“The Haunted Jazz of Hank Mobley" by Richard Brody

The Front Row “The Haunted Jazz of Hank Mobley Richard Brody

The New Yorker March 25, 2020

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 on Spotify.)

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 of Charlie 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, and Lee 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 was Coltrane, 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 a remarkable 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, with history-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), and Cedar Walton, and the trumpeter Woody 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” and an 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 by this 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.”