"When Bird [alto saxophonist, Charlie Parker] was alive, I wouldn't go near him too much," he said. "The same thing goes for [tenor saxophonists] Don Byas and Dexter Gordon. They were very strong. I felt it wouldn't do my playing any good. I might start playing like them.
- Johnny Griffin, tenor saxophonist
“If saxophone playing had a Formula One division, Johnny Griffin would have pole position every start- or he would have had before he discovered a gentler and more lyrical side to his musical personality. Born in Chicago, the Little Giant was part of the first bebop generation, but he only really found his true voice in the '505, often in partnership with Eddie 'Lockjaw' Davis, with whom he duelled to often spectacular effect. Griffin spent some time in Europe in the '6os but has enjoyed a resurgence back home in more recent years.”
- Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed.
“Johnny Griffin, a jazz tenor-saxophonist from Chicago whose speed, control, and harmonic acuity made him one of the most talented musicians of his generation, and who abandoned his hopes for an American career when he moved to Europe in 1963, died Friday at his home in Availles-Limouzine, a village in France. He was 80 and had lived in Availles-Limouzine for 24 years.
His death was announced to Agence France-Presse by his wife, who did not give a cause. He played his last concert Monday in Hyères.
His height — around five feet five — earned him the nickname “The Little Giant”; his speed in bebop improvising marked him as “The Fastest Gun in the West”; a group he led with Eddie Lockjaw Davis was informally called the “tough tenor” band, a designation that was eventually applied to a whole school of hard bop tenor players.”
- Obituary By Ben Ratliff, published in the July 26, 2008 New York Times
The editorial staff at JazzProfiles welcomes back to these pages the writing of Don DeMichael with a piece on Johnny Griffin, a powerhouse tenor saxophonist whose fierce sound and finger-bustin’ technique were characteristic of his playing throughout a career that spanned six decades and two continents.
“So much controversy has been stirred up by "Third Stream" music, the back-to-the-land movement, the need for new forms in jazz composition, the importance of Mainstream jazz, the value of Traditional jazz, and
God-knows-what-else, that it's easy to lose sight of jazzmen who aren't trying to mold the shape of things to come — men who don't particularly care where jazz is heading or where it's been, musicians whose greatest desire is simply to play their instruments.
It's ironic that, throughout the history of jazz, such men have had the greatest impact on the direction of jazz and have been the ones to add to the legends and traditions of the music. Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker and Lester Young were probably more concerned with what they were going to play when they were on stand than with how they might alter the course of jazz. It has been the blowers — and Louis, Bird, and Pres were at heart blowers—who have shown the way. Jazz evolves every night; there's no such thing as evolution by planned crusade.
All of which brings us to little Johnny Griffin, a blower of the first stripe. He is a man concerned with living and playing in the present.
The diminutive tenor man, currently co-leading a group with Eddie (Lockjaw) Davis, said recently, "Jazz is self-expression. It's not what I recorded last year or what I played last night, but how I feel tonight that's important. I feel differently tonight than I did yesterday. If I feel bad, I'll play bad. But if I feel good, there'll be some feeling of hilarity in my playing."
Griffin believes in the inspiration of the moment, in giving in to circumstances. "Jazz to me is not arrangements," he said. "That's why I like to blow. I don't even want to know what I'm going to play. The individual solo, that's jazz. To say something...
"I'm what you might call a nervous person when I'm playing. I like to play fast. I get excited, and I have to sort of control myself, restrain myself. But when the rhythm section gets cooking, I want to explode. I like to play with
fire, and I like strong bassists and drummers. I've played with such fiery rhythm sections with drummers like Art Blakey, Philly Joe Jones, and Max Roach that there's little you can miss as far as fire is concerned.
"Some guys say, Why don't you cool it the first set — take it easy?' And I try for the first tune or so. But when I get into the music, I don't have anything to do with it. I can't help myself. Before you know it, things are wailing."
Griffin's career includes a two-year stay with Lionel Hampton. He joined Hamp a few days after graduating from high school in 1945. He tells amusing tales of the Hampton band's adventures. One concerns a theater engagement in New York City.
The theater management insisted on a tight time schedule — 53 minutes were
allotted the show, no more, no less. Griffin says Hampton would get carried away playing Flying Home, and many times during the engagement, as the elevated stage descended with the band blasting away, Hampton would be seen still marching through the audience with a blowing tenor man.
After leaving the Hampton band in 1947, Griffin spent 10 years with a variety of groups, including those of Joe Morris and Arnett Cobb, and an early edition of the Jazz Messengers. In 1958, he worked four months with Thelonious Monk, a period he says was "a wonderful experience."
"I don't think Monk changed me, though — not my way of playing," he said. "I've known Monk a long time. I worked with him in Chicago at the Beehive in '54 or '55. As strange as he may seem to the public, Monk is a well-read person. And if you can get close to him, he can carry on a very intelligent conversation.
"He's such a strong person when he's playing his own music. You have to modify your playing with him, especially when he's comping. You have to go Monk's way. Sometimes I'd ask him what change he had played on some tune. He'd tell me, but then he'd say, "But that's only relative. You've got to hear it.'"
The 32-year-old tenor man's respect for "strong" players is mirrored in his own muscular playing. But he feels that he is what he is today because he avoided listening too much to "strong" jazzmen.
"When Bird was alive, I wouldn't go near him too much," he said. "The same thing goes for Don Byas and Dexter Gordon. They were very strong. I felt it wouldn't do my playing any good. I might start playing like them.
"Yet everything I play comes from others. Everything I've ever heard comes out in what I play. You shouldn't get stuck on any one man, but listen to them all, then draw on them according to how you feel at any one time. I don't want anyone to influence me overly. It would suppress what I have to express. I wouldn't be giving myself to myself."
Even though he avoided overexposure to "strong" players, there were others whom Griffin listened to — Fats Navarro, Dizzy Gillespie ("always"), Elmo Hope, Wardell Gray, Sonny Stitt, Ben Webster ("the ferociousness of Ben"), Coleman Hawkins, and Lester Young ("He didn't play with fire, but he was so relaxed . . . the way he'd bend notes ... he just swung").
But even with his studied avoidance of strong players and the consequent emergence of his own style, Griffin is not content with his playing. "Somebody can tape something I play one night, and I can listen to it the next night and think it's okay. But later, I'll pick it to pieces. I've never been satisfied with anything I've done.
"I'm searching for something, and I don't have a clear idea what I'm looking for. The more I learn, the more there is that I know I don't know.”
Maturity comes when you realize your limitations as well as your strengths. Johnny Griffin today is a mature person. His search for a nebulous "something" could conceivably end with a large group of his own. His latest Riverside record, The Big Soul Band, and his plans for more big band recordings would indicate this. Whatever his "something" turns out to be, it will be vital, fiery music, firmly rooted in the present.
I really enjoyed playing on the Paul Horn composition, Count Your Change. Because it transitioned so easily from 4/4 to 5/4 time, it helped me develop my 5/4 chops [“back in the day”]. The tune became so familiar to me that I was able to “dance around” the usual way of counting 5/4 - one bar of 3 plus one bar of 2 - and establish some interesting counter rhythms between my hands and feet on the drum kit.
Count Your Change was originally released in 1962 as part of the eight tunes that made up the Columbia LP - Profile of A Jazz Musician [Columbia 8722]. The album featured Paul on alto sax, clarinet and flute [including the rarely heard bass flute], Emil Richard on vibes, Paul Moer on piano, Jimmy Bonds on bass and Milt Turner on drums. [You can listen to the original recording on the video that serves as a lead-in to this piece.]
Count Your Change is basically blues for the first eight bars of the theme; then come six measures in 5/4 time, followed by two measures in 4/4. The same pattern is followed in each of the blowing choruses. If you think of it as though the 5/4 bars were an extension of the ninth and tenth measures of the regular 12-bar blues, the form will become clearer.
The composition was featured television film called The Story of a Jazz Musician, a half-hour program built around Paul and the group, for which he wrote the background score (featuring four cellos and flugelhorn) as well as supplying music by the quintet. "The story line," says Paul, "traces the evolution of a typical composition. It shows Emil and me kicking around some ideas at my home, then trying the piece out at Shelly's Manne Hole in Hollywood. There are scenes with the fellows talking, as well as some narration by me; scenes with my father, and Yvonne and our kids; a visit to the Down Beat office to see John Tynan. It's an unusual TV approach to jazz."
The Story of a Jazz Musician has been available on YouTube for some time in the three segments shown below. You won’t want to miss Part 3 as it features interior views of Shelly Manne’s famous Hollywood, CA Jazz club - The Manne Hole - and Paul’s group performing Count Your Change.
While the editorial staff at JazzProfiles completes a feature on the recently received preview copy of SOPHISTICATED GIANT: The Life and Legacy of Dexter Gordon By Maxine Gordon, we thought you might enjoy reading the following take on the book as written by David Hadju for the New York Times.
Our copy was sent to us from the nice folks at EsoWon Books and you can visit them on the web at http:/www.esowonbookstore.com/
David Hajdu is the music critic for The Nation and a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Before joining The Nation in January 2015, he served for more than ten years as the music critic for The New Republic. He is currently at work on a "fictional work of nonfiction," a biography of a nonexistent songwriter, to be published by W. W. Norton. He is also collaborating with the artist John Carey on a book of graphic nonfiction about vaudeville, to be published by Columbia University Press.
Hajdu is the author of four books of nonfiction and one collection of essays: Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn(1996), Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña (2001), The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America (2008), Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture (2009), and Love for Sale: Pop Music in America (fall 2016).
SOPHISTICATED GIANT
The Life and Legacy of Dexter Gordon
By Maxine Gordon
Illustrated. 279 pp. University of California Press. $29.95.
A Review By David Hajdu
Nov. 28, 2018. A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 1, 2018, on Page 67 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Hot Sax. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
“Dexter Gordon, the lusty virtuoso of bebop saxophone probably best known now for his Oscar-nominated, starring performance in the movie “Round Midnight,” embodied no fewer than four jazz clichés. He made his reputation as the very image of the big, bold, tenor-sax man, blaring rattling solos from the depths of his 6-foot-5 frame. He seemed for years to be a stereotype of the jazz musician as self-destructive hedonist, arrested and imprisoned on narcotics charges and crimes related to drug use. He became a symbol of the black expat demimonde in mid-20th-century Europe, where musicians joined writers, painters and other African-American artists seeking refuge from maltreatment and underappreciation in their homeland. And he ended up an emblem of survival and redemption, weathered but still standing and still blowing, a veteran of a lifetime of battle with the world and himself.
That Gordon embodied those clichés because he invented or crystallized them in the public imagination is largely forgotten today, nearly 30 years after his death, at 67, in 1990, from kidney failure following treatment for cancer of the larynx. In his final years, Gordon set out to tell his own story, hoping to correct some misconceptions and complicate some simplifications about his life and music. He wrote notes and drafts of biographical vignettes in longhand on yellow legal pads, and for a time tried to collaborate with the novelist Wesley Brown, before deciding to work largely on his own with help from his wife and former manager, Maxine Gordon. When his health began to fail precipitately, he asked her to promise to complete the book if he died before finishing it. “Sophisticated Giant: The Life and Legacy of Dexter Gordon” is the fulfillment of that promise.
Although fairly short passages from Dexter Gordon’s notepads appear here and there, the book is mainly Maxine Gordon’s, and that’s to its benefit. She learned about jazz from the inside herself, working in various back-room roles for the composer Gil Evans, the organist Shirley Scott and others before she met her future husband in France in 1975. She worked with him, overseeing his much ballyhooed return to America in 1976, with chief responsibility for the ballyhoo, and she was with him, living quietly (half the time in Mexico), during his late period of reflection, retired from music. It helps, too, that she went back to school after Dexter Gordon’s death, studied oral history for a summer at Columbia and got a master’s degree in Africana studies at N.Y.U. “Sophisticated Giant” is a work of considerable sophistication, the first-person testimony of its subject employed with affectionate discipline, smartly contextualized and augmented by material from interviews Maxine Gordon conducted with the tenor saxophone masters Sonny Rollins and Jimmy Heath, the record producers Bruce Lundvall and Michael Cuscuna, and others.
Born into a line of high-achieving African-Americans, Dexter Gordon took pride in being part of what, in his notes, he called an “Uncommon Family.” His maternal grandfather, an officer in the United States Cavalry, was awarded the Medal of Honor during the Spanish-American War. His paternal grandfather, a barber who may have included dentistry among his services, was called “Professor” for his air of erudition. Dexter Gordon’s own father was a physician in Los Angeles, among the first black doctors to practice in the city. Dexter Gordon himself was precociously creative. Mentored as a teenager by the same African-American music teacher who taught Frank Morgan, Art Farmer, Marshal Royal and Don Cherry, among others, he proved to be so gifted on the tenor saxophone that he was offered a chair in the Lionel Hampton Orchestra while still in high school.
Gordon entered a world that, like many spheres of popular music in every era, was populated by scores of young artists entertaining other young people with work that spoke pointedly to their age and time. When he joined the Hampton group, at 17, Gordon began playing with Joe Newman and Ernie Royal, both nearly as young as he was. A few years later, he was honored to be hired by one of his lifelong idols, Louis Armstrong (whom he called “Pops”), but he grew restless playing the mainstream swing in the elder bandleader’s repertoire. He quit for an opportunity to join a radical group of young players in the Billy Eckstine Orchestra who were inventing a new music not yet called bebop. “Pops asked me if I wanted more money,” Gordon recalls in “Sophisticated Giant.” “I told him that wasn’t the problem. It was that we young guys wanted to play some new music.”
With Eckstine, surrounded by itchy, bursting, brilliant adventurers, all African-American and nearly all young — Gene Ammons, Leo Parker, Sonny Stitt, Sarah Vaughan, Fats Navarro — Gordon found his musical voice and broke out as a must-hear jazz phenomenon. He began to play in the style that would define him until his late years: saxophone jazz as a firestorm of melodic invention, harmonic surprise and charismatic energy.
Maxine Gordon astutely frames the fiery daring of Dexter Gordon’s generation of bebop innovators in the context of rising black consciousness and creative agency in midcentury America: “At the same time that the war was coming to an end, black culture exploded with unprecedented exuberance and innovation. For musicians like Dexter, that meant breaking out from the constraints of the traditional dance bands and allowing improvisations to extend into unknown places. Dexter said that the ‘Young Turks’ wanted to express a social statement through their music. They were developing their own lifestyles around the new music at a time when things were moving very fast for them and for the world.”
In addition to his autobiographical jottings, Dexter Gordon was working late in his life on a treatment for a screenplay about the rise of bebop in the 1940s. For the section of “Sophisticated Giant” dealing with this period, Maxine Gordon quotes his treatment notes at some length, and they read like a summing up of his views on jazz as an art form and a way of life. The setting is the band bus for the Eckstine Orchestra. “These boys become men at 17 or 18,” Dexter Gordon wrote. “They have a mission.” He explained that mission — his purpose, as he saw it — in a series of questions and declarations. Among them: “A life that improvises music cannot run by another’s rules. This may bring problems if based on an ordinary observer’s rules for behavior in a society that does not always understand what art is, or what an artist is or why there is nothing without music.
“How has this music survived?
“The artist is not self-destructive. …
“Even after a death of one of the members, they continue to speak of him in the present tense.”
After 14 years of semi-exile, living in Copenhagen and Paris with occasional visits to the United States for recording sessions, Gordon came home for good and signed with Columbia Records, which released an acclaimed album documenting his hot-ticket return to the New York jazz scene, “Homecoming: Live at the Village Vanguard.” Ten years later, when Gordon was 63 and not performing much, the French director Bertrand Tavernier cast him as the lead in “Round Midnight,” a drama with music about a fictional, aging, African-American jazz saxophonist struggling with addiction who settles in Paris, returns to New York and (spoiler alert) dies. Gordon was duly praised for his subtle, knowing portrayal of an elder whose spirit survives the ravages of time and bodily abuse.
Without data, I have to assume that most people who still picture Dexter Gordon imagine the fading shadow of a once-great artist that he portrayed in “Round Midnight.” With “Sophisticated Giant,” Maxine Gordon has produced a homecoming even more dramatic, and perhaps more important, than the one she helped arrange for him in 1976: She has brought back the restive teenage fireball who wanted only to play some new music.”
“Possessed of both his own conception, which made Mobley's music readily identifiable, and the equally rare inspiration that also made listening to his work eminently satisfying, Mobley was perpetually eclipsed throughout his career by more extroverted and influential stylists. ...It has only been in the years since he stopped recording (...), and especially since his death in 1986, that the exceptional quality of his playing and writing has begun to receive a commensurate measure of respect.”
- Bob Blumenthal, Jazz author, columnist and critic
"The most lyrical saxophonist I've ever heard. He sang into his horn."
- Benny Golson, tenor saxophonist and composer
At this point, my ongoing Mobley Quest moves away from features that focus on one of Hank’s many recordings as a leader for Blue Note [There were 24 in all.] and reverts back to the larger studies on Hank, all of which have been posted on the blog to date including Simon Spillett pieces -”Hank Mobley’s recordings with Miles Davis - UPDATED” and “Looking East: Hank Mobley in Europe 1968-1970,” the John Litweiler interview that appeared in Downbeat in 1973, Derek Ansell’s book Workout: The Music of Hank Mobley which was published by Northway in 2008 and the two Jazz Monthly essays by Michael James from 1961 and 1962, respectively.
The only extensive writing on Hank’s career which has not been presented so far in my MobleyQuest are the following booklet notes by Bob Blumenthal’s to the Mosaic Records box set of Hank’s 1950s Blue Note recordings.
An especially beneficial aspect of Bob’s Mobley essay is that it contains many references to MY GROOVE, YOUR MOVE, a limited-edition program compiled by Kimberly Ewing and Don Sickler for a concert of Hank Mobley's music presented in Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall on October 29, 1990.
I’ve said this before but it bears repeating: during the many years that he wrote about Jazz for The Boston Globe, CD Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Downbeat and numerous other publications, Grammy-Award winning author, columnist and critic Bob Blumenthal became one of my most consistent teachers about all-things-Jazz
For his long affiliation with it and studied application of it, Bob knows the music.
Equally important is his ability to communicate this knowledge and awareness in a writing style that is clear, cogent and concise.
Bob’s a mensch and a mentor and it’s always a privilege and a pleasure to represent his work on these pages.
“On the back cover of MY GROOVE, YOUR MOVE, a limited-edition program compiled by Kimberly Ewing and Don Sickler for a concert of Hank Mobley's music presented in Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall on October 29, 1990, the baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter is quoted about Mobley's aspirations. Most of the tenor saxophonist’s wishes have to do with the conditions performing jazz musicians seek yet find all too rarely — clubs with dressing rooms, good pianos and accommodating acoustics — but Mobley also was looking for an upgrade in listening attitudes. "Somewhere to play where people aren't just comparing you to someone else!" was the way Nica put it.
Few musicians had greater cause to seek such a forum for their playing than Hank Mobley, who could serve as Exhibit A when building a case against the poll-driven, King of the Hill approach to jazz appreciation. Possessed of both his own conception, which made Mobley's music readily identifiable, and the equally rare inspiration that also made listening to his work eminently satisfying, Mobley was perpetually eclipsed throughout his career by more extroverted and influential stylists. Throughout the period represented by the present collection, his work was often downgraded as a lesser version of Sonny Rollins; and in 1960 and '61, when he worked with Miles Davis and recorded what are his greatest sessions under his own name, he was dismissed for not measuring up to his predecessor in the Davis band, John Coltrane. When the avant-garde innovators dominated the attention of jazz critics a few years later, Mobley's playing was often dismissed as old hat and irrelevant. It has only been in the years since he stopped recording (his last session, co-led with Cedar Walton, took place in 1972), and especially since his death in 1986, that the exceptional quality of his playing and writing has begun to receive a commensurate measure of respect.
Mobley may have been doubly cursed. He was a great tenor saxophonist in an era that enjoyed an abundance of great tenor saxophonists, and his particular skills were not as attention-grabbing as those of several peers. Consider his friend John Coltrane, who recorded with Mobley on three occasions during the period covered by the present collection. Even at this stage of his career, when Coltrane's ideas were often partly formed and imperfectly executed, his fervor is often more immediately arresting than Mobley's more subtle approach to harmony and rhythm. Mobley's penchant for doing things his own way only reinforced the difference.
In the invaluable interview/article "The Integrity of the Artist — The Soul of the Man" that Down Beat published in 1973, Mobley told John Litweiler: "When I was about 18, [my uncle] Dave told me ‘if you're 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 philosophy plus his talent should have won Mobley more respect in the 1950s; but, then again, it was a golden era for tenor players. Mobley recorded with several of the best — Coltrane and Griffin on the latter's Blue Note album A BLOWING SESSION and Zoot Sims and Al Cohn plus Coltrane on Prestige's TENOR CONCLAVE — not to mention perennial poll winner Stan Getz, the two Sonnys (Rollins and Stitt), Lucky Thompson and still-inspired patriarchs of the horn like Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young and Ben Webster.
Mobley found his own voice amidst these giants, notwithstanding the discernible influence of Rollins in the '50s and Coltrane a decade later. He had a sound on the horn which he himself identified as "round," a gorgeous, centered tone filled with soul and tenderness. "The most lyrical saxophonist I've ever heard," Benny Golson said. "He sang into his horn." Mobley's musical knowledge was highly refined, and emerged with particular clarity in his sophisticated harmonic approach. Horace Silver recalled that "He'd write some different, alternate changes, and they'd always be so inventive and so creative, so beautiful. A very musical mind, a harmonic mind."
As far as his rhythmic concept went, Al Grey captured the impact of Mobley's playing as well as his writing when he noted that "All of [Mobley's] tunes flow so freely, you can really swing with them — I mean really swing!" In addition, Mobley possessed organizational skills unusual in a musician who spent so much of his career as a sideman. He had a special knack for writing material for the blowing sessions of the period, often coming up with compositions in the studio on the spur of the moment. These pieces, frequently containing harmonic wrinkles that set them apart from mere rewrites of standards, were designed with the specific players on the date in mind, to the point that in conversations with Don Sickler, Mobley recalled melodies that Sickler would hum by naming musicians who had played on the original recordings.
He was also a master ensemble player, particularly skilled in blending with talented trumpet partners. This made him highly attractive to the independent jazz labels in the mid-50s, when both the new hard-bop style and the advent of the 12" long-playing album generated a recording boom; and it ultimately won Mobley the role, particularly during 1957, of de facto house tenor for Blue Note Records.
Recalling the busy days in Rudy Van Gelder's original Hackensack, New Jersey studio, Mobley told Litweiler that "Savoy recorded on Fridays, Prestige on Saturdays, Blue Note on Sundays, something like that. 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. Only Blue Note did it; the others were a little stiff. If we had a date Sunday, I'd rehearse the band Tuesday and Thursday in a New York studio.... 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 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!'"
Mobley's relationship with Lion, Wolff and Blue Note, which began shortly before the first music included here was recorded and continued through 1970, was as important to the saxophonist's career and his legacy as any hook-up with a fellow musician. During its active life, most people took the pairing of artist and label for granted. Today, when both the sound and the look of Blue Note albums has taken on iconic status, Mobley's music and his visage are at the center of the legend. He graces the cover of The Blue Note Years: The Jazz Photography of Francis Wolff (Rizzoli, 1995), and 13 additional images inside make him the dominant presence in the book.
Mobley loomed large in the recording studio as well, particularly in the incredible 15-month span of 1956-8 that dominates this collection. At the dawn of the 12" era, Lion and Wolff found (albeit in a more harmonically complex and less romantic concept) the focal point for a series of studio jam sessions that Prestige was employing so successfully with Gene Ammons.
Unfortunately, another factor led to the extensive documentation of players like Ammons and Mobley at the time. "I had the knowledge," Mobley confessed to Litweiler in 1973 regarding the heroin habit that frequently interrupted his career. "When I got strung out it was my own fault. A person getting strung out at age 18, that's a problem. He doesn't even have a chance to learn what life is about. By the time I got strung out, I had learned my instrument, I was making money." For great players like Ammons and Mobley, drug addiction left them more inclined than they otherwise might have been to record frequently, and the wealth of material generated allowed jazz labels to sustain the public presence of these musicians when problems physical and legal made them otherwise unavailable. It is tempting (yet hardly fair in the case of such respected producers from the period as Lion, Orrin Keepnews and Lester Koenig) to view this situation as one of record company exploitation; at the same time, the realities that faced musicians like Mohley in the 1950s must be kept in mind lest we ascribe periods of particular inspiration or lack thereof to when albums were recorded. In the present case, Mobley became a key player in the Blue Note orbit at a point when his particular skills and the emerging format for studio jazz recording were in a most complimentary zone.
This yielded music that has been doggedly sought out by many jazz fans and has eluded too many more through limited availability. Of the nine albums represented herein, two were never released and four others were never reissued domestically. Those fortunate enough to have tracked down all nine of the original albums (including the two that first appeared in Japan) will find nine alternate takes included (and programmed after the originally issued material, which makes for better casual listening and will not impede any comparison-minded student of the music willing to employ a CD player's program function). This is not all of the music Mobley made during his first recording phase and — given his talent, consistency and ubiquitous presence in so many important bands and on so many labels — it is not all of the best Mobley from the '50s. What we have here is a magnificent overview of the period, with some of the most memorable players of the day giving themselves to the indelible concepts of a musician who is finally getting his due as a magnificent tenor saxophonist and composer.
Hank Mobley was born on July 7, 1930 in Eastman, Georgia, and raised in Elizabeth, New Jersey. There was much music in his family, particularly piano music. The aforementioned uncle, Dave Mobley, played piano among other instruments, and his mother and grandmother also played keyboards (his grandmother was a church organist). Piano became Mobley's first instrument; then he picked up the tenor sax at age 16 and basically taught himself the horn. On his uncle's advice, he listened initially to Lester Young and then to Don Byas, Dexter Gordon and Sonny Stitt. "Anyone who can swing and get a message across," as Mobley explained his influences to Leonard Feather in 1956.
By his late teens, Mobley was working as a professional musician. He was hired by Paul Gayten and worked the rhythm and blues circuit with him between 1949 and '51, having been recommended by Clifford Brown (who had not heard Mobley play at the time but was aware of his growing reputation). "Hank was beautiful, he played alto, tenor and baritone and did a lot of the writing," Gayten recalled. "He took care of business and I could leave things up to him." The Gayten band also included baritone saxophonist Cecil Payne and future Ellingtonians Clark Terry, Aaron Bell and Sam Woodyard. Working with the last three no doubt eased the way for Mobley's two-week stint as Jimmy Hamilton's replacement in the Ellington Orchestra during 1953. ("I didn't play clarinet, but I played some of the clarinet parts on tenor," he later recalled). While the band recorded, the material did not feature Mobley as a soloist.
Mobley's jazz recording debut was the product of a job he held in the house band of a Newark nightclub after leaving Gayten in 1951. Another promising youngster and future Blue Note artist, pianist Walter Davis, Jr., was also a part of the group, and the opportunity to back visiting stars including Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon, Billie Holiday, Bud Powell and Lester Young was invaluable to their rapid development. Max Roach hired both Mobley and Davis after appearing at the Newark club, and brought them into rooms like the Apollo Bar before recording with them for Debut in March 1953. The session (now available on OJC) included both quartet and septet tracks and captures an already recognizable tenor stylist and composer. There were three melodically appealing Mobley originals, including the striking minor-key KISMET, while his imaginative chordal substitutions and fluent shifting of accents also enlivened the standard GLOW WORM and the Charlie Parker blues CHI CHI. Roach reportedly tried to summon both Mobley and Clifford Brown to California to form what would become the Brown/Roach quintet in the summer of 1953, but was only able to locate the trumpeter.
Back on the East Coast, Mohley gained further experience with Davis, Tadd Dameron, Milt Jackson and J.J. Johnson. For much of 1954 he worked with Dizzy Gillespie, and participated in four of the trumpeter's recording sessions. While among the lesser-known items in Gillespie's extensive discography, these tracks show Mobley to good advantage in a rare big-hand setting on Chico O'Farrill’s MANTECA SUITE (where Mobley plays the half-chorus solo on the THEME movement covered by Big Nick Nicholas on the original 1947 recording) and as a clearly formed stylist on the sextet titles RAILS and DEVIL AND THE FISH.
After leaving Gillespie in September 1954, Mobley joined pianist Horace Silver's quartet at Minton's Playhouse, a group completed by bassist Doug Watkins and drummer Arthur Edgehill. "On weekends Art Blakey and Kenny Dorham would come in to jam, 'cause they were right around the corner," Mobley recalled to Litweiler, which led to Silver's first quintet session for Blue Note with Dorham, Mobley, Watkins and Blakey in November 1954. The compositions were all Silver's; but the entire quintet was dazzling, with Mobley's solo catapulting off band breaks on ROOM 608, preaching at medium-slow tempo on CREEPIN' IN, flying against the seesaw momentum of STOP TIME and laying bare the saxophonist's soulful blues conception on DOOLIN’. The session was issued as Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers, working a variation on the Messengers name that Blakey had employed for a larger ensemble several years earlier; and the five musicians decided to work in a cooperative relationship whenever any one of them was offered work.
It did not take long for the Messengers's blues-and percussion-driven new strain of modern jazz to take hold, or for Mobley to establish himself as one of the music's primary new voices through additional appearances on Blue Note. He recorded in a Dorham sextet that also included Silver and Blakey in January 1955, and with Silver and the Messengers again in February on a session that included the funky hit THE PREACHER (where the audacious entry of the tenor sax is a highlight) and Mobley's own typically "heavy form" HANKERIIN'. In March, Mobley and Blakey participated in Julius Watkins's sextet session, nine days before Blue Note gave the tenor saxophonist his own first opportunity to appear on vinyl as a leader.
(A) MARCH 27, 1955
Mobley considered his debut session - The Hank Mobley Quartet [BLP 5066] to be his best early recording and indicated that significant preparation had preceded the actual visit to Van Gelder's studio. The date features his tenor sax with the Messengers rhythm section, and has been particularly hard to find since its 1955 release as Blue Note 10" LP 5066. United Artists reissued the session in a rare facsimile edition 20 years later and it was sold only in Japan and Europe. Otherwise, it has been available as one side of a Japanese 12" LP (sharing a disc with George Wallington's Blue Note session) and on a Japanese compact disc where the two alternate takes first appeared.
At this point in the insert booklet annotations, Bob launches into a detailed, track-by-track descriptions of the nine LPs [and three CD reissues] that form the Mosaic Complete Blue Note Hank Mobley Fifties Sessions [MD6-181] and concludes with this statement:
“When it came to music, Hank Mobley was extremely sure-footed in this period. If his drug problem created a less than steady personal life and slowed his recording activities significantly for much of 1958 and 1959, he was able to bounce back with Blue Note, when he entered a truly golden age on albums like Soul Station, Roll Call and Workout.”
