers. Their groundbreaking first album for Blue Note, 1955’s Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers, was a landmark in the genesis of hard bop, with its sophisticated solos and bright, almost funky rhythms. Mobley led his first session for Blue Note, The Hank Mobley Quartet, in 1955, and recorded for Savoy and Prestige during 1956. In the middle of that year, the original lineup of the Jazz Messengers split, with Blakey keeping the name and Silver forming a new group. Mobley stayed with Silver until 1957, by which time he had begun to record prolifically as a leader for Blue Note, completing eight albums’ worth of material over the next 16 months. Some of his best work, such as Hank Mobley and His All Stars and The Hank Mobley Quintet, was cut with a selection of old Messengers mates. Not all of his sessions were released at the time, but some began to appear as import reissues in the ’80s. Often composing his own material, Mobley was beginning to truly hit his stride with 1958’s Peckin’ Time, when a worsening drug problem resulted in an arrest that took him off the scene for a year.
Upon returning to music in 1959, Mobley oriented himself by rejoining Art Blakey in the Jazz Messengers for a short period. His comeback session as a leader was 1960’s classic Soul Station, near-universally acknowledged as his greatest recorded moment. Mobley cut two more high-quality hard bop albums, Roll Call and Workout, over 1960-1961, as well as some other sessions that went unreleased at the time. In 1961, Mobley caught what looked to be a major break when he was hired to replace John Coltrane in Miles Davis’ quintet. Unfortunately, the association was a stormy one; Mobley came under heavy criticism from the bandleader, and wound up leaving in 1962. He returned to solo recording with 1963’s No Room for Squares, often tabbed as one of his best efforts, before drug and legal problems again put him out of commission during 1964. Energized and focused upon his return, Mobley recorded extensively during 1965, showcasing a slightly harder-edged tone and an acumen for tricky, modal-flavored originals that challenged his sidemen. At the same time, Dippin’ found a funkier soul-jazz sound starting to creep into his work, an approach that reached its apex on the infectious A Caddy for Daddy later that year.
Mobley recorded steadily for Blue Note through the ’60s, offering slight variations on his approach, and continued to appear as a sideman on a generous number of the label’s other releases (especially frequent collaborator Lee Morgan). 1966’s A Slice of the Top found Mobley fronting a slightly larger band arranged by Duke Pearson, though it went unissued until 1979. After cutting the straightforward Third Season in 1967, Mobley embarked on a brief tour of Europe, where he performed with Slide Hampton. He returned to the U.S. to record the straight-ahead Far Away Lands and Hi Voltage that year, and tried his hand at commercially oriented jazz-funk on 1968’s Reach Out. Afterward, he took Hampton’s advice and returned to Europe, where he would remain for the next two years. 1969’s The Flip was recorded in Paris, and Mobley returned to the States to lead his final session for Blue Note, Thinking of Home, in 1970 (it wasn’t released until ten years later). He subsequently co-led a group with pianist Cedar Walton, which recorded the excellent Breakthrough in 1972.
Sadly, that would prove to be Mobley’s last major effort. Health problems forced him to retire in 1975, when he settled in Philadelphia. He was barely able to even play his horn for fear of rupturing a lung; by the dawn of the ’80s, he was essentially an invalid. In 1986, he mustered up the energy to work on a limited basis with Duke Jordan; however, he died of pneumonia not long after, on May 30, 1986. During Mobley’s heyday, most critics tended to compare him unfavorably to Sonny Rollins, or dismiss him for not being the innovator that Coltrane was. However, in the years that followed Mobley’s death, Blue Note hard bop enjoyed a positive reappraisal; with it came a new appreciation for Mobley’s highly developed talents as a composer and soloist, instead of a focus on his shortcomings. ~ Steve Huey
In the Davis biography So What,
writer John Szwed noted that with Mobley’s blues inflections, “There
was a hipness to his playing that reinforced Davis’ popularity in black
communities across America.” But Davis did not speak so favorably about
the saxophonist, and Coltrane and Wayne Shorter’s roles with the
trumpeter historically have overshadowed Mobley’s short tenure in the
band. Just after leaving Davis, Mobley said that he delved into a
recurring drug addiction that frequently kept him away from performing
and recording. While incarcerated for drug possession, he used prison
time to compose, and his sound continued to evolve after each setback
throughout the 1960s. Fortunately, as Blue Note Sessions shows, Mobley’s record company stood by him, despite such episodes. On 1964’s No Room For Squares, Mobley conveyed quiet
authority while allowing ample room for an especially spirited quintet.
The group’s unison lines on his “Three Way Split” give way to shifting
rhythms in a fierce exchange among Mobley, bassist John Ore and drummer
Philly Joe Jones. Mobley extended his musical palette for the sextet LP A Caddy For Daddy (recorded in 1965). His waltz “The Morning After” sounds like it was written specifically for pianist McCoy Tyner. Dippin’ (also recorded in 1965) featured pianist Harold
Mabern, whose robust blues feeling was a quality he shared with the
leader. Mabern, who spoke to DownBeat about two weeks prior to his Sept.
17 death, somewhat agreed with a consensus that Mobley could be
personally withdrawn. But he described the saxophonist as far from
distant.
“Hank was a joy to be around, he never created problems, never got
loud and boisterous,” Mabern said of the sessions that produced Dippin’,
the only album the two musicians made together. “He was pure in heart.
Those are the things that made the date easy for us, but he was no
pushover: He knew what he wanted; you couldn’t jive him.” Mobley did not always adhere to a standard format, as illustrated by his 1966 octet recording, A Slice Of The Top.
His sharp timing and command of all registers remained steadfast while
he created long choruses for a distinctive brass section that included
euphonium and tuba. While Duke Pearson was nominally in charge of the
arrangements, they flowed from Mobley’s instructions. The tracks range
from a waltz in 6/8 time (“Cute ’N Pretty”) to the title track’s
multidirectional groove. The groundbreaking LP sat unreleased until 1979, about six years
after Mobley expressed frustration at the amount of his material sitting
in the Blue Note vault. His exasperation seems understandable, and the
new Mosaic collection includes tracks from five compelling albums that
were recorded in the 1960s but not released until the late ’70s and
mid-’80s. Still, as Mosaic producer Michael Cuscuna pointed out, Mobley
and his contemporaries—including Morgan, Jimmy Smith and Grant
Green—created more tracks than any label could have been expected to
issue around the time they were recorded. During Mobley’s last years in the studio, his work also included
covers of r&b hits, like the Four Tops’ “Reach Out I’ll Be There,”
as well as original compositions that emphasized immediately attractive
melodies with repeating motifs, such as “The Flip.” In some ways, these
tracks show that after 20 years of invention, he never lost his feel for
r&b. Bassist Mickey Bass, who played on the saxophonist’s 1970 Blue Note album, Thinking Of Home,
said Mobley’s compositional skills remained honed, regardless of the
distractions or hardships he faced. “With both Hank and Lee Morgan,
their genius was so great that in spite of their addictions, they would
write out most of the tunes for the record date in the cab on the way to
rehearsal,” Bass recalled. “That genius was unheard of at that
particular time.” In 1972, Mobley recorded his last album, Breakthrough!, a collaboration with pianist Cedar Walton. (It was released on the Cobblestone label and later reissued by Muse). Mobley continued his peripatetic lifestyle in the years that
followed, but with the possibility of new music always out there. At the
time of his 1973 DownBeat interview, Chicago was his home and he had
started working with pianist Muhal Richard Abrams. No recording of the
two is known to exist, which is a shame. Mobley’s final years remain
mysterious, but he was known to have suffered from lung cancer and bouts
of homelessness. It’s conceivable that he saw how his advanced ideas
for composing and arranging on A Slice Of The Top became part of the lexicon for some of the groups coming out of Abrams’ Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. As Bob Blumenthal writes in the liner notes to Blue Note Sessions,
Mobley did achieve a moment of acclaim shortly before his death. When
Blue Note experienced its rebirth in 1985, the label invited him to
participate in a relaunch concert at New York’s Town Hall. Mobley
appeared at the event, but he chose to speak to the audience, rather
than perform. In some regard, he didn’t have to, as everyone present
seemed to acknowledge that the label, and jazz itself, had thrived
because of Mobley’s contributions. DB
The Complete Hank Mobley Blue Note Sessions 1963-70
Mosaic Records Limited Edition Box Set
Mosaic Records
Presents "The Complete Hank Mobley Blue Note Sessions 1963-70" - 8 CDs
with 74 tracks from the second great phase of Hank Mobley's career in
state-of-the-art sound. With all the developments in recent years with
analogue to digital converters and hi-res transfers that bring the CD to
almost the same quality as analogue LPs, we have returned to the
original analogue tapes of these Mobley master tapes in order to make
them available like never before.
Hank Mobley, as a member of the original Jazz Messengers, was
one of the founding fathers of the hard bop and the Blue Note sound.
From 1954 to 1961, he had fruitful relationships in the bands of Horace
Silver, Art Blakey, Max Roach and Miles Davis among others. He logged 13
sessions for Blue Note alone during that period which also highlighted
his considerable talents as a composer. But through all his recording
and touring activity, he remained a musician's musician , largely
overlooked by the jazz press and fans at large. His fluid
improvisations, harmonic brilliance, hypnotic lyricism and warm round
tone didn't get the attention that more extroverted tenormen like
Coltrane and Rollins could command.
Silent for most of 1962, Mobley's return in 1963 showed some
major changes in his approach. His rich warm, round sound remained, but
Hank pushed more air through his horn creating a herder, more
in-your-face tone. His rhythmic approach was punchier, although his
graceful ability to skate over and through the pulsating rhythm of
master rhythm sections remained. His solos did demonstrate pore economy
as he eliminated filigree and excess notes, thanks to lessons learned
sharing the stage with Miles Davis.
In 1963 Hank began, making sideman appearances on Donald Byrd's
"A New Perspective" and Herbie Hancock's "My Point Of View" This set
covers his own sessions from that year until his final session for the
label in 1970. Although most of this material was issued on CD at one
time or another in the '80s or '90s, all of this music is out of print.
Mosaic has returned to the original analogue tapes to create an
audiophile listening experience that take advantage of today's high
level of analogue to digital converters and to 24/96 transfers that
bring the listener a sound that is comparable with vinyl.
On March 7, 1963, he recorded an album's worth of material with
Donald Byrd, Herbie Hancock, Butch Warren and Philly Joe Jones, but
Alfred Lion didn't think that all the material was strong enough to
release. A second session in October with Lee Morgan, Andrew Hill, Joe
Ore and Philly Joe yielded another six tunes.
Blue Note selected the best four tunes from the October session
with two from the March session to create the album "No Room For
Squares," released in May 1964. Hank was back and there were major
changes to his approach. As Joe Goldberg wrote in the liner notes for
that album: "I hear a greater order, economy and authority in his work
so that it now becomes much easier to understand the respect his
colleagues have had for him all these years.
Mobley's talents as a composer continued to grow. He expanded
his language to include modality and samba rhythms. Even on the
obligatory funk tune to lead off an album like "The Turnaround" or "The
Flip," Hank took extra care to go beyond the 24-bar blues template to
create fascinating works with unique structures that engage the
soloists. His gift for melody and finding fresh harmonic chord sequence
always enriched his compositions.
On the 12 sessions included in is set between 1963-71, Mobley's
achievements, as an improviser, composer and leader are chronicled..
Seven of these sessions were released very soon after recording
including acknowledged masterpieces like "No Room For Squares," "The
Turnaround," and "Dippin'" as well as lesser known gems like "A Caddy
For Daddy" and "Hi Voltage."
The five albums of material that were issued much later rival
the originally issued material. "Straight No Filter" is an exquisite
half session with Lee Morgan, McCoy Tyner, Bob Cranshaw and Billy
Higgins. "Third Season" features a septet with adds guitarist Sonny
Greenwich and alto saxophonist/flutist James Spaulding to the standard
quintet instrumentation, which inspires some of Mobley's best writing.
The piece de resistance among the rescued gems is "A Slice Of The Top,"
with an octet that adds euphonium, tuba and alto sax & flute to
ensemble for some gorgeous writing on four Mobley originals and one
standard with orchestrations by Duke Pearson. His final Blue Note
session features the title tune "Thinking Of Home" as a three-part suite
that is some of the best of Hank's compositional work.
Mobley's musical kinship with Lee Morgan and Billy Higgins is a
unifying factor in this session and all three contribute to its most
magical moments. Other sidemen on these sessions include trumpeters
Freddie Hubbard, Donald Byrd,, Blue Mitchell and Woody Shaw, alto
saxophonists Jackie Mclean and James Spaulding, guitarists George Benson
and Sonny Greenwich, pianists Harold Mabern, Barry Harris, McCoy
Tyner, Cedar Walton, bassists Paul Chambers, Bob Cranshaw, John Ore and
Ron Carter and drummer Philly Joe Jones.
When the eminent jazz critic Leonard Feather described Hank Mobley
(1930-1986) as “the middleweight champion of the tenor saxophone”, it
was intended as a compliment. He aimed to differentiate the Georgia-born
saxophonist’s mellower, softer sound from harder-hitting heavyweights
such as John Coltraneand Sonny Rollins.
But for those who came to appreciate Mobley’s unique voice as a hard
bop-era tenor player, it seemed as if Feather’s words damned the
saxophonist with faint praise. Indeed, the critic’s boxing analogy stuck
and became something of a curse. After that, Mobley was typecast,
perennially labelled a second-tier musician, despite the evidence of Blue Note albums like 1960’s Soul Station (his finest moment on record) and the earlier and more obscure Poppin’, which deserves a far wider audience than it has.
Mobley was 27 when he went into Rudy Van Gelder’s Hackensack studio on Sunday, 20 October 1957, to record what became Poppin’.
By then the tenor saxophonist, who was a former Jazz Messenger, already
had six albums under his belt for Alfred Lion’s Blue Note label. He had
also established himself as one of the leading exponents of hard bop, a
style that was less cerebral than bebop and drew heavily on blues and gospel elements.
Lion recorded the saxophonist – whose sound, compositional skill and
ability to swing he admired – at almost every opportunity. That
inevitably meant that some of his sessions were left on the shelf, but
Mobley wasn’t alone in that respect. A great many Blue Note recording
artists – including Grant Green, Stanley Turrentine and Jimmy Smith– suffered the same fate. So, Poppin’ – like Mobley’s previous session, Curtain Call,
recorded a few months earlier – ended up being consigned to the vaults.
Though we’ll never know why Blue Note shelved it, it’s an excellent
album that showcases Mobley in a sextet setting alongside a stellar
line-up of sidemen: trumpeter Art Farmer, baritone sax specialist Pepper
Adams, pianist Sonny Clark, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Philly
Joe Jones (the latter two both seconded from the then high-flying Miles Davis Sextet).
Spectacular results
Poppin’’s opening title song is the first of four Mobley
originals. The horns combine to play the main theme over a lively,
swinging groove before the soloists have space to shine. Sonny Clark is
first out of the blocks, delivering an agile piece of right-hand piano
work. Pepper Adams follows; his virile, baritone sax has a husky,
resonant tone but is also very athletic. Then comes Art Farmer, whose
horn playing, with its bright timbre, is distinguished by a
sophisticated eloquence. Last to solo is Mobley, whose tenor saxophone,
with its light but slightly rotund sound, flows effortlessly over
Chambers’ and Jones’ driving groove. The latter also shows off his drum
skills with a few choice breaks before the three horns lock in for a
final statement of the snaking opening theme.
Mobley rarely played jazz standards, but when he did the results were
spectacular. His rendition of Jimmy Van Heusen’s and Eddie DeLange’s
popular 1939 tune ‘Darn That Dream’ is particularly lovely: Mobley’s
tone is mellow, plump, husky and full of warm emotion on both the song’s
first and last solos. In between, Farmer uses a muted trumpet on his
solo, which imbues the music with a languorous, late-night feeling.
Adams also succumbs to the song’s deliciously laidback mood, which is
enhanced by Clark’s delicate piano runs and some subtle accompaniment by
Chambers and Jones. Mobley’s closing unaccompanied cadenza is
perfection itself.
Fuelled by Chambers’ and Jones’ propulsive rhythms, the toe-tapping
‘Gettin’ Into Something’ picks up the pace. Clark plays a twisting
bluesy run before teeing up the tune’s harmonised theme, stated by the
three horns. Mobley takes the first solo. Inspired and flowing
improvisations from Farmer (this time using an open trumpet), Adams and
Clark follow him before the opening theme’s final return.
An opportunity to shine anew
‘Tune Up’, a cracking version of a Miles Davis tune from 1956, keeps
up the high tempo but is lighter and airier. Chambers’ speed-walking
bass and Jones’ fizzing drums drive the rhythm section, over which the
horns enunciate the smooth contours of the song’s main melody. Solos
come from Farmer, Adams, Clark, Mobley and Chambers (who bows his bass).
Mobley picks up the baton again for a while until Philly Joe Jones
delivers an impressive drum solo before cueing in the rest of the band
to reprise the “head” theme.
Just as good – if not a shade better – is the Mobley-penned ‘East Of
Brooklyn’, an archetypal hard bop swinger. The horn-played main theme
rides on a groove that alternates between percussive, Latin-style
syncopations and a straightahead swing style. Mobley, followed by
Farmer, Adams, Clark and Chambers, are all dependable as soloists,
balancing technical expertise with emotional depth. Despite its high quality, Poppin’ was left in the can for 23
years until producer Michael Cuscuna dug it out of the archives for a
Japanese vinyl release in 1980. It has now been resurrected again, via
Blue Note’s new Tone Poet Audiophile Vinyl Reissue Series, meaning that this forgotten gem has an opportunity to shine anew. The Tone Poet Audiophile Vinyl Reissue Series edition of Poppin’ is out on 28 February. Pre-order it here.
When
my coworker Robert heard that I was getting into jazz, he brought a CD
into work for me. “You need this,” he said smiling. He slid the jewel
case across the dusty top of my computer terminal. It was Hank Mobley’s Soul Station.
Set
against a black background, beneath three rows of simple text, Mobley’s
face and shoulders hovered in the center of the album cover, a statuary
bust awash in aquamarine. “He looks like he’s high out of his mind,”
Robert said. It was true. Head back, eyes hidden beneath heavy lids, the
young tenor wore a euphoric smirk whose mix of bliss and self-assurance
seemed to dare you to ask what he was so ecstatic about. But what if he
wasn’t high, just ecstatic? Couldn’t this be a smile of satisfaction
and excitement, the pure childlike reverie musicians feel when playing
stirring music in a well-equipped studio? Although I didn’t know it
then, Mobley had had drug problems off and on — many jazz players had —
but at the time of this recording, he was as clear as his polished horn.
You can hear it in the music. This album is his masterpiece. That’s why
it’s fitting that he holds up his saxophone in triumph on the cover.
In
1979, at age forty-nine, Mobley told journalist John Litweiler, “It’s
hard for me to think of what could be and what should have been. I lived
with Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk; I walked with them up
and down the street. I did not know what it meant when I listened to
them cry — until it happened to me.”
The
first time I read these sentences, they filled me with gloom. The
thought of one of my favorite tenors suffering enough to cry left me
grieving into the night. It also raised the question: What happened to
Mobley?
What “should have been” — should have.
Should. “Should” is the language of outcomes. The word suggests a
blueprint of the mechanics behind fate, about our conceptions of
fairness, providence, and stakes, as well as a person’s expectations,
not just what we’re entitled to, but how much we believe in the American
value of “hard work + time = rewards & improvement.” In its
grandest application, “should” can suggest the inner workings of cosmic
justice, what the universe owes you — reward for effort, reward for
morality, Karmic recompense. Here, the word delivers news of destiny
undelivered. What Mobley thought should have happened did not. Instead,
he got something else, something that seems to have challenged his
worldview and suffused it with some amount of regret.
Mobley’s
words remind me of the song “It Could Happen to You.” Like many bebop
and hard-bop standards, this one debuted as a vocal number in a film,
the 1944 musical And the Angels Sing, but numerous musicians in Mobley’s day played instrumental versions of it.
“Hide
your heart from sight, lock your dreams at night,” go the lyrics. “It
could happen to you. Don’t count stars or you might stumble. Someone
drops a sigh and down you tumble.”
Thanks
to biographies and Hollywood archetypes, we know the typical tragedies
of the working musician: creative freedom without financial stability;
cult status without widespread recognition; health problems but no
health insurance. Thanks to jazz lore, we know the others’ particular
tragedies: Charlie Parker’s self-destructive genius; Bud Powell’s
groundbreaking vision interrupted by mental illness; Monk’s imagination
and compositions, beloved by insiders but unable to generate the money
or fame his brilliance deserved. Mobley never enjoyed their distinction
or profile, yet what happened to him was the same as the others: bad
luck and trouble, the currency of the blues, and like Charlie Parker
taught him, “Baby, you’d better learn those blues; can’t play enough of
the blues.”
The song “Remember” on Soul Station starts with some of the most joyous jazz on record, forty-five seconds of pure, swinging elation.
Out
front, Mobley’s sax plays the theme: very spare, very simple. Pianist
Wynton Kelly laces the theme with bright, jubilant chords tapped with
the weight of angel food cake. Behind them, drummer Art Blakey’s swift
beat moves the intro along until he marks the end with one of his
thunderous press rolls, and kicks off Mobley’s two-minute solo with a
brassy cymbal crash.
“Remember” is a cover of a 1925 Irving Berlin with melancholy lyrics.
Remember we found a lonely spot, And after I learned to care a lot, You promised that you’d forget me not, But you forgot To remember.
Yet on Soul Station,
stripped of lyrics, the song loses its mournful theme and becomes
something so joyful, it sounds the way falling in love feels. The band
transforms a eulogy to lost love into an anthem of elation, infusing it
with a sense of optimism and excitement which, in the soundtrack to an
unwritten film in my mind, seems to signal the arrival of new
beginnings, a farewell to hardship and hello to something epic. The
hippity-hop of Kelly’s piano, Mobley’s round, lush tone, and Blakey’s
buoyant shuffle — if you want a glimpse into a happy soul, into how I
feel on my best days, those forty-five seconds of music are it.
I’ve
listened to “Remember” so many times that when I sing along with
Mobley’s solo, I know nearly every note he plays. I know when Blakey
intensifies the beat, when he changes the rhythm, and I know all his
fills. I can sing Kelly’s ebullient solo, and I know the spots where you
can hear Kelly humming to himself — something he often did — as well as
the spots where he heightens the mood by hitting the keys harder. This
isn’t a boast about my sophisticated ear. It’s a tribute to how melodic
and infectious the music is. So melodic, so cleanly articulated and
composed, that even a guy like me who plays one instrument poorly can
remember it.
Remember the night The night you said, “I love you.” Remember? Remember you vowed By all the stars above you. Remember?
I
remember walking up Manhattan’s Park Avenue in the winter of 2007,
listening to this song. The sun had nearly set. A steely blue encased
the street, the towering buildings and expansive pavement all bearing
the same cool color as the inside of your eyelids at dawn. Mobley’s
“Remember” played in my earphones, and it washed me with a feeling of
confidence and calm. I shuffled through the frigid air and stopped at
the curb on 39th. Cars raced past. I waited for a gap. When I looked
down at my cheap cotton shoes, the toes were wet and perched on the worn
cement edge, and instead of bemoaning how cold and tired and wet I
felt, I thought, “I feel good.” I was aware of it at that moment, and I
knew that the song was the reason.
I only lived in New York for one year, but “Remember,” like all of Soul Station,
was one of the only energizing forces during that period of fatigue.
More than all the coffee and tea I drank to combat sleep deprivation,
more than the endless amounts of nicotine I consumed to feel better
about stress and lack of money, cold weather, exhaustion, and wet shoes,
that album powered me through. It so effectively cushioned the blows my
life dealt that, when I think about that year now, I hear this song and
mostly remember the good things that happened, the overall tone of it,
which is the tone this song set.
Part
of the charm of “Remember” is its pace. The beat is perfectly spaced so
that when your legs move in sync with it, it sets you sashaying up the
street. When Blakey struts, you strut. When Kelly swings, you swing.
It’s the ideal song for walking, because the song’s confidence and
swagger infuse the listener, and as you move to keep pace, you
temporarily inhabit its joyous disposition.
As writer Bob Blumenthal says in the remastered Soul Station
liner notes, “All six [songs] are delivered with a natural ease that
may create a misleading impression of easy music — what could sound
easier, for instance, than the opening choruses of ‘Remember?’ — yet
that is part of the brilliance behind the album. If everybody could toss
off music this satisfying, then Soul Station would have far more company at the pinnacle of recorded jazz.”
Into my dreams you wandered it seems, and then there came a day
You loved me too, my dreams had come true, and all the world was May.
But soon the May-time turned to December. You had forgotten, do you remember?
It
takes talents like Kelly, Blakey, and Mobley to perform music this
satisfying, but how did they make such a sad song so uplifting?
“Where do you think everybody got the blues from?” Mobley told DownBeat magazine in 1973. “Did you ever hear “Just Friends” and tap your foot to it? Soul Station
is the same thing, just like walking down the highway, it sounds like
somebody’s saying, ‘Oh, man, I’m tired of this town, got to get away
from this.”
Born
in Georgia in 1930, Mobley started playing sax at age sixteen after his
family moved to New Jersey. A few relatives played instruments. He
learned piano as a kid, but alto captured his attention. When he spotted
one at a local store, he saved up money by working at a bowling alley.
“When I finally got up enough money for my horn, the dealer went on a
month’s vacation,” Mobley said. “In the meantime, I got a music book,
and when he got back, I knew the whole instrument; all I had to do was
put it in my mouth and play. I’ll tell you, when I was about eight they
wanted me to play the piano, but I wanted to play cops and robbers. But
when I got serious the music started coming easy.”
“I
was in woodshop, carpentry, auto mechanics; then I took machine shop
for a year. I was a nervous wreck studying to be a machinist. We had a
little music thing in school, and I played this Lester Young solo, ‘One
O’Clock Jump,’ note for note. The shop teacher used to play trumpet, and
he said, ‘There’s no room out there for a black machinist. The way you
play saxophone, why don’t you study that?’ That’s the way I did. I quit
shop that same year, I just put on my hip clothes and went chasing women
and going to rock and roll things …”
His
uncle played seven instruments, including trumpet, and even briefly led
his own band. “My uncle told me a lot of things,” Mobley said, “and he
always used to say, ‘Listen to Lester Young.’ When I was about eighteen
he told me: ‘If you’re playing with somebody who plays loud, you play
soft. If somebody plays fast, you play slow. If you try to play the same
thing they’re playing you’re in trouble.’ Contrast. If you play next to
Johnny Griffin or Coltrane, that’s hard work. You have to out-psych
them. They’d say, ‘Let’s play “Cherokee,”’ I’d go, ‘Naw, naw — ah, how
about a little “Bye-Bye Blackbird”?’ I put my heavy form on them, then I
can double up and do everything I want to do.”
This
contrast served him well. In an era of speeding solos, he became a
master of midtempo, but only after years of playing professionally.
First, he switched instruments. “To the best of my knowledge,” he said,
“Sonny Rollins, Sonny Stitt, myself, Jimmy Heath, John Coltrane — we
called ourselves the ‘Five Brothers,’ you know, the five black
brothers — we all started playing alto, but Charlie Parker was such a
monster that we all gave up and switched to tenor. I wasn’t creating
anything new, I was just part of a clique. When we all listened to Fats
Navarro and Bud Powell, when we were twenty, twenty-one, all of us were
learning together. We weren’t trying to surpass Parker or the
heavyweights. But as you get older you start finding different
directions. At the time it was like going to college. It was just doing
our thing, playing different changes, experimenting …”
Based
solely on Mobley’s reputation, trumpeter Clifford Brown recommended him
for a job with Newark-based R&B pianist Paul Gayten, in 1949. Brown
had never even heard Mobley play. After two years with Gayten, Mobley
left to join the house band at a Newark club, alongside pianist Walter
Davis, Jr. Every week, some of jazz’s biggest names came from New York
to perform, and Mobley backed them: Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Bud
Powell. After one weekend show at the club in 1951, drummer Max Roach
hired him and Walter Davis. “I was just twenty-one,” said Mobley. “We
opened in a place on 125th Street in Harlem; Charlie Parker had just
been there before me, and here I come. I’m scared to death — here’s
Sonny Rollins, Jackie McLean, Kenny Dorham, Gerry Mulligan, just about
all the young musicians came by there.” That gig launched his career.
Mobley
and Davis recorded with Roach in early 1953 on one of the drummer’s
first dates as a leader. He recorded on other Roach albums and played
with others whose names are now legendary: Tadd Dameron, Milt Jackson,
J. J. Johnson. He did two weeks with Duke Ellington’s orchestra in 1953
when their clarinetist and tenor Jimmy Hamilton stepped out to get some
dental work. He spent the next year playing and recording with Dizzy
Gillespie and then joined drummer Art Blakey and pianist Horace Silver
in a band that became one of jazz’s most influential, one of the
architects of hard bop, the Jazz Messengers. Considered a classic, their
debut album, Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers,
was one of the earliest hard-bop sessions, and it announced the tone
for the post-bop era, as well as for Art Blakey’s career, since he
carried the Jazz Messengers name for the next thirty-five years of his
life.
Mobley and Silver
The
Messengers started out as a collective of friends pooling their
resources and playing what they liked. “Horace had the quartet at
Minton’s,” Mobley said, “then on weekends Art Blakey and Kenny Dorham
would come in to jam, ’cause they were right around the corner. Out of
that we started feeling something, and we said, ‘Let’s do our thing; we
all got something going name-wise; if anyone gets a job let’s use all of
us.’ I think [drummer] Arthur Edgehill was working with somebody else,
too, but Blakey was right there. Horace’d get a job, or Art, or Kenny,
or I’d get a job; we’d split the money equally.”
Charlie
Parker didn’t give formal lessons to young players or mentor them; he
threw them bits of advice, and he advised the young Mobley to learn the
blues. Besides being a genre of music and specific chord progressions,
“the blues” is also code for trouble, for suffering, sadness, and
misfortune. “Parker played the modern blues,” Mobley
said, “what he’s saying is that so much of modern jazz, structures,
harmonic progressions, they’re all based on the blues.” He also embodied
it. Brilliant, charming, inventive, self-destructive: In bop, Parker
helped create a new type of music, and before he died at age thirty-four
from drug and alcohol abuse, his music and lifestyle led countless
players to the horn and the needle.
Between
the year of Parker’s death and 1958, Mobley recorded nine albums as a
leader for Blue Note Records, four for other labels, and he played as a
sideman on numerous others. Those Blue Note sessions at Rudy Van
Gelder’s studio were salad days. “They’d buy the whiskey and brandy
Saturday night and the food on Sunday — they’d set out salami,
liverwurst, bologna, rye bread, the whole bit,” said Mobley. “Only Blue
Note did it; the others [Prestige and Savoy] were a little stiff.” Blue
Note was equally generous with rehearsals. Because they wanted solid
albums, they paid for musicians’ practice. “If we had a date Saturday,
I’d rehearse the band Tuesday and Thursday in a New York studio …”
During
his career, Mobley recorded as a leader almost exclusively for Blue
Note, a label run by Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, two German
immigrants whose jazz fanaticism and impeccable taste spoke to their
players’ abilities. Lion and Wolff were meticulous. They had strong
opinions about what did and didn’t sound good, and they mostly recorded
what they liked rather than what they thought would sell. “We’d be
making a tape, and sometimes my horn might squeak, and Frank Wolff would
say, ‘Hank Mobley! You squeaked! You squeaked!’ — and the whole band
would crack up, we couldn’t get back to play the tune. And old Alfred
Lion would be walking around, (snap) ‘Mmm!’ (snap) ‘Ooh!’ (snap)
— ‘Now vait a minute, it don’t sving, it don’t sving!’ So we’d stop and
laugh, then come back and slow it down just a bit. Then he’d say, (snap) (snap) ‘Fine, fine, dot really svings, ja!’”
By the midfifties, Mobley had grown as a composer since his Newark days, with some of his strongest early material appearing on Hank Mobley Quartet, Hank Mobley Quintet, and Hank Mobley and His All-Stars. By the time he released Peckin’ Time
in 1958, a deepening heroin dependence led to his arrest, though, and
the prison sentence kept him out of music for most of the year. When he
returned in 1959, he briefly rejoined Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers
to reestablish his bearings, and he got right back to recording. Soul Station
was his comeback. As Blumenthal observes, drug problems “interrupted
his performing career, yet, as the recorded evidence proves, they had
not impeded his progress.” He followed the album with a string of
powerful records the following year, Roll Call, Workout, and Another Workout, creating a sequence that inarguably composes the best of his oeuvre.
In
1961, Miles Davis punctuated Mobley’s winning streak with what seemed
the opportunity of a lifetime: to play in his quintet. Davis led one of
jazz’s most popular outfits. He paid his musicians well. They had
frequent bookings and lots of press. For a brief time, Davis even paid a
retainer to make sure his musicians were available when he needed them.
“That was the best job you could have,” said Davis’ drummer Jimmy Cobb,
“about as high as you could get playing jazz music, so I was feeling
pretty good about it.” Davis’ visibility also launched John Coltrane’s,
Red Garland’s and Cannonball Adderley’s solo careers. When Coltrane left
to focus on his own songwriting and recording, the trumpeter went
searching for the right replacement. He wanted Sonny Rollins, but
Rollins had taken a sabbatical. He wanted Jimmy Heath, but parole
limited the distance Heath could travel to perform. He hired Mobley.
After less than a year together, the association dissolved.
“[P]laying
with Hank just wasn’t fun for me,” Davis said in his autobiography, “he
didn’t stimulate my imagination.” The problem was stylistic. Mobley’s
style was too laid back, too legato and behind the beat. Davis could
also be cruel. He often hassled his new musicians by comparing them with
the musicians whose slots they’d filled. He did this to Cobb, did it to
Red Garland, and he did it to Mobley. During one concert, while Mobley
soloed, Miles stood within earshot and said, “Any time Sonny Rollins
shows up with his horn, he’s got the job.” The tenor eventually quit.
“But when I left Miles [in 1961],” he said, “I was so tired of music,
the whole world, man, I just went back to drugs.”
He played a few sessions, some his own like the darkly melodic No Room for Squares,
some for others like organist Freddie Roach. In 1964, he got arrested
for narcotics again and imprisoned. He wrote the songs for the octet
that became Slice of the Top and had to give pianist
Duke Pearson the sheet music to arrange while he served prison time.
Like before, Mobley didn’t let his problems slow him down. During the
second half of the 1960s, he managed to record an album or more for Blue
Note every year: Far Away Lands, High Voltage, Third Season, The Flip. These albums are dense and listenable, featuring some catchy, complex, standout tunes, but they aren’t as potent as Soul Station or Workout.
He lived in Chicago for a while and led a band with pianist Muhal
Richard Abrams and drummer Wilbur Campbell. He married Arlene Lisser, an
assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois, and a
fan. Once he and Lisser split, he left Chicago. Rather than enter an
alcohol treatment unit, he moved, living briefly in East Orange, New
Jersey; then in Philadelphia, where his health deteriorated.
When Slice of the Top
finally came out in 1979, thirteen years after it was recorded, Mobley
was forty-nine and in bad shape. As the text on the record sleeve says,
he had two lung operations in the early seventies, which kept him from
performing or recording. A problem with a birth certificate stopped him
from participating in a European festival. And he had two of his
saxophones stolen. His remaining sax leaked, so the sound was off, and
he didn’t have the money to buy a replacement. Not that it mattered.
“The doctor told me not to play it, or I might blow one of my lungs
out,” he said. By 1975, he was effectively retired, a fate undeserved
for a musician of his achievement and ability.
As
he said on the record sleeve, “It’s hard for me to think of what could
be and what should have been. I lived with Charlie Parker, Bud Powell,
Thelonious Monk; I walked with them up and down the street. I did not
know what it meant when I listened to them cry — until it happened to
me.” Maybe I’m misreading it or taking it out of context, but when I
read those words, I hear a person looking back not just on his career,
but on his life. Did I waste it? Where did it get me? After so many fruitful decades, here he was on life’s leeward slope, taking stock of his vanished youth.
You can feel the reflection and fear in his voice, the question of meaning. Look at all the things I did, he seems to be saying, all the places I went and people I knew.
All the practice. All the time spent composing, playing gigs, losing
sleep to write and rehearse and record twenty-five albums for Blue Note,
all the hustling. Playing alongside Parker and Monk, helping start the
Jazz Messengers, playing with Max Roach before he formed his famous
band, filling in for Coltrane in Miles’s quintet — he’d been in nearly
all the right places at the right time, everywhere any tenor would want
to be. Shouldn’t it have amounted to more? But Mobley’s pianist on Soul Station,
Wynton Kelly, died of a seizure in Canada at age thirty-nine, broke.
Mobley’s old Jazz Messengers bassist Doug Watkins died at age
twenty-eight in a car accident, the same tragic end that the
clean-living, twenty-five-year-old trumpeter Clifford Brown met, the
person who got Mobley his first job. And his trumpeter friend and
collaborator Lee Morgan? A jealous lover shot him on stage at a show
when he was thirty-three. In music and life, there is no justice.
Mobley’s final album offers evidence of this.
Blue
Note’s cofounder Francis Wolff died in 1971, and the company, like
jazz, changed. The following year, Mobley teamed up with pianist Cedar
Walton and recorded Breakthrough! for a small label
named Muse. It was the first album he’d done as a leader for another
company since 1955, and it looks the part. An oversized image of a
cinder block floats on the cover, a grainy gray CGI set against the sort
of blown-out, artificially blue sky that you find in allergy medicine
commercials. There’s no expressive profile of the artist. No careful
font or lush coloration. Everything about the cover suggests an
afterthought, as if the label saw Mobley as some hobbyist from the burbs
who’d just learned the horn, and treated this not as another in a
sequence of solid sessions, but as a throwaway. In hindsight, this album
stands as a capstone to one of jazz’s great careers. Based on the
cover, it resembles a vanity project.
Why the title, Breakthrough!?
Break through to what, death? The other side? Judging from the album’s
low production values, the title could not have been suggesting that
Mobley was finally going to break through the barrier of popular
appreciation and earn him the recognition he deserved. Although Mobley
hadn’t “broken through” to fame, he had already made his name and left
his mark, had broken and rebroken if measured by his triumphs over
adversity. The title reads like an ignorant assessment of his career,
patronizing even, in the same way that his last Blue Note album, Thinking of Home,
inadvertently reads like cruel commentary on his physical frailty, a
way to point out the low sad station of his soul in old age, a curtain
call — which is another one of his album titles — as if God Himself were
calling him home. Fortunately, the music on Breakthrough!
isn’t as awful as the presentation. As Scott Yanow at AllMusic says,
“Hank … is in brilliant form, showing how much he had grown since his
earlier days.” His solo on “Summertime” is particularly emotive. After
it, he recorded nothing more.
Mobley
somehow managed to work briefly with pianist Duke Jordan in
Philadelphia in 1986, then died of pneumonia in May of that year. He
spent the last years of his life so far off the radar that even the
attentive New York Times failed to notice his passing and issue an obituary.
In
his heyday, musicians and listeners appreciated Mobley for his
songwriting and melodic playing, yet he was still overshadowed by more
assertive or inventive players. Noted critic Leonard Feather
inadvertently gave Mobley a demeaning tag that stayed with him his whole
life, when he called him “middleweight champion of the tenor
saxophone.” Feather meant to describe Mobley’s tone as lying somewhere
between cool jazz tenors like Stan Getz and more bold players such as
John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. Instead, the metaphor implied a
middling quality, a style unexceptional and middle-of-the-road, which
seems to have cast Mobley into his lifelong station as an “underrated”
tenor. Even as an underdog, he earned a cult following.
In Blue Note Records: The Biography, author Richard Cook says, “Mobley has always been a favorite among Blue Note collectors — perhaps the
musician in such circles. Though a journeyman rather than any kind of
groundbreaking voice, he was more influential than jazz historians have
often allowed. Many British musicians of the fifties and sixties would
seek out his elusive records. If a figure such as Sonny Rollins was too
overpowering a voice to be useful as an influence, the more diplomatic
Mobley could offer more practical material to work with.”
It’s
tempting to say he “should have been” more famous, but to use the
phrase is to face the fact that the last years of Mobley’s life conflict
with the jubilance and celebratory swagger of Soul Station. As a fan who listens to his music almost weekly, his words continue to haunt me, though not in the way they did initially.
He says he found it just as hard to think of “what should have been” as “what could be.” Could be
— that’s not the language of loss. It’s the language of hope. A person
gazing into the future and imagining its potential is someone who thinks
they’ll be around in the future, someone with at least some momentary
optimism. By the end of his career, he’d penned over eighty songs.
Maybe, at age forty-nine, he was still imagining what new songs he could
write, where his music could take him, what sort of tenor he still
could be. Granted, when he said “what could be” was “hard to think
about,” he might have meant that pessimistically: that when he thought
about the future, he thought about limitations, not about what he could
do so much as what he could no longer do, what could not
be. Then again, when he said “hard,” he might have meant “challenging”
rather than “painful,” implying that it stretched his imagination to
think about, rather than pained him. When he looked into his future,
what did he see? We’ll never know. His words will always carry a dual
meaning, just as his posture does on Soul Station.
Looking
at the album cover now, the way he raises his sax still seems
triumphant. The truth is, it’s impossible to tell. Was he raising it
when Francis Wolff snapped the photo, or was he lowering it? The horn
rests on the back of Mobley’s shoulder, frozen between ascent and
descent, action and rest, ambition and accomplishment. Behind that
euphoric smirk, he could be thinking, Man, this session is poppin’! Let’s keep it going; or he could be thinking, Alright, guys, let’s call it a day and head home.
The direction of movement will forever be unclear, though it’s tempting
to assign meaning when you consider the direction his life took after
the session. Then again, maybe he wasn’t raising or lowering his
saxophone at all. Maybe it’s just relaxing on his shoulder, going
neither up nor down, forever brassy and clear, and forever at rest.
This essay appears in my bookThis Is: Essays on Jazz.
Please purchase it through my publisher or indie bookstores, because
Amazon fucks over all its authors and bookstores. Thank you.
During
his long and productive career, tenor saxist Hank Mobley was termed
“The Middleweight Champ: of the tenor sax, due to his “round” sound
being halfway between the beefy Sonny Rollins/Dexter Gordon and the airy
Lester Young/Stan Getz tones. What this 8 disc limited edition set
shows is that not only was Mobley a master of creating his own unique
and personal sound, but he was one of the most gifted and underrated
composers/arrangers of his, or any, generation. While he never quite got
his due during his short 55 year life, his tenor sax playing from his
early days of the fledgling hard bop recordings up to this collection of
tracks (with only one session subsequently released) has slowly become
to be recognized as one of the most important forces of small group
jazz. This collection begins right after Mobley rode the wave of successful albums such as Workoutand Roll Call as well as his critically important stint with Miles Davis.He was still on a creative roll in 1963’s No Room For Squares with
Donald Byrd/tp, Herbie Hancock/p, Philly Joe Jones/dr, Andrew Hill/p
Lee Morgan/tp and Butch Warren/b. The two sessions for this album
produced a very advanced title track as well as a rollicking blues “Me
‘N’ You” with Morgan in a blistering mood. The 1965 followup The Turnaround is just as strong, but also
a major step forward with a different sound, with the likes of Freddie
Hubbard/tp, Billy Higgins/dr, Paul Chambears/b and proto-bopper Barry
Harris digging in on the clever modern Latin bopper “East of the
Village” and the stretched out blueser “Pat ‘N’ Chat.” Mobley’s tone
starts to get a bit darker here with an extra blues and grit, making the
title tune palpable in texture. The same year saw the release of Dippin’ back
with long-time friend Morgan, still with Higgins and now with Harold
Mabern/p and Larry Ridley/b with the team buoyant on the title track,
“Recorda Bossa Nova” and Mobley turning into a Texas Tenor on the rich
“I See Your Face Before Me.” Completing the trio of strong sessions that
year was A Caddy For Daddy, with the extra trombone of Curtis
Fuller adding dimension along with the harmonics of McCoy Tyner/p and
Bob Cranshaw/b along with chums Higgins and Morgan. The big leap came the following year with 1966’s ambitious A Slice Off The Top. Kind of a post-bop version of Birth of the Cool, this
fascinating session brings in his previous albums band with the added
tuba of Howard Johnson, Kiane Zawadi/s euphonium and James Spaulding’s
alto sax and flute. The charts by Mobley and Duke Pearson still sound
modern and enticing, with a gorgeous lilt to “Cute ‘N’ Pretty” (Mobley
did love those “N” song titles!) and the aggressive stampedes of “Hanks
Other Bag” and “A Touch Of Blue.” He kept this advancement and
experimentation of sounds alive on 1967’s Third Season (which
wasn’t released until 1980) features the guitar of Sonny Greenwich, who
gets some space on the gospel-drenched “Gimme That Feelin’” with Mobley
showing strong composing talents on “An Apertif” and “Don’t Cry, Just
Sigh.” From the same period, Straight No Filter, Far Away Lands and High Voltage
are amazingly consistent advanced hard bop releases, with impressive
Mobley compositions “Third Time Around” “The Hippity Hop” “No Argument”
and “No More Goodbyes” showing an apotheosis of the leader’s skills at
the pen. The only misstep is 1968’s Reach Out with George Benson on guitar that has the band trying to crossover into the pop-soul genre. He recovers in 1960 with The Flip with
a three horn front line of Mobley and Slide Hampton/tb with Dizzy
Reese/tp. Even better was the advanced trumpet of Woody Shaw teamed with
Cedar Walton/p and Eddie Diehl/g, which closed out his Blue Note era on
a strong note. The swan song included a clever “Suite” as well as
stretched out “Justine” along with the cooker “You Gotta Hit It.” Mobley actually didn’t record much after this all of this, as his
lung condition forced him to retire, finally resulting in his 1986 death
from pneumonia. This strong boxed set is an impressive legacy, proud to
stand with his sessions with Miles Davis. The biography/session notes
by Bob Blumenthal are exemplary and the studio photos by Francis Wolff
capture the attitude and aura of this apotheosis of modern jazz.
The Complete Hank Mobley Blue Note Sessions 1963-70
Mosaic Records Limited Edition Box Set Mosaic Records
Presents "The Complete Hank Mobley Blue Note Sessions 1963-70" - 8 CDs
with 74 tracks from the second great phase of Hank Mobley's career in
state-of-the-art sound. With all the developments in recent years with
analogue to digital converters and hi-res transfers that bring the CD to
almost the same quality as analogue LPs, we have returned to the
original analogue tapes of these Mobley master tapes in order to make
them available like never before.
Hank Mobley, as a member of the original Jazz Messengers, was
one of the founding fathers of the hard bop and the Blue Note sound.
From 1954 to 1961, he had fruitful relationships in the bands of Horace
Silver, Art Blakey, Max Roach and Miles Davis among others. He logged 13
sessions for Blue Note alone during that period which also highlighted
his considerable talents as a composer. But through all his recording
and touring activity, he remained a musician's musician , largely
overlooked by the jazz press and fans at large. His fluid
improvisations, harmonic brilliance, hypnotic lyricism and warm round
tone didn't get the attention that more extroverted tenormen like
Coltrane and Rollins could command.
Silent for most of 1962, Mobley's return in 1963 showed some
major changes in his approach. His rich warm, round sound remained, but
Hank pushed more air through his horn creating a herder, more
in-your-face tone. His rhythmic approach was punchier, although his
graceful ability to skate over and through the pulsating rhythm of
master rhythm sections remained. His solos did demonstrate pore economy
as he eliminated filigree and excess notes, thanks to lessons learned
sharing the stage with Miles Davis.
In 1963 Hank began, making sideman appearances on Donald Byrd's
"A New Perspective" and Herbie Hancock's "My Point Of View" This set
covers his own sessions from that year until his final session for the
label in 1970. Although most of this material was issued on CD at one
time or another in the '80s or '90s, all of this music is out of print.
Mosaic has returned to the original analogue tapes to create an
audiophile listening experience that take advantage of today's high
level of analogue to digital converters and to 24/96 transfers that
bring the listener a sound that is comparable with vinyl.
On March 7, 1963, he recorded an album's worth of material with
Donald Byrd, Herbie Hancock, Butch Warren and Philly Joe Jones, but
Alfred Lion didn't think that all the material was strong enough to
release. A second session in October with Lee Morgan, Andrew Hill, Joe
Ore and Philly Joe yielded another six tunes.
Blue Note selected the best four tunes from the October session
with two from the March session to create the album "No Room For
Squares," released in May 1964. Hank was back and there were major
changes to his approach. As Joe Goldberg wrote in the liner notes for
that album: "I hear a greater order, economy and authority in his work
so that it now becomes much easier to understand the respect his
colleagues have had for him all these years.
Mobley's talents as a composer continued to grow. He expanded
his language to include modality and samba rhythms. Even on the
obligatory funk tune to lead off an album like "The Turnaround" or "The
Flip," Hank took extra care to go beyond the 24-bar blues template to
create fascinating works with unique structures that engage the
soloists. His gift for melody and finding fresh harmonic chord sequence
always enriched his compositions.
On the 12 sessions included in is set between 1963-71, Mobley's
achievements, as an improviser, composer and leader are chronicled..
Seven of these sessions were released very soon after recording
including acknowledged masterpieces like "No Room For Squares," "The
Turnaround," and "Dippin'" as well as lesser known gems like "A Caddy
For Daddy" and "Hi Voltage."
The five albums of material that were issued much later rival
the originally issued material. "Straight No Filter" is an exquisite
half session with Lee Morgan, McCoy Tyner, Bob Cranshaw and Billy
Higgins. "Third Season" features a septet with adds guitarist Sonny
Greenwich and alto saxophonist/flutist James Spaulding to the standard
quintet instrumentation, which inspires some of Mobley's best writing.
The piece de resistance among the rescued gems is "A Slice Of The Top,"
with an octet that adds euphonium, tuba and alto sax & flute to
ensemble for some gorgeous writing on four Mobley originals and one
standard with orchestrations by Duke Pearson. His final Blue Note
session features the title tune "Thinking Of Home" as a three-part suite
that is some of the best of Hank's compositional work.
Mobley's musical kinship with Lee Morgan and Billy Higgins is a
unifying factor in this session and all three contribute to its most
magical moments. Other sidemen on these sessions include trumpeters
Freddie Hubbard, Donald Byrd,, Blue Mitchell and Woody Shaw, alto
saxophonists Jackie Mclean and James Spaulding, guitarists George Benson
and Sonny Greenwich, pianists Harold Mabern, Barry Harris, McCoy
Tyner, Cedar Walton, bassists Paul Chambers, Bob Cranshaw, John Ore and
Ron Carter and drummer Philly Joe Jones.
Henry "Hank" Mobley (July 7, 1930 – May 30, 1986) was an American hard bop and soul jazztenor saxophonist and composer.[1] Mobley was described by Leonard Feather as the "middleweight champion of the tenor saxophone", a metaphor used to describe his tone, that was neither as aggressive as John Coltrane nor as mellow as Stan Getz, and his style that was laid-back, subtle and melodic, especially in contrast with players like Sonny Rollins and Coltrane. The critic Stacia Proefrock claimed he is "one of the most underrated musicians of the bop era."[2]
Biography
Early life and education
Mobley was born in Eastman, Georgia, but was raised in Elizabeth, New Jersey, near Newark.[3]
When he was 16, an illness kept him in the house for several months.
His grandmother thought of buying a saxophone to help him occupy his
time, and it was then that Mobley began to play. He tried to enter a
music school in Newark, but could not, since he was not a resident, so
he instead studied music through books at home.
Career
At 19, he started to play with local bands and, months later, worked for the first time with musicians like Dizzy Gillespie and Max Roach.[4] He took part in one of the earliest hard bop sessions, alongside Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Doug Watkins and trumpeter Kenny Dorham. The results of these sessions were released as Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers. When The Jazz Messengers
split in 1956, Mobley continued on with pianist Silver for a short
time, although he did work again with Blakey some years later, when the
drummer appeared on Mobley's albums in the early 1960s.
In 1956, Mobley recorded the album Mobley's Message with Jackie McLean and Donald Byrd. AllMusic gave the album 4 stars out of 5, and users gave the album 4.5 out of 5 stars.[5] During the 1960s, he worked chiefly as a leader, recording over 20 albums for Blue Note Records between 1955 and 1970, including Soul Station (1960), generally considered to be his finest recording,[6] and Roll Call (1960). He performed with many of the other important hard bop players, such as Grant Green, Freddie Hubbard, Sonny Clark, Wynton Kelly and Philly Joe Jones, and formed a particularly productive partnership with trumpeter Lee Morgan.
Mobley is widely recognized as one of the great composers of originals
in the hard bop era, with interesting chord changes and room for
soloists to stretch out.
Mobley spent a brief time in 1961 with Miles Davis,[1] during the trumpeter's search for a replacement for John Coltrane. He is heard on the album Someday My Prince Will Come (alongside Coltrane, who returned for the recording of two tracks), and several live recordings (In Person: Live at the Blackhawk and At Carnegie Hall).
Retirement
Mobley was forced to retire in the mid-1970s, due to lung problems.[1]
He worked two engagements at the Angry Squire in New York City November
22 and 23, 1985, and January 11, 1986, in a quartet with Duke Jordan and guest singer Lodi Carr a few months before his death from pneumonia in 1986.[7]
Blumenthal, Bob (1999) [1960]. "A NEW LOOK AT SOUL STATION". Soul Station (The Rudy Van Gelder Edition) (Media notes). Hank Mobley. Blue Note Records/Capitol Records.
The late jazz critic Leonard Feather famously wrote in 1968 that Hank
Mobley was “the middleweight champion of the tenor saxophone.” Feather
added, “Hank is the middleweight champion because his sound, as he once
put it himself, is ‘not a big sound, not a small sound, just a round
sound’ and because, while fads and fancies change, he has remained for
some 15 years a consistently successful performer, working almost
exclusively as a sideman except on records, and retaining a firm, loyal
following.” The respect that was always due him consistently eluded Mobley during
his career. He has been consistently damned with faint praise by jazz
critics and historians. Despite the fact that he was a charter member of
one of hard bop’s most enduring bands and a skilled purveyor of tough,
soulful jazz as a leader with 25 Blue Note albums to his credit, he was
never accorded admission to the top echelon of players. A retiring
personality, long-term problems with drugs and health, and the lack of a
crossover hit like his peer and frequent collaborator Lee Morgan’s “The
Sidewinder” all relegated him to the second tier. But Mobley was far
more than a second-string player, and his best music – much of which
remains in print on CD – is deserving of a closer look.
Even Mobley’s biographer Derek Ansell has observed that very little is
known about the saxophonist’s personal life. He was born July 7, 1930,
in Eastman, Georgia, and raised in Elizabeth, New Jersey. His uncle,
mother, and grandmother all played the piano, and it became his first
instrument; he began playing the saxophone at 16, and modeled himself
after Lester Young, Don Byas, Dexter Gordon, and Sonny Stitt (who he
would replace in an important combo years later).
He got his start with the New Orleans-based bandleader Paul Gayten’s
R&B unit, and toured and recorded with the group from 1949 to 1951.
He joined some of his old Gayten cohorts in 1953, when he undertook a
brief stint as a replacement for Jimmy Hamilton in The Duke Ellington
Orchestra. That same year, he made his recording debut with premier bop
drummer Max Roach’s group on Debut; Roach wanted to recruit Mobley for a
new band he was organizing with trumpeter Clifford Brown, but the tenor
man missed the opportunity when he couldn’t be located.
However, after playing regularly with Dizzy Gillespie in 1954, Mobley,
then just 23, began working in New York at Minton’s Playhouse, the
onetime crucible of bebop, with a quartet led by pianist Horace Silver.
The group lineup solidified with the addition of trumpeter Kenny Dorham,
bassist Doug Watkins, and the volcanic drummer Art Blakey. Recording as
Horace Silver & The Jazz Messengers, this unit cut historic 1954-55
sessions that included Silver’s timeless hard bop compositions
“Doodlin’” and “The Preacher.” Mobley remained with The Jazz Messengers
through 1956, by which time Blakey had assumed leadership of the
previously cooperative band.
Mobley debuted as a leader with the LP Hank Mobley Quartet
(1955), cut for Blue Note with his Messengers colleagues Silver,
Watkins, and Blakey. Through ’56 he worked principally as a sideman,
recording with Dorham, Silver, trombonist J.J. Johnson, trumpeter Donald
Byrd, and (alongside tenor titan John Coltrane) pianist Elmo Hope. In
mid-1956 he began to play regularly as a leader or co-leader, heading up
sessions for Prestige and Savoy. Late that year he cut his second
session as a leader for Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff’s Blue Note,
continuing an association that would run until nearly the end of his
studio career; at around that same time, he cut a pair of hard-hitting
sessions for Savoy and Blue Note with the Philadelphia trumpet phenom
Lee Morgan, with whom he would be paired frequently for much of the next
decade.
Through 1960, Mobley recorded several rewarding albums in his own name
for Blue Note in quartet, quintet, and septet lineups, and guested with a
host of top-notch hard bop names, including Jimmy Smith, Johnny
Griffin, Sonny Clark, Curtis Fuller, Donald Byrd, and Freddie Hubbard.
His output slowed in 1959, thanks to an increasingly debilitating
addiction to heroin.
However, in 1960 and ’61, Mobley turned in what most observers call the
best studio performances of his career as a leader. A February 7, 1960,
date with Blakey and two members of Miles Davis’ band, pianist Wynton
Kelly and bassist Paul Chambers, resulted in the Blue Note album Soul Station
(1960). Jazz historian and producer Bob Blumenthal, who annotated the
CD re-release of the session, noted that this coolly played program of
funky bop “announced the second and most consistently satisfying phase
in Mobley’s career.” It was succeeded by the much-admired Roll Call (1961), which expanded the Soul Station band to a quintet with the addition of trumpeter Freddie Hubbard.
In early 1961, Mobley replaced Sonny Stitt (who had in turn replaced
Coltrane) in the saxophone chair of Miles Davis’ working quintet.
Working in Davis’ celebrated group was widely viewed as the most coveted
assignment in jazz, but Mobley’s tenure with the volatile trumpeter
would be short-lived. He appears on a handful of tracks on Someday My Prince Will Come
(1961) and on two indifferently received LPs recorded live at the
Blackhawk in San Francisco. He also took part in a New York big-band
Davis event conducted by Gil Evans, issued as Miles Davis at Carnegie Hall
(1961). Davis later wrote scathingly in his autobiography that he found
the music he made with Mobley boring, because the tenor player “didn’t
stimulate my imagination.”
In the midst of his time with Davis, he led a session with Kelly,
Chambers, stalwart Blue Note guitarist Grant Green, and Davis’ former
drummer Philly Joe Jones. Blue Note collected some of the tracks as the
highly prized Workout (1961); some unreleased music from the session was tardily issued as Another Workout (1985).
Mobley disappeared off the scene for an entire year, resurfacing in
early 1963 for a quintet session with trumpeter Donald Byrd and pianist
Herbie Hancock that would surface on three different Blue Note albums.
His sessionography would be discontinuous through the end of his
association with Blue Note. He was most rewardingly paired during this
time on a number of meat-and-potatoes hard bop sessions with Lee Morgan,
including his own No Room For Squares (1964), Dippin’ (1965), and A Caddy For Daddy (1966) and Morgan’s Cornbread (1965) and Charisma (1966).
Mobley’s recording career slowly petered out at the end of the ‘60s: he
made five sessions in 1967, just one in 1968, three (including a couple
of unexpected dates in Paris with avant garde saxophonist Archie Shepp)
in 1969. His final session for Blue Note in 1970 went unreleased; just
two studio appearances followed it. Ongoing drug problems and a pair of
lung operations virtually ended Mobley’s work as a musician in 1975; at
his last session in 1980, he cut a single track with pianist Tete
Montoliu. Mobley died nearly desitute in Philadelphia from pneumonia at the age
of 55 on May 30, 1986. He said in a 1979 interview, “It’s hard for me to
think of what could be and what should have been.”
The cover of The Complete Hank Mobley Blue Note Sessions 1963-70
Miles Davis, an exacting man, excised many of Hank Mobley’s solos
from the recordings they made at San Francisco’s Black Hawk club in
April 1961. My surmise is that Davis was disappointed Mobley wasn’t John
Coltrane, a lazy, beside-the-point determination that has kept Mobley
from his proper mantle. Even today the general belief seems to be that
players like Coltrane and Sonny Rollins were the “heavy thinkers” of
tenor sax in the early ’60s, while Mobley was a song-and-dance man; they
brought the brains, he brought the hard bop. Here is a boxed set that opens a door on reality: Mobley was a tenor
genius dogged by left-handed compliments, and if you think there was any
member of the tenor pantheon with whom he could not hang, you need a
better official hagiography. Having decamped from Davis’ band, Mobley
retooled his sound throughout 1962. Previously his attack had been of an
aerated variety, vaporous tendrils of notes enveloping you like that
pie smoke tempting hungry tramps from windowsills in early cartoons.
From 1963 on, Mobley wielded a harder edge, a whip of rhythm that
snapped and asserted, dispensing with the specter of blandishment. Even Mobley disciples know little of his work post-1965, which is one
reason why this box carries max value. In the autumn after the Summer
of Love, Mobley blazed with one of his best units, featuring Jackie
McLean on alto; Billy Higgins, his perfect partner in cerebral hoodoo,
on drums; and a kind of fiery, postbop brother in Blue Mitchell on
trumpet. They waxed 1968’s Hi Voltage, and note the sparking
kick (in thick, jute-like analog) of “Flirty Gerty,” which sounds like a
Larry Williams title and resounds as rhythm & blues from the far
side of Saturn. Mobley was earthen, but he could get futuristic. A Caddy for Daddy from 1965 ought to have been a kind of
brand-maker, the Mobley set that made inroads to pop culture. Its
prevailing groove is as danceable as any on Lee Morgan’s The Sidewinder,
which is apt, given the trumpeter’s presence. Morgan is clearly stoked
by how Mobley thinks, a constant theme of these disparate lineups. One
listens to Mobley, but one also listens to other players listening to
Mobley. Like Andrew Hill, who might seem more foil than ally, but their
harmonic interplay throughout October 1963’s No Room for Squares
date is akin to a stylistic dance-off between Stravinsky
(avant-gardist) and Handel (tunemaster), highlighting intoxicating
overlap. A summer 1969 session in Paris netted The Flip, with
Dizzy Reece on trumpet playing as if he were Mobley, and Mobley in turn
working his upper register with a trumpeter’s finesse. Throughout this set, Mobley’s solos seem a source of life; after a
given song ends, we retroactively consider its totality as an
overarching solo by the leader that just happens to have parts played by
different instruments. He can shift shapes, but you always know he’s
Mobley. Melville was that way, and Dylan, and Miles too. At his apex,
Mobley puts some more weight on that particular rarefied shelf.
Colin
Fleming writes fiction and nonfiction on myriad topics—art, film,
music, sports, literature—for a wide range of publications. He also
talks regularly on the radio for the likes of NPR and Downtown with Rich Kimball. His most recent book, Buried on the Beaches: Cape Stories for Hooked Hearts and Driftwood Souls (Tailwinds), was published in 2019, with an entry in Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series on Sam Cooke’s Live at the Harlem Square Club to follow in 2020. Find him on the web at colinfleminglit.com (where you’ll also find his unique online journal, the Many Moments More blog) and on Twitter @colinfleminglit. He lives in Boston and has contributed to JazzTimes since 2006.
Saxophonist Hank Mobley performs onstage on December 28, 1956 in New York.Photograph by Popsie Randolph / Michael Ochs Archives / Getty
The recent release, from Mosaic Records, of the eight-disk set “The Complete Hank Mobley Blue Note Sessions 1963-70” does more than make a significant batch of Mobley’s music compendiously available; it also tells a story of a great artist and of his times. Mobley, one of the central tenor saxophonists of modern jazz, died in 1986, at the age of fifty-five, more than a decade after he’d stopped regularly recording. The Mosaic set presents an often thrilling, often depressing vision of an artist whose work continued to advance even as his career was being thwarted by the practicalities of the music business. Though Mobley made these recordings between the ages of thirty-two and forty, many of them nonetheless inhabit the rarefied realm of late work—art that feels as if its creator already has a foot in the beyond.
His performances here, for all their energy, swing, melody, and charm, have a haunted sensibility, as if anticipating end times from however far away. They represent thirteen recording sessions that led to a dozen albums, only seven of which (and few of the best) were released soon after they were recorded—some were chopped up and mixed and matched—which denied Mobley his proper place in the music of his time and left him deeply frustrated. This release is a welcome chance to revisit Mobley’s achievement and honor his legacy. (The albums gathered in the set are also streaming onSpotify.)
Born in Georgia in 1930 and raised in New Jersey, Mobley got his first major gig in 1951, with the drummer Max Roach (and recorded with him), and came to prominence in the mid-fifties, in the company of the pianist Horace Silver and the drummer Art Blakey. He recorded with them for Blue Note, which became Mobley’s studio for almost all of his albums; his first as a leader came in 1955. He was a key part of the movement known as “hard bop, ” which infused the complexities ofCharlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Bud Powell with a strong dose of the fervent blues. It’s a movement of paradox: on the one hand, it led to music that held a grip on popular traditions and tastes; on the other, it cleared a new kind of musical space for soloists which pointed in the direction of bold and heady modernism for such musicians as Miles Davis and John Coltrane. As the Mosaic set shows, Mobley partook in both tendencies, often at the same time.
In the fifties and early sixties, Mobley’s sound was velvety and enveloping but frank and unmannered; his warm energy, lyrical phrasing, wry wit, and melodic heartiness drew richly on the blues. (He said that Parker counselled him in this direction.) He wasn’t as innovative as his contemporaries Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane, but he was as distinctive, his music as personal. He recorded copiously in the late fifties, as a leader and sideman, with many of the best musicians of the time, including Coltrane, Elmo Hope,Sonny Clark, Jackie McLean, andLee Morgan; he was also a regular member of Blakey’s band, the Jazz Messengers. Mobley became addicted to heroin in the late fifties and was incarcerated. He returned to the studio in 1960—to record what I consider his most accomplished album, “Soul Station”—and then, in 1961, joined Miles Davis’s band.
But the tenor saxophonist whom Mobley was replacing wasColtrane, whose overflowing originality both inspired Davis and overwhelmed him. Davis’s band of 1961 was just marking time, and Mobley left it frustrated, telling the jazz writer John Litweiler, in aremarkable 1973 interview, “When I left Miles, I was so tired of music, the whole world, man, I just went back to drugs.” Yet Davis also shifted and expanded Mobley’s musical ideas: “Miles pulled my coat to a few things. He suggested just straight ahead, hit every note on the head. . . . Every time you try to get an idea across, you don’t labor, play behind the beat, or anything like that; you hit it, and bring something out of it.” Mobley made some excellent recordings in 1963 that reflect this new approach.
From the very first of the recordings in the Mosaic set, issued on the album “No Room for Squares,” it’s apparent that Mobley’s tone and manner had changed. On “Up a Step,” his entrance is turbulent, and his sound is less suave, more abraded—there’s an element of struggle, as if he’s pushing against circumstances and even against himself. The band features the twenty-two-year-old Herbie Hancock on piano, whose comping pushes Mobley into probing, more troubled harmonies. (Mobley would return the favor twelve days later, as a sideman on Hancock’s second album, “My Point of View,” in the company of the brilliant seventeen-year-old drummer Tony Williams. A few weeks later, both Hancock and Williams would join Davis’s group, withhistory-making results.)
At this point, Mobley was recording with members of a new generation of musicians: while the trumpeter Morgan was his most usual partner in the front line, other frequent collaborators included the drummer Billy Higgins, the pianists Andrew Hill, McCoy Tyner (starting in December, 1965, just as Tyner was leaving Coltrane’s group), andCedar Walton, and the trumpeterWoody Shaw. On an October, 1963, session split between the Mobley albums “No Room for Squares” and “Straight No Filter,” Hill, too, offers percussive and dissonant accompaniments that urge Mobley into more fragmented and gruffer phrases. The influence of Coltrane is apparent in Mobley’s playing, in keening, long-held high notes and whirling, cascading, rapid-fire arpeggios that plummet toward rough-toned low notes.
Jazz was changing when Mobley was making music; so was the world. There weren’t any overt politics in Mobley’s music, not even in the titles of his tunes (whereas Clark Terry had one called “Serenade to a Bus Seat,” from 1957, Charles Mingus put out “Fables of Faubus,” in 1959, and Blakey recorded “The Freedom Rider,” in 1961), but the edge of assertiveness, of challenge and questioning, in his playing sounds like it’s part of a moment of fervor, of agitation, of progress, of change. On “Recado Bossa Nova,” from the 1965 album “Dippin’,” Mobley boldly leaps through rhythmic intricacies, exuberantly urged on by Higgins (whose taut and vigorous accompaniment is a crucial part of the boxed set). As fine as much of Mobley’s and his bandmates’ playing was on these recordings, he was aware of the relative routineness of most of his released albums from this period, telling Litweiler, “ ‘Reach Out,’ ‘Hi Voltage,’ ‘The Turnaround,’ ‘Caddy For Daddy,’ they’re pretty much much the same."
Unlike the music of Coltrane or Davis, Mobley’s was also more or less the same whether he was a sideman or a leader—because, for the most part, he didn’t reconceive the the function of groups, as they did. Throughout the period covered in the Mosaic set, Mobley made some great recordings on albums led by others, such as Morgan’s “Cornbread” andan exciting live set with Wynton Kelly. Yet the Mosaic set also marks a moment when the idiom of hard bop—the format of the Blakey band, with a dose of Davis’s and Coltrane’s ideas and styles, along with popular grafts of bossa nova and boogaloo—risked becoming formulaic, with performances distinguished by minor differences and the happenstance of expressive flourishes. (There’s nonetheless a special, pared-down sound, suggesting a vigorous yet melancholy quest, to his solos on the last of the Mosaic set’s recorded sessions, from the album “Thinking of Home,” released only in 1980.)
Yet Mobley, too, had far grander musical designs and concepts in mind—and even realized some of them, though they weren’t released at the time. He was an accomplished and prolific composer who wrote fifty-six of the seventy-one pieces featured in the Mosaic set. Mobley told Litweiler that he’d written a film score on a trip to Paris, for a movie “about the French-Algerian war.” He added, “Then I came back and recorded it for Blue Note, and they didn’t put it out.” His grandly ambitious 1966 session “A Slice of the Top” (“the best thing I ever did,” he told Litweiler), featuring an octet that he and the pianist Duke Pearson arranged into big-band-like densities and interjections—which he, along with the entire group of soloists, matched with mighty inspiration—wasn’t released until 1979. Mobley was bitter, telling Litweiler:
I'm tired of people saying, “Do a record date,” and you go through all the effort, you write something good that should be heard, and they sit on it. What’s the point of it all? I have about five records on the shelf—Blue Note had half the black musicians around New York City, and now the records are just lying around. What they do is just hold it and wait for you to die. I bet they put out all of Lee Morgan’s records now.
Morgan was murdered in 1972. Three days later, Mobley recorded another session, under Walton’s leadership, on another label. At times, Mobley sounds like he’s detached, distracted, or listless; but, on several tracks, he bursts through whatever was holding him back, and he offers a solo, often unaccompanied, on “Summertime” that’s one of the great recorded farewells. (It was followed only bythis single, brief coda, from 1980.) As the jazz critic Bob Blumenthal explains in the booklet to the Mosaic set, Mobley, who had lung cancer, became homeless in his final years and fell out of touch with other musicians. The Mosaic set should go far to illuminate his legacy, far too late; the playlist below includes some of my favorite recordings of his, from throughout his too-brief career.
Here’s another posting in our “Quest” series, a set of related pieces designed to shed more light on Jazz musicians whom the editorial staff JazzProfiles views as underrepresented in the Jazz literature.
The JazzProfiles Mobley Quest commenced on February 7, 2015 with a featured entitled Hank Mobley: So Talented, So Overlookedwhich offered perspectives on Hank by John B. Litweiler, Michael James, Kenny Mathieson, Bob Blumenthal, Ira Gitler, Leonard Feather and Richard Cook.
In addition to fronting his own quartet, Simon has won several awards for his music, including the tenor saxophone category of the British Jazz Awards (2011), Jazz Journal magazine, Critic's Choice CD of the Year (2009) and Rising Star in the BBC Jazz Awards (2007).
Simon has his own website which you can visit via this link.
I wrote the following article in 2004, after which it was submitted to, and published by, the English magazine Jazz Journal.
For this reprint, I have corrected a number of grammatical errors, as well as rewriting a few key passages which were poorly argued and/or badly constructed. The main body of the text – and its general sentiments – remain intact. I have, however, appended a new title to the piece – based upon a quote from Mobley himself, when interviewed about his tenure in the Davis quintet. Somehow, it seems a perfect title for an essay on music which, recorded at the very height of the impenetrable pretensions of certain quarters of the avant-garde, retained a readily comprehensible beauty.
I would also draw the readers attention to the fact that, at the time of writing, I had neither heard the Complete Davis recording from the Blackhawk, nor read Mobley's one and only DownBeat interview, conducted by John Litweiler in 1973. I would urge anyone reading this piece to seek both of these out. [Editor’s Note: The Litweiler Mobley Interview was published on these pages on April 6, 2018 and can be accessed by going here.]
This piece was also written prior to the publication of the only existing biography on Mobley, written by English journalist Derek Ansell. [Editor’s Note: The JazzProfiles review of Mr. Ansell’s book can be located by clicking on this link.]
Finally, I would like to extend my thanks to Steve Voce, for retaining a copy of the original piece – which I myself had lost – and to Steve Cerra for bringing it to a wider audience via this site.
Simon Spillett, August 2018
“Sonny Rollins, Jackie McLean, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, George Coleman, Wayne Shorter, Gary Bartz, Bill Evans, Bob Berg and Kenny Garrett are all saxophonists who justifiably owe their wider reputation and subsequent career success to their tenures in the various groups led by Miles Davis.
The trumpeter's midas-touch upon these performers, as with his legions of other sidemen, ensured him of his legendary talent as a 'star-maker', but there were occasionally other, less fortunate, graduates from his bands, some whose work elsewhere earned them great respect and admiration, who nevertheless failed to find acceptance with Davis.
Mobley’s stint as a Davis sideman begun in December 1960, when he replaced the departing Sonny Stitt at an engagement at The Cloister nightclub in Chicago. Stitt could never realistically have been expected to fit with the Davis group's ethic in those immediately post-Kind Of Blue years. An unreconstructed Bebopper, he was used to negotiating his way around the most complex substitutions appended to standards and blues themes and he was not at all happy with the modal areas that Davis was then exploring (later still he offered some pointed criticism of his predecessor Coltrane's methods). The short-lived Davis quintet with Stitt briefly toured Europe and the United Kingdom in autumn 1960, supported in this country [U.K.] by the Vic Ash-Harry Klein Jazz Five. Ash's recollections to this writer forty years later verify that Stitt was less than comfortable with his role for the tour.
Stitt, of course, was a star in his own right, and a player who probably felt inhibited by a return to mere sideman status. Hank Mobley, on the other hand, was a sideman supreme, whose career to date had been largely confined to stints in the bands of Dizzy Gillespie. Max Roach, Horace Silver and Art Blakey However, Mobley had also recorded prolifically as a leader, chiefly for Blue Note records, where he appeared for a time with a frequency that made him seem like that label's house tenorman.
On these 1950s sessions, and on those with his regular leaders, Mobley displayed a solid style, intelligently constructed from the language of Charlie Parker with an emphasis on a subtle lyricism which leavened the occasional heaviness of the Hard Bop contexts in which he found himself. The ubiquitous appeal of his style is evidenced by the fact that not only did Mobley influence contemporary tenors like Clifford Jordan, Tina Brooks and Junior Cook, but that it also informed the work of future notable tenormen as Wayne Shorter and Joe Henderson.
Unfortunately, this ubiquity – making him something of a 'musicians' musician' – led to Mobley frequently being taken for granted, both by critics and record buyers. A shy character, reluctant to push himself as bandleaders, he was all too easy to overlook, especially so during the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane and Johnny Griffin's work contained more attention grabbing dramatics.
The years that marked the 'breakthrough' of Coltrane (via the release of his Giant Steps album) and the mystifying retirement from performance by Rollins, 1960 was also the beginning of something of a purple patch for Mobley. His work on two Blue Note albums recorded that year, Soul Station (BLUE NOTE 84031) and Roll Call (BLUE NOTE 84058) is generally regarded as his best on record, high praise for a musician who'd already proven himself among the most consistently inventive tenormen of his generation whenever caught by a studio microphone.
These two 1960 Blue Note sessions, however, seemed to crystalise Mobley's approach, as if he'd suddenly hot upon the perfect balance of sound and ideas.Firstly, there is a greater depth and clarity to his tone, possibly attributed to his finally settling upon a metal Otto Link mouthpiece, which gives a far broader open quality when compared to the somewhat foggy articulation that had sometimes clouded his work when playing on an ebonite mouthpiece, which he'd done for a time in the middle-1950s.
Secondly, whilst Mobley's renewed vigour had already been discernible on his contributions to recordings done slightly earlier with Art Blakey (At The Jazz Corner of The World, taped April 1959) and Dizzy Reece, who once said that he thought Mobley made all the Avant-Garde tenor players sound 'like schoolboys' (Star Bright, taped November 1959), it was the context in which Hank now found himself that highlighted his new found focus. More specifically, it was his choice of sidemen.
Soul Station has Mobley together with his former boss Art Blakey and the Miles Davis rhythm duo of bassist Paul Chambers and pianist Wynton Kelly,both of whom had recorded under the saxophonists leadership two years previously, as well as on the Reece session mentioned above. It's widely acknowledged that both Kelly and Chambers were at their artistic peaks around this time, with the pianist in particular enlivening Soul Station, never more so than on his bright dancing trip through Mobley's signature composition This I Dig Of You. He's just as impressive on the he follow-up, Roll Call, recorded in November 1960 just prior to Mobley joining Davis, which adds Freddie Hubbard, then in young tyro form. Again, despite Hubbard and Blakey's ear-catching dynamism, it is Kelly and Chambers who are most truly in-gear with the leader on these recordings.
Mobley's playing throughout these sets, and indeed elsewhere on Blue Note during this vintage (sessions with Donald Byrd, Kenny Dorham and others), undoubtedly represents his creative apex, one reached without too much regard for hip musical fashions. In his liner notes to Soul Station, annotator Joe Goldberg picked up on how Mobley had by and large ignored the usual routes towards modern jazz 'stardom';
'Nor did [Mobley], in the manner of John Coltrane, come almost completely unknown under the teaching influence of the great Miles Davis (for how many men has that recently been the key to success).'
Ironically, this is exactly what happened next. Mobley may have been anything but a musical neophyte (as some had regarded Coltrane when he joined the trumpeter in 1955), but Davis's offer assured him of perhaps the one thing that had thus far eluded him; a high-profile forum in which to showcase his art. Not only was his new leader in demand in clubs throughout the US, he was also recording for a major record label, releasing albums whose sales figures (and market prominence) dwarfed almost anything on Blue Note, Savoy and Prestige, the three independent imprints for which Mobley had already recorded. This high-visibility ensured anyone who worked with Davis a welcome share of the limelight.
However, Davis's choice of Mobley reveals the dilemma at the heart of his music. Post-Coltrane, he had been experiencing difficulties securing a wholly satisfying front-line partner. Jimmy Heath had briefly subbed for the departed Coltrane, but parole problems limited his contribution to Davis's touring itinerary (although one can hardly imagine him being an especially effective long term foil at this time anyway). Coltrane himself had suggested Wayne Shorter, but the young tenorist got a typically curt response to a phone call to Davis offering his services and joined Art Blakey instead. Sonny Stitt's recruitment, as discussed earlier, was therefore little more than a final stop-gap measure, as Davis confirmed in his autobiography years later.
Mobley's availability, it is safe to assume, probably came to Davis's attention via Wynton Kelly and Paul Chambers. Undoubtedly, he already knew of the saxophonist's work, namechecking him as early as the 1955 interview on the sleeve of the Prestige Musings Of Miles LP (PRESTIGE 7007). As a potential sideman for the trumpeter, he certainly had the right credentials; each of his former band leaders - Blakey, Silver and Roach – had at one time or another been in Davis' various line-ups.
A potential problem lay in the fact that, unlike that of Coltrane when he joined Miles in 1955, Mobley's style was already basically set. It's interesting to look at the few joint appearances on record that Coltrane and Mobley made in the 1950s to bear this out. On the Tenor Conclave album (PRESTIGE 7074) made in late 1956 with fellow saxophonists Al Cohn and Zoot Sims, one can easily pick out who is who, but of Coltrane and Mobley, it is the latter, interestingly enough also the younger of the two, who seems most in control. Coltrane was then in his awkward, gawky period, when he was consolidating his arhythmic ideas with a marked theoretical bias. In other words, whereas Mobley's solos already sounded like a language unto themselves, Coltrane's still resembled those of someone attempting to formulate his thoughts into cogent statements.
By 1960, of course, he had it all together, and seemed to be a different player in everything but intensity, a super-technician who had found a way to marry passion with precision whose improvisations now sounded like granite-sculpted works of art. Mobley's playing at this same juncture was undoubtedly cut from the same material as it had been four years previously.
Such a disparity of approaches may have been the result of the ambitions of the respective leaders that Coltrane and Mobley worked for. Davis, for example, strove to continually outrun the status quo of the music; when bebop reigned, he was off into cool, when cool began to capture the wider public, he went in pursuit of modal music.
Mobley's chief employers, Silver and Blakey, however, were less obsessed with pushing the envelope and concerned themselves primarily with a joyful celebration of the current influences on East Coast Afro-American jazz: Gospel, Blues. Latin music, Rhythm and Blues and Bebop, coalesced under the banner of Hard Bop, the language of which few spoke as eloquently as Hank Mobley. Of Mobley's other bosses, only Max Roach was intent on going down another route, that of complex composition that contained the occaisonal hint of 'Third Stream' ambitions, something that may be the reason for Mobley's very brief time in Roach's late 1950s group, before ceding to the harder-hitting George Coleman (the association between Roach and Mobley was ultimately terminated finally when saxophonist was imprisoned on the first of his drug convictions in 1958.)
Mobley's on-record debut with Miles Davis occurred in March 1961, when he played on the three sessions that ultimately yielded the Someday My Prince Will Come album (COLUMBIA CL 1656). John Coltrane is also present on two of the tracks, the Spanish-suggesting modal exercise Teo, on which Mobley is absent, and the title tune, upon which he apparently dubbed in his solo on an existing take. Both tenormen are present on this track, although with this admission of post-production trickery, it is likely that neither man was actually in the studio when the other recorded his contribution. (An alternate take of Someday My Prince Will Come was initially issued on the box set Miles Davis - The CBS Years in 1988; CBS 463 246 - a performance which features only Mobley on tenor, as well as a less-than-happy sounding Davis ticking off Paul Chambers for playing the intro wrong.)
This was to be Miles and Trane's last recorded discourse, and it is all too easy to allow the exquisite beauty of Coltrane’s solo on the title cut to obscure Mobley's less stark and more reserved romanticism. He fares better on the two ballads, Old Folks and I Thought About You, the latter having an especially economic gem of a saxophone solo.
The more assertive drive of the two blues themes recorded at these dates. Pfrancin' (a.k.a. No Blues) and Blues No.2 (which remained unissued until the 1970s when it turned up on the odds-and-bits compilation Circle In The Round CBS 88471) is in marked contrast, with the latter performance including an impromptu sit-in by Philly Joe Jones.
Someday My Prince Will Come is without doubt a rewarding album, yet coming so hot on the heels of the breakthroughs of Kind Of Blue and relying so much on standards and blues material, it cannot fail to appear like a lesser achievement. Upon its release several critics expressed this exact sentiment, some quickly lining up Mobley as the root cause for the sudden musical flatlining, ignoring the fact that it was actually Davis who was in a creative lull and not his sidemen.
Indeed, the same week as Someday My Prince Will Come was completed, Mobley taped the third album in his great early 1960s Blue Note triptych, Workout (BLUE NOTE 84080), cut with Davis colleagues Kelly, Chambers and Philly Joe Jones and, as an added starter, guitarist Grant Green. A more hard-hilting example of Mobley in his prime is difficult to imagine, especially during his full-on solo on the title track, and even if the album ultimately fails to reach the heights of its two predecessors (the saxophonist's compositions seem a shade more functional this time around), it does provide a stellar example of the leaders ability to enrich a piece of musical fluff in The Best Things In Life Are Free, an old song dressed up in much the same two-beat, dance-friendly manner as Miles Davis had done on Bye, Bye Blackbird.
Sadly, Davis was beginning to share the critics' opinion of his tenorist, a noticeably rare example of the trumpeter and the jazz press concurring on anything. In his 1989 autobiography, he described to Quincy Troupe how: '...the music was starting to bore me because I didn't like what Hank Mobley was playing in the band. Playing with Hank just wasn't fun for me: he didn't stimulate my imagination'.
It needn't be pointed out that Davis had long looked to his front-line player to push his music in new directions – think Coltrane or Wayne Shorter - whereas Mobley operated along the lines of the quintessential sideman, expecting the leader to determine the way ahead.
If there were one criticism that held water, it was that Mobley was actually pushing the music backwards, towards the hackneyed practices of the classic Hard Bop quintet. Davis was also not a man to keep his feelings to himslef, and with such huge expectations on his shoulders, one would suspect that Mobley would have felt at best inappropriate, or at worst, inadequate. His response was to do what he did best, that is consolidate rather than innovate
This is demonstrated admirably on the two albums the Davis quintet recorded during their April 1961 residency at The Blackhawk in San Francisco. (Friday And Saturday Night at The Blackhawk COLUMBIA CS 8469/8470). The immediacy of a club setting helps the music considerably, with the aloof Davis coming across at times with an almost palpable sense of presence. However, the starsof these sets are Mobley and Kelly. Both men shine on Walkin', on the first disc, while Kelly is afforded the rare luxury of a feature number, an albeit brief exploration of Love I’ve Found You at the close of the record.
On the second 'Saturday' volume, Mobley's best moments come on Sonny Rollins’ Oleo and Monk's Well You Needn't. Elsewhere he steps into Coltrane's shoes on the modal waltz originally recorded at the March 1961 studio dates, this time titled Neo. (Two further tracks from these sessions were subsequently issued on Columbia various artists sampler albums.)
Another live recording followed a month later, this time taped at a concert organised by the African Research Foundation held at New York's Carnegie Hall; it marks the end of Mobley's recorded appearances with Miles. Again, two volumes resulted: the original Miles Davis At Carnegie Hall (COLUMBIA CS 8612) LP was issued the following year, with the archive retrieval Live Miles finally appearing in 1987 (CBS CK 40609).Both sets have since been issued as a “complete' edition. Both contain superlative Mobley.
So What is the only title from the concert to feature both the entire Davis quintet and the Gil Evans orchestra. Evans was present principally to conduct several selections from his collaborative albums with Miles, but for the occasion he had also scored pianist Bill Evans’ ruminating introduction from the original studio version of So What for the full orchestra. It’s dark, dramatic impact is all but sabotaged when Paul Chambers peels off the famous bass intro at nearly double the tempo of the original, a practice that would increase, literally, on Davis's live appearances in the decade to come.
So What had quickly become something of a theme song for Davis after its debut on Kind Of Blue, but the version from Carnegie Hall belongs to Mobley, who offers up a delightful solo, strong in linear construction, rich in ideas, and owing nothing to Coltrane's oft-quoted outing on the original. His ability to weave idiosyncratic ideas into the fabric of his improvisations is at its most astute here, as he quotes from both March of the Siamese Children and Charlie Parker's Ah-Leu-Cha. There are also phrases which would turn up later in the year as the main melodic motifs for Hank's composition Gettin' and Jettin', as well as a reference to further future modal themes from his pen, such as The Vamp and Chain Reaction. Another version of Walkin' on Live Miles, is second best to So What and another example of Mobley's inexhaustible stream of ideas on blues changes.
Despite the quality of his sidemen's performances on both the Carnegie HaJl and Blackhawk albums, it is easy to understand why Davis probably regarded them as makeweight contract fillers. At any rate, there were already signs of unrest within the band, with Wynton Kelly keen to strike out on his own.
Hank Mobley remained with Davis until around early 1962, his place in the bands front-line sometimes augmented by trombonist J. J. Johnson (photographs of this line-up exist: sadly recordings do not).His own assessment of the time he spent with the trumpeter sits rather awkwardly with Davis's own recollections. He told Del Shields in 1965; 'I worked two and a half years with Miles and we never had a harsh word, just a lot of understanding'. (Liner note to Mobley's album The Turnaround, BLUE NOTE 84186, 1965).
As far as the influence that Davis exerted on Mobley is concerned, Ira Gitler wrote; 'Hank thinks he developed quite a bit when he was with Miles Davis Quintet. "People are always talking about how he leaves the stand and all that" says Mobley, "but Miles is always listening, even when he's at the bar" (Liner note to Mobley's album A Caddy For Daddy, BLUE NOTE 84230, 1966)
The legacy of his time with Davis can be felt on Mobley's initial post-Davis Blue Note LP, No Room For Squares (BLUE NOTE 84149) recorded in 1963, which mixes sessions with either Donald Byrd and Lee Morgan on trumpet. The title number is very close to Davis's modal experiments, as is Up A Step, a Mobley theme featuring Byrd at his most Miles-like. Compositionally, Mobley was coming into his own during this period, as he began to write themes that ran counter to the normal structural methods of Hard Bop, often incorporating lengthy modal vamps and passages that emphasied scalar rather than chordal improvisation.
His playing immediately post-Miles had also began to change. For starters, his sound, his most famous calling card, began to toughen considerably, lending his lines a more visceral feel, although it never reached the diamond-hardness of a Stitt, or the cello-richness of Rollins. His phrasing, always lithe and supple, began to break down into terse nagging fragments, interspersed with runs up to the high register. There was also now greater emphasis on using the bottom of the horn, and extensive use of the device of false-lingered rhythms played out on a single note to build up a certain tautological tension.
These facets can be found in all of Mobley's work up until his final recordings in the early 1970s. They can be traced equally to the self-acknowledged influence of his friend John Coltrane, but the simple fact is that they were not present in Mobley's playing before he joined Davis. In that, Davis's influence can be said to have brought about the gradual deconstruction of Mobley's already formed style. Even if he scarcely got Miles's approval, the trumpeter's influence loomed large on Mobley for the remainder of his career; even on his final Blue Note date, Thinkin' Of Home from 1970 (BLUE NOTE 84367) there is a composition, Justine that sounds like something that Davis could have dreamed up at any point between Someday My Prince Will Come and Miles In The Sky. In this, parallels can be drawn between Mobley and his ultimate Davis replacement, Wayne Shorter, another Newark-based player, who had acknoweldged how key and influence Mobley was early on in his career. There is even a case for this influence working in reverse; 1969's The Flip (BLUE: NOTE 84329) has Mobley sounding uncannily like the Shorter of the Adam's Apple/Schizophrenia period.
Unlike Shorter, who shot to super-stardom with Weather Report in the early 1970s, Mobley's life took increasingly desperate and tragic turns in the years ahead. He saw out the 1960s in Europe, where he had fled to find work when appreciation of his talent at home was on the wane. There he recorded with players as diverse as Dizzy Reece and Archie Shepp, another tenorist for whom Miles Davis had little regard. Returning to the US in 1970, he made his last recording two years later in a quintet co-led with pianist Cedar Walton. Then came interminable periods of scuffling from city to city, from Chicago to Philadelphia and elsewhere. There were problems with respiratory diseases, an operation to remove a lung, and the theft of his only fully serviceable tenor. In the absence of a regular gig he could not afford a new horn and he tried to make a living occasionally playing alto or baritone saxes, as well as, continuing to compose many new themes. But life was futile. There was even a time spent living as a vagrant to add to these injustices.
A comeback attempt in the 1980's was foiled by an illness that finally transpired to be pneumonia, and his final recording - a single track taped with Catalonian pianist Tete Montoliu in 1980 – makes for heartbreaking listening.
Hank Mobley died in Philadelphia on May 30, 1986, aged 55, ironically at the very same time as his classic Blue Note recordings were beginning to reappear on CD. Reissued, these albums were greeted with far more critical generosity than they'd been afforded first time around, and, quite suddenly, Mobley was elevated posthumously to go-to-figure status for younger players wanting to learn the ground rules of bop. His work with Davis too found itself reappraised, helping to overturn years of neglect. That is had suffered this fate was easy to understand: contained on albums which represent the period in which Davis was marking time between Kind Of Blue and the looser, more open music of the band featuring Herbie Hancock and Tony Williams, it stood in the shadows of John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter, two of Davis's most ideal partners. Its quality is nonetheless first class; not perhaps equal in innovation terms to either that of Coltrane or Shorter, but just different. Indeed, Mobley's contributions to these recordings are firmly within his own quietly modest musical ambitions, and consequently should please anyone who has come to love and admire the work of this sbtle, undersung voice of the tenor saxophone."
Tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley wasn’t the pioneer that some of his peers were, but his smoothly toned, concise style earned lots of praise over the years. While Mobley served well as an employee of Miles Davis (my first exposure to him), I think Miles’ quintets worked best with a more exploratory saxophonist; on the other hand, Mobley’s solos hit me like a breath of fresh air on Johnny Griffin’s triple-tenor Blowin’ Session album, where Griffin and John Coltrane fire the heavy ordnance. Plentiful sideman gigs aside, I had to wait until spinning a few of his own albums to really appreciate Mobley’s voice.
Soul Station
Feb. 1960 / Blue Note RVG
I would assume this record makes many a shortlist of definitive Blue
Notes, given the enticing material and swinging foundations from Wynton
Kelly, Paul Chambers, and Art Blakey that inspire exemplary tenor sax
from Hank Mobley. His phrasing garnishes mainstream grammar with melodic
poise that at its best seems premeditated to perfection, and since
Mobley’s the only horn, Soul Station shines plenty of wattage on his subtleties.
First up is a cheerful version of Irving Berlin’s “Remember” that
features an outstanding Mobley solo. Perfection in jazz (as I referred
to above) is usually inaccurate word choice, but when improv is so well
executed as to invent a new song within an existing one, what other
description suffices? The original “This I Dig of You” has a catchy
melody and vamp that switches to steady-time solos; Kelly scouts first
to clear a path for Mobley, whose ebullience extends to Bud Powell’s
“Wail”, and Blakey gets a quick spot. “Dig Dis” (as opposed to “Dis
Here” or “Dat Dere” – ah, Blue Note ebonics) hits a standard 12-bar
blues with Mobley alternately yearning and tinkering.
In “Split Feelins”, the suggestive piano chord and Latin vamp directly
anticipate Joe Henderson’s “Mamacita” – later to appear on Kenny
Dorham’s Trompeta Toccata – though “Split Feelins” soon reveals
itself a straight swinger at heart. The title track delivers on its
pledge of soul yet the performance comes off a bit monotonous. The
closing standard “If I Should Lose You”, while decently done, is less
forceful than the version on Roy Haynes’ 1962 LP Out of the Afternoon,
despite the pointlessness of comparing Roland Kirk and Hank Mobley – or
Kirk with anyone, for that matter. In any case, this is an excellent
album with staying power.
Roll Call
Nov. 1960 / Blue Note RVG
Roll Call adds trumpeter Freddie Hubbard to the Soul Station
lineup of Mobley, Kelly, Chambers, and Blakey and is generally a more
aggressive record. The leader puts forth many confident moments, and I
would rate Hubbard’s showing as one of his best as a hired gun. Also,
Wynton Kelly happens to be more amenable to me in Mobley’s sessions than
he is under Miles Davis’ name, maybe because different drummers are
prompting him. I also credit the varying timbres of different jazz
groups, where an instrumental voice shines more or less depending on its
surroundings – not an uncommon phenomenon.
The title track is fit to satisfy any hardbop jones (including lengthy
horn statements and a Blakey solo that seems freer than usual for him)
and so is “The Breakdown”, a taut blues with Mobley quoting “Bemsha
Swing” during the drum exchanges. There’s further fuel in “My Groove
Your Move”, “The More I See You”, and the catchy “Take Your Pick”. The
stop-time testimonies in “A Baptist Beat” prove once again that explicit
‘gospel’ jazz is often a stilted mismatch, but the track loosens up
over the long haul. (The alternate take is worth a listen too, though
I’m not waiting for a Catholic Conga, Presbyterian Passacaglia, or
Methodist Montuno anytime soon.) For me, the quartet format of Soul Station is more conducive to studying Mobley’s style, though he’s equally on form here, as is everyone else.
Workout
Mar. 1961 / Blue Note RVG
A fruitful workout indeed for Mobley, guitarist Grant Green, Wynton
Kelly, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones at the drums. The assertive
title piece gets the album down to business right away, Mobley lacing
numerous motifs into his solo and Green white-knuckling the edge of
Jones’ drumming, which gives the soloist a milliseconds-wide window of
swinging in the strongest possible manner. A proper analysis of the
32-bar “Uh Huh” would note how the first three bars deke the listener
into a 12-bar frame of mind while the remaining measures deviate from
those expectations. I love the uncanny blend of Mobley and Green’s tones
in the theme, and when Philly Joe locks into his rim-click groove
beneath the solos, everything’s golden. “Smokin” follows as a true
blues, uptempo with energetic trades at the end.
As if the first three cuts didn’t lift enough spirits, “The Best Things
in Life Are Free” makes a joyous turn to outside material. Mobley cites
“Four” during his solo, and believe me, I’ve refrained from naming
several other clever quotes on his albums that the liner essays don’t.
The relaxed blues “Greasin’ Easy” finishes the original program, and the
CD appends “Three Coins in a Fountain”. As a blowing session with hooks
galore, I give Workout high marks, and I’ll even accept Mobley’s occasionally squeaky reed as giving his sax a random sonic edge here.
Another Workout
Dec. 1961 / Blue Note RVG
More than a few Blue Note reels had to wait a decade or two before being released; Another Workout
first appeared in the mid-1980s and then received RVG CD treatment in
the following century. After reading much acclaim for this date, I added
it to my Mobley curriculum, but it doesn’t live up to my expectations.
The playing is fine, the sound a little odd, but mainly, the album
doesn’t carry the weight of the others Hank recorded around this time.
One sure highlight is Mobley’s lovely reading of “I Should Care”, and
“Hello Young Lovers” nods to Miles Davis’ Prestige-era approach to
standards – perhaps appropriate since Mr. PC and Jones are on hand
again. But “Out of Joe’s Bag”, despite Philly’s lively drumming, comes
across somewhat trite, and “Hank’s Other Soul” turns a promising theme
into an unmemorable morass. Hank scoots nicely though the modal “Gettin
and Jettin” but the track pales next to its remake as “Up a Step” on No Room for Squares.
This session was certainly worth pulling from the vaults and maybe it’s
as special as other listeners attest, but I don’t hear that
wonderfulness in full.
No Room For Squares
Mar. and Oct. 1963 / Blue Note RVG
I’d owned Soul Station beforehand, but this was the first Mobley
album that really hooked me; a couple of the tracks caught my ear in a
record store (long live brick and mortar) and I liked it even more on
further listens. I wouldn’t say it’s better than the above titles, just
slightly more modern in scope, and it features an array of players from
two different sessions – Lee Morgan/Donald Byrd (trumpet), Andrew
Hill/Herbie Hancock (piano), John Ore/Butch Warren (bass), and Philly
Joe Jones (drums).
The modal tunes “Up a Step” and “No Room for Squares” both swing
infectiously with Mobley in sharp form. His tenure with Miles Davis
surely helped spark these numbers, and notice how Hank teases so much
out of just a handful of pitches in the first bars of his “Squares”
solo. He’s just as hip when surfing standard chord changes in “Three Way
Split” and “Old World, New Imports”, two upbeat tunes in which Philly
Joe also distinguishes himself. The ballad feature is “Carolyn”, a
pretty if not especially deep Morgan composition with nice sax
counterlines. The album makes room for one square in Morgan’s “Me ‘n
You”, a corny boogaloo that doesn’t match the tone of the other pieces.
Nonetheless, “Three Way Split”, “Up a Step”, and “No Room for Squares”
earn the disc an enthusiastic endorsement.
THE MUSIC OF HANK MOBLEY: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH HANK MOBLEY:
Kofi Natambu, editor of and contributor to Sound Projections, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He has written extensively about music as a critic and historian for many publications, including the Black Scholar, Downbeat, Solid Ground: A New World Journal, Detroit Metro Times, KONCH, the Panopticon Review,Black Renaissance Noire, the Village Voice, the City Sun (NYC), the Poetry Project Newsletter (NYC), and the African American Review. He is the author of a biography Malcolm X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: The Melody Never Stops (Past Tents Press) and Intervals (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of Solid Ground: A New World Journal, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology Nostalgia for the Present (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
When the eminent jazz critic Leonard Feather described Hank Mobley
(1930-1986) as “the middleweight champion of the tenor saxophone”, it
was intended as a compliment. He aimed to differentiate the Georgia-born
saxophonist’s mellower, softer sound from harder-hitting heavyweights
such as John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins.
But for those who came to appreciate Mobley’s unique voice as a hard
bop-era tenor player, it seemed as if Feather’s words damned the
saxophonist with faint praise. Indeed, the critic’s boxing analogy stuck
and became something of a curse. After that, Mobley was typecast,
perennially labelled a second-tier musician, despite the evidence of Blue Note albums like 1960’s Soul Station (his finest moment on record) and the earlier and more obscure Poppin’, which deserves a far wider audience than it has.
