Hank Mobley

[DrJ]

I am big on Mobley. It's funny because when I first really got into jazz full scale, I listened almost exclusively to Blue Note once I had discovered my first few classic era recordings...and Mobley was just so ubiquitous, in his own dates and with others, that I immediately assumed, "well, this is what jazz tenor sounds like." It really wasn't until I began listening beyond that sphere, to jazz across all eras and on multiple labels, that I began to appreciate how unique Mobley's sound and approach really were.

He's pretty much INSTANTLY identifiable...I've never once been crossed up in trying to figure out whether it was Hank or someone else playing, which I can't say about many musicians period. The identity was forged on multiple levels. There's that great resonant but hollow, heavy but light tone...man, it's just unmistakeable. As Lon rightly points out, there's lots of Pres there, and yet Hank sounds not even remotely like the whole school of folks heavily influenced by Pres (Getz, Cohn, Sims, etc), so it's more than that. Probably it's the bluesy underpinnings, the SOUL.

Then there's the phrasing...and in particular, as Jim mentions, his amazing facility with rhythm. When I first started listening to Hank, there were times I thought he was stumbling or getting behind the beat due to technical limitations, and as my ear has become more sophisticated, I realize it's all by design...you've heard of microtonality, well, Hank was doing micrometerality! Truly remarkable how subtly he was able to subdivide the beat, even making someone as legendary in that realm as Joe Henderson look like a beginner!

Put those things together and then add a huge dose of humility and supreme lack of unnecessary fuss and bluster (even at its most heated, there is at the core an almost Zen-like calmness in Mobley's best playing - which I find in very few other "hard bop" era musicians' work, maybe the best of Sonny Clark's), and you have the recipe for a timeless style and, well, hipness...funny how much that word is associated with Mobley these days!

[connoisseur series500]

I can't play music so it is difficult for me to describe why I like or dislike a certain musician.

I have always liked Hank Mobley, and I've got most of his stuff. He is not a dazzling soloist, but his music and compositions are always of high quality to me. He seems to work very well with his sidemen. To me, Hank Mobley is Hardbop as much as Lee Morgan or Horace Silver or Art Blakey is. I love his stuff.

[John Tapscott]

Mobley, as simplistic as it sounds, makes me feel good. I don't think I've ever really gotten excited by one of his solos, but I do nod my head, and sometimes even find myself saying aloud: yeah.

I don't think it's simplistic at all. I agree. Hank's playing always uplifts my spirit. I can't quite put my finger on why, but to me there's a certain balance and thoughtfulness in his playing (and his composing) which is most satisfying to mind and soul. Hank had a real gift. He doesn't always grab you like Rollins or even Henderson, but after his solos end, you know you've been listening to something very special. I'm not sure he was the most consistent soloist, and on certain sessions where he's a sideman he's a bit overshadowed a bit by the others. I generally prefer his playing on his own dates. "Roll Call" is a desert island disc for me. Two other favorites include the quartet session for the Mosaic set plus a seldom mentioned disc called Far Away Lands. This is a heavy Hank recording. Darn near wore out the cassette from constant listening in my car some years ago. Hank is probably my overall favorite tenor player.

[brownie]

Hank Mobley is one of those unassuming jazz musicians who produced so much inspired

music. Got into him soon after I became interested in jazz in the '50s. He was on one of

my favorite early BN album 'The Jazz Messengers at Cafe Bohemia'. Loved his warm tone

and the way he phrased his solos: going straight to the essential, ideas flowing smoothly,

no waste of notes. You really had to LISTEN to what he was playing to get into the

originality of his solos.

Never managed to catch him live unfortunately but he showed up in the summer of 1969

when Byg (run by thieves who grabbed - or tried to grab - every musicians available

in that glorious Paris summer) was recording a lot of albums in a studio on the eastern

fringe of Paris.

I was attending some of those sessions since I knew many of the musicians who were

involved. Mobley was present at one of Archie Shepp's dates (along with Grachan

Moncur). He was not really in top form at the time. I talked briefly with him during

the session. He was very disillusioned by then (he had a lot of reasons to be).

He had come to Europe to get more playing oppotunities but that failed.

Sad life, great player.

[Soul Stream]

John Patton used to play some with Mobley. Patton once said..."When Hank was on the stand, you didn't have to worry about NOTHIN'!" I think that pretty much sums it up.

[vibes]

I mentioned this in the other "confessional" thread, but I've always had a bit of trouble getting into Hank Mobley. I think it's partially because of his tone - it's just not heavy enough for me. People have mentioned that his tone is in the Lester Young vein, and maybe that's it - I don't care for Lester Young at all, like his music even less than Hank Mobley's. I have a few Hank Mobley sessions, including those on the Mosaic set, but I don't listen to them often. "Soul Station," "Roll Call," and "No Room For Squares" are probably my favorite Mobley sessions. After reading this thread last night, I went and listened to "Roll Call" again, and I think it's the sidemen that stand out more on the albums than Hank himself. I found myself listening more for Freddie Hubbard.

[David Ayers]

other favorites include {snip snip snip} a seldom mentioned disc called Far Away Lands. This is a heavy Hank recording. Darn near wore out the cassette from constant listening in my car some years ago. Hank is probably my overall favorite tenor player.

Well I am glad you find this one as pleasurable as I do! I have mentioned this as a favorite of mine before. It doesn't get much attention though, does it?

[Eric]

I love this one - dug it out of the stacks in the basement last night after reading this thread and listened to it. I love the tunes here - and the playing is fun too. Maybe that is it for Hank and my ears - he is just fun to listen to. Fun if you want to listen closely and think or fun if you just want to groove. Does not try to bust your balls with hardcore playing but is hardly simple or smooth. Just good jazz ... and oh so hip

Eric

[shawn·m]

I’m a big Mobley fan. I love the little odd figures and phrases he peppers his solos with and the way he makes them somehow fit. I don’t think Mobley was a terribly flamboyant musician —he tended to stay in the middle register of his horn— but as others have mentioned, there’s lots to admire.

[Late]

Potato, isn't that Hank snuck in there in the background of your avatar? That session stands out to me as representative of Hank's generosity. Not only does it feature the Blue Note debuts of three artists (Porter, Hardman, Clark), but Hank also lets Porter take some writing honors. (So why didn't Alfred give Porter at least a single-album contract after this set? It makes perfect sense to me!)

John, I have Far Away Lands on cassette too! I do find this one quite a lot of fun. This thread has seemed to bring out the eloquence in the board. Nice reading! (Especially nice after reading something like: "Lorraine Hansberry wrote Raisins in Sun. It is a complex play. There are levels of complexity that you don't see the deeper meaning of until you look at them.")

Edited June 13, 2003 by Late

[shawn·m]

Good eyes, Late. I can’t begin to imagine why Lion didn’t offer Shafi Hadi more recording opportunities. Then again, considering the way Hadi seemingly turned his back on jazz, maybe he did?

[kenny weir]

The reason I have accrued so many Mobley recordings - only five under his leadership, but dozens and dozens as a sideman - is because of the context. They're all sessions of the type I really dig.

However, I've realised there comes a point where you start wanting to hear specifically Mobley. It was for that reason I was looking forward to the new Miles/Blackhawk reissues, and in that regard I've not been disappointed.

Never having heard any of this music before, I can only chuckle about all the crapola I've read over the years about Mobley in the Davis band. Seems like it's been a crime for him to be NOT Coltrane.

[EBrew]

I became familiar with Hank through my love for Lee Morgan. I picked up any and every CD I could with Lee on it and he recorded some great albums with Hank on Blue Note. He is a solid player with a soulful sound, he writes some great heads and as someone else stated he is a master of the vocabulary. On a hard bop date he would be the man I would search out to play... unless I could get Wayne Shorter. I recently picked up Miles Live at the Blackhawk Complete and Hank blew me away. I love live recordings because they give you a better track to what the player is really about. There is that danger of catching them on a really bad night and being completely turned off.

It is difficult to sell other people on players that they don't connect to. This thread however is a way to make a few folks go back and listen to see if they hear the things that others were able to find. Maybe a new angle to approach an artist's music. There are more than a few CDs that I revisited after hearing someone else talk about things that I missed.

That being said - SoulStation would have been perfect if he had gotten a trumpet player for that date. Lee or Freddie weren't available??? B)

[Larry Kart]

I like the term "micrometrically." Here are the at times too fancy liner notes I wrote for the 1982 LP reissue of Mobley's '57 album "Poppin.'" The bit about Nietzsche commenting on Mobley’s style was one of the too fancy parts. While Nietzsche did say those things, in his essay "Contra-Wagner," he was referring to the music of Georges Bizet. Also, I'd like to take back some of the semi-snotty remarks below about Art Farmer and Pepper Adams. You're only young once. Finally, Dexter Gordon on Mobley: "Ah, yes, the Hankenstein -- he was s-o-o-o-o-o hip."

The Notes:

In the mid-1950s the Blue Note label yielded momentarily to supersalesmanship, releasing such albums as The Amazing Bud Powell, The Magnificent Thad Jones, and The Incredible Jimmy Smith. That trend was dormant by the time Hank Mobley became a Blue Note regular and unfortunately so--a record titled The Enigmatic Hank Mobley would have been a natural. "To speak darkly, hence in riddles" is the root meaning of the Greek word from which "enigma" derives; and no player, with the possible exception of pianist Elmo Hope, has created a more melancholically quizzical musical universe than Mobley, one in which tab A is calmly inserted in slot D.

Though he was influenced by Sonny Stitt and, perhaps, Lucky Thompson, Mobley has proceeded down his own path with a rare singlemindedness, relatively untouched by the stylistic upheavals that marked the work of his major contemporaries, Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane. In the words of Friederich Nietzsche, not previously known for his interest in jazz, Mobley’s music is "without grimaces, without counterfeit, without the lie of the great style. It treats the listener as intelligent, as if he himself were a musician. I actually bury my ears under this music to hear its causes." And that is the enigma of Mobley’s art: In order to hear its causes, the listener must bury his ears under it. In a typical Mobley solo there is no drama external to the developing line and very little sense of "profile" the quality that enables one to "read" a musical discourse as it unfolds. Not that high-profile players--Rollins and Dexter Gordon, for example--are unsubtle. But to understand Mobley the listener does have to come to terms with complexities that seem designed to resist resolution.

First there is his tone. Always a bit lighter than that of most tenormen who worked in hard bop contexts, it was, when this album was made, a sound of feline obliqueness--as soft, at times, as Stan Getz’s but blue-gray, like a perpetually impending rain cloud. Or to put it another way, Mobley, in his choice of timbres, resembles a visual artist who makes use of chalk or watercolor to create designs that cry out for an etching tool. Harmonically and rhythmically, he could also seem at odds with himself. For proof that Mobley has a superb ear, one need listen only to his solo here on "Tune Up." The apparently simple but tricky changes pretty much defeat Art Farmer and Pepper Adams; but Mobley glides through them easily, creating a line that breathes when he wants it to, not when the harmonic pattern says "stop." And yet no matter how novel his harmonic choices were--at this time he surely was as adventurous as Coltrane--Mobley’s music lacks the experimental fervor that would lead Coltrane into modality and beyond. Mobley’s decisions were always ad hoc; and from solo to solo, or even within a chorus, he could shift from the daring to the sober. What will serve at the moment is the hallmark of his style; and thus, though he is always himself, he has, in the normal sense hardly any style at all.

Even more paradoxical is Mobley’s sense of rhythm. His melodies float across bar lines with a freedom that recalls Lester Young and Charlie Parker; and he accents on weak beats so often (creating the effect known in verse as the "feminine ending") that his solos seem at first to have been devised so as to baffle even their maker. Of course, that’s not the case, but even though he has all the skills of a great improviser, Mobley simply refuses to perform the final act of integration; he will not sum up his harmonic, rhythmic, and timbral virtues and allow any one element to dominate for long. In that sense he is literally a pioneer, a man whose innate restlessness never permits him to plant a flag and say "here I stand." Thus, to speak of a mature or immature Hank Mobley would be inappropriate. Once certain technical problems were worked out--say, by 1955--he was capable of producing striking music on any given day. New depths were discovered in the 1960s and the triumphs came more frequently; but in late 1957, when Poppin’ was recorded, he was as likely as ever to be on form.

Much depended on his surroundings, and the band he works with here has some special virtues. The rhythm section is one of the great hard-bop trios, possessing secrets of swing that now seem beyond recall. Philly Joe Jones and Paul Chambers, partners, of course, in the Miles Davis Quintet, shared a unique conception of where "one" is--just a hair behind the beat but rigidly so, with the result that the time has a stiff-legged, compulsive quality. The beat doesn’t flow but jerks forward in a series of spasmodic leaps, creating a climate of nervous intensity that was peculiar to the era. Either the soloist jumps or he is fried to a crisp on the spot. As a leavening element there was Sonny Clark, equally intense, but more generous and forgiving in his patterns of accompaniment. He leads the soloists with a grace that recalls Count Basie; and his own lines, with their heartbreakingly pure lyricism, make him the hard bop equivalent of Duke Jordan.

The ensemble sound of the band, a relatively uncommon collection of timbres heard elsewhere on Coltrane’s and Johnny Griffin’s first dates under their own names, gives the album a distinctive, ominous flavor; but this is essentially a blowing date. Art Farmer, for my taste, never played as well as he did during this period, perhaps because the hard bop style was at war with his deadening sense of neatness. Possessing a musical mind of dandaical suavity coupled with the soul of a librarian, Farmer usually sounded too nice to be true. But this rhythm section puts an edge on his style (as it did a few months later on Clark’s Cool Struttin’), and I know of no more satisfying Farmer solo than the one preserved here on "Getting Into Something," where he teases motifs with a wit that almost turns nasty.

Adams’ problem has always been how to give his lines some sense of overall design, and too often the weight of his huge tone hurtles him forward faster than he can think. But when the changes and the tempo lie right for him, Adams can put it all together; and here he does so twice, finding a stomping groove on "Getting Into Something" and bringing off an ex-hilarating doubletime passage on "East of Brooklyn."

As for the leader, rather than describing each of his solos, it might be useful to focus first on a small unit and then on a larger one. On the title track, Mobley’s second eight-bar exchange with Jones is one of the tenorman’s perfect microcosms and an example of how prodigal his inventiveness could be. A remark-able series of ideas, mostly rhythmic ones, are produced (one might almost say squandered) in approximately nine seconds. Both the relation of his accented notes to the beat and the overall pattern they form are dazzlingly oblique; and the final whiplike descent is typically paradoxical, the tone becoming softer and more dusty as the rhythmic content increases in urgency. In effect we are hearing a soloist and a rhythm player exchange roles, as Mobley turns his tenor saxophone into a drum.

On "East of Brooklyn" Mobley gives us one of his macrocosms, a masterpiece of lyrical construction that stands along-side the solo he played on "Nica’s Dream" with the Jazz Messengers in 1956. "East of Brooklyn" is a Latin-tinged variant on "Softly As in a Morning Sunrise," supported by Clark’s "Night in Tunisia" vamp. Mobley’s solo is a single, sweeping gesture, with each chorus linked surely to the next as though, with his final goal in view, he can proceed toward it in large, steady strides. And yet even here, as Mobley moves into a realm of freedom any musician would envy, one can feel the pressure of fate at his heels, the pathos of solved problems, and the force that compels him to abandon this newly cleared ground.

In other words, to "appreciate" Hank Mobley, to look at him from a fixed position, is an impossible task. He makes sense only when one is prepared to move with him, when one learns to share his restlessness and feel its necessity. Or, as composer Stefan Wolpe once said, "Don’t get backed too much into a reality that has fashioned your senses with too many realistic claims. When art promises you this sort of reliability, drop it. It is good to know how not to know how much one is knowing."

[Brad]

Thank you for posting this. I especially liked the Dexter quote. Like Connoisseur Series 500, I'm not a musician (although I'm studying the alto) so it's often hard to explain why you like or dislike a certain piece or artist. But Hank was the epitome of cool, of mellow, of funk. I've always loved his sound and everytime I think of his unfortunate demise, it saddens me. The "middleweight" quote is unfortunate because it's taken out of context. I never saw him as an acquired taste, just cool and really hip. Just a beautiful sound.

[John L]

Thanks, Larry. That is as insightful a summary of Mobley's musical essence as I have ever read.

And the Dexter Gordon quote is great too. If even Dexter was that impressed, you can be sure that Mobley had hipness in superabundance!

[Roundsound]

Boy - If you want to get a rise up out of people is to question Hank. It always makes me feel good when I hear Hank. The Blackhawk Miles was my first intro to Mobley and I thought he was bland. (In retrospect I think what really turned me on to jazz was Wynton Kelly's way of interplaying with Miles.

What initially turned me onto Mobley was the Blakey live session with Morgan and Mobley. And when I first heard Soul Station I knew this was a Desert Island pick. (The best sax with jazz piono trio session ever - for me)

I agree that Mobley eptimones the cool, shy, detached jazz master of the 50's. This of course matched his playing style, with a strong touch of flair and swing. His solos sometimes have a strong melodic phrasing and touch that could could be turned into heads (ala Bird). His solos lines have a logic as how the parts easily segue into the next.

Hank never seemed to lose his way in a long solo. No matter the chord change, all transitions were seemless and smooooth.

[P.D.]

Boy - If you want to get a rise up out of people is to question Hank. It always makes me feel good when I hear Hank. The Blackhawk Miles was my first intro to Mobley and I thought he was bland. (In retrospect I think what really turned me on to jazz was Wynton Kelly's way of interplaying with Miles.

I wonder if you still feel this way about the Blackhawks based on the current reissue?

This may not apply to you, as you state the Blackhawks were one of your first jazz records, but I get the impression, myself included, that we all wanted a strong Coltrane presence next to Miles. the recordings with Coltrane were much played items on jazz collectors turntables, and Coltrane leaving the group seemed a bit disastrous.

Also most of the tunes on the Blackhawks had originally been brought into Miles repetoire via studio recordings with Trane on tenor. I often wonder, would the take on Mobley with Miles be different had they stayed together and produced a number of items that could be looked on as Miles / Mobley specific. The same seems true of the other front line partners to Miles, until Wayne became part of the group.

As it is I am enjoying the new CD reissue much more than iI think I did the original LPs

[BruceH]

People have mentioned that his tone is in the Lester Young vein, and maybe that's it - I don't care for Lester Young at all, like his music even less than Hank Mobley's.

[chris]

I don't care for Lester Young at all

Man, if that doesn't turn out to be enough to drive someone insane, nothing will

[vibes]

I don't care for Lester Young at all

Man, if that doesn't turn out to be enough to drive someone insane, nothing will

I was waiting for this. I once made a similar comment at the BNBB at it caused quite a stir.

[pryan]

Thanks, Larry. That is as insightful a summary of Mobley's musical essence as I have ever read.

And the Dexter Gordon quote is great too. If even Dexter was that impressed, you can be sure that Mobley had hipness in superabundance!

My thoughts exactly.

[shawn·m]

Vibes, have you heard Lester on Basie’s “Oh, Lady Be Good”? It’s really been burrowing its way under my skin lately. Not quite halfway through his solo, there’s this little phrase ending with a bent-note figure that stays with you for days… Might change your mind. Maybe.

[Brad]

Clem,

How is Dexter's quote banal? I know I may be prejudiced here but it's a nice line: the Hankenstein. It's just a musician talking that's all. Now, if you want to talk about him laying down too many quotes in some of his songs, one could argue that.

[Cali]

I dig a lot of Dex but his fondness for what I feel to be cheap, disjunctive quotation lessens his art for me. (And yes, the same goes for Sonny Rollins. I'm glad they're having fun but those kinda yuks ain't my bag at all.)

Clem

B) Yeah, but other muscians crack-up!