Sam Woodyard: A Real Swinger

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Woodyard is a temperamental musician, but at his best is one of the greatest Jazz drummers. His work with Ellington was frequently of the highest quality, combining an understanding of the leader’s requirements with an individual, earthy kind of swing.”

- Eddie Lambert, The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz

“From Woodyard, … [Kenny Burrell] learned the importance of clear melodic statements and the advantages of taking the music outside in incremental steps, chorus by chorus.”

- Gary Giddins, Visions of Jazz

“Sam wasn’t a flashy player, but few swung harder; he drove the Ellington band like no other drummer in the band’s storied history.”

- Chris Kelsey, Drummer World

“Sam Woodyard? He’s a swinger?”

-Duke Ellington

Along with the band leaders themselves and its arrangers, drummers give big bands most of their "personality."

Typically, there are three or four trumpets, usually four trombones with one of them a bass trombone, and five saxes in a big band.

But there’s only one drummer.

Sure he’s generally part of a three-piece rhythm section, but most of the time, you can barely hear the bass player and other than taking a solo chorus or two to give the brass players’ chops a rest, who can remember a meaningful big band piano part?

Gene Krupa with Benny Goodman’s big band; Buddy Rich with the big bands of Tommy Dorsey, Artie Shaw and Harry James let alone his own power house orchestras; the Davey Tough, Don Lamond and Jake Hanna led versions of Woody Herman’s “herds;” Shelly Manne later followed by Mel Lewis propelling the Stan Kenton Orchestra, and then the Terry Gibbs Dream Band, the Gerald Wilson Orchestra, the Gerry Mulligan’s Concert Big Band and later the big band he co-led with Thad Jones; Chick Webb’s Savoy Ballroom big band; Jimmy Crawford lifting the Jimmy Lunceford Band; Papa Jo Jones and Sonny Payne booting the Basie bands along; Louis Bellson’s “explosion” – the list is endless.

But the common ingredient is that each drummer gives the big band its particular “feel.”

Jeff Hamilton played drums with Woody Herman’s 1970’s big band and made it swing differently than did Tough, Lamond and Hanna.

“That’s what I want,” Woody would say. “I want the drummer to make the band his own.”

You recognize the impact of a great big band drummer immediately because the band is under control. While a big band can generate an incredible amount of pulsating, forward momentum, if the drummer is not “in charge” of it, the outcome is the proverbial “train wreck.”

Both the players and the listeners want to experience the “joy ride” of a swinging big band, but neither of them want the sound of it to rush madly into oblivion. Everyone wants to be on the edge of the flashing sound created by an excited and energetic big band, but no one wants to experience a jumbled mass of sonority.

Sam Woodyard joined the Ellington band in July 1955 and remained with it until 1966. He was certainly one of the longest serving drummers with Duke Orchestra. Sam took charge of it, gave it “his feeling” and he modernized the sound of the drums within the context of it.

He did this essentially by applying what drummers like Art Blakey, Philly Joe Jones, Art Taylor, Roy Haynes and many other drummers were doing on the New York small group Jazz scene to Duke’s always-progressing big band arrangements.

The knocking sound of the stick played over the snare on the 2^nd and 4^th beat of each bar, the huge 22” riveted ride cymbals with their all-encompassing overtones the accentuated high-hat instead of a thumping bass drum, all served to loosen/lessen the “feel” of the beat while accenting it in a modern way.

Duke never stopped modernizing the sound of his arrangements and Sam’s adaptation of what was happening in modern Jazz small group drumming made Duke’s charts sound more “of the moment” instead of throwbacks to the 1920’s Cotton Club days, or the Swing Era of the 1930’s or the big band sound of the 1940’s.

Sam rarely got any credit for his contributions to the overall, transformational “feel” of Duke’s band basically because he worked very hard at being a part of things. In other words, he didn’t want to stand out, he just wanted to swing the band.

And Sam swung the heck out of it.

Unfortunately, all too often, Sam is less remembered for the overall “personality” he injected into the Ellington drum chair and more for his drum solos on Skin Deep, a piece used to launch an extended drum solo which brought-down-the-curtain on many of Ellington’s Jazz Festival performances.

You know the one: after playing a brief melody, the band walks off the bandstand to grab a smoke leaving the drummer alone to pound the dickens out of the drums.  All too often, the band wasn’t the only one doing the exiting as very few drummers know how to play extended drum solos and still fewer audiences know how to listen to them.

As was the case with many drummers of his generation, Sam was self taught and had relatively poor reading skills. But his inability to read music well didn’t matter because there weren’t any drum parts!

And when Duke wanted something more exotic out of Sam as Bill Berry explains in the following excerpt from his insert notes to Duke’s Such Sweet Thunder, the Columbia/Sony Entertainment LP/CD whose music was dedicated to the Shakespearian Festival in Stratford, Ontario, he would say to him:

"Imagine this great golden barge floating down the Nile River: beautiful dancing girls, mounds of food and drink, elephants, ostrich feather fans, a hundred slaves rowing the barge and Cleopatra is lying on a satin bed."

How’s that for a drum chart?

Besides, when you have cats in Duke’s band like Clark Terry [trumpet], Paul Gonsalves [tenor sax] and Jimmy Woode [bass] watching over you, everything is going to turn out fine.

We wanted to remember Sam Woodyard on these pages and what better way to do so than to turn to Stanley Dance, the ultimate chronicler of all-things-Ellington, for some excerpts from the essay on Sam in his definitive The World of Duke Ellington[New York: Da Capo, 1970].

“Clark Terry encouraged me right from the start said. He said:  ‘Everybody’s scuffling and tomorrow you’ll be three hundred miles from here.’ He taught me the whole book in about a week, and he had a very good way of teaching without hollering and making you feel conspicuous, so that people out front wouldn't be thinking, ‘Well, they've got a new drummer.’ He'd indicate things with his hand, or say, 'You've got four bars at the end of the chorus,’ and so on. He sat at the end of the trumpet section, next to me.

Clark, Paul, Jimmy Woode, and Willie Cook were in my corner from the first, but even those who weren't speaking soon came around, and we'd have a little taste, and they'd say they'd like me to play like this or like that behind them, and so we all got together. They found I wanted to play for the band, and that it didn't make any difference to me if it was with sticks, brushes, or hands. There's no sense in your building a house and my building a garage for it if we're not on the same property….

I've never been able to read fast, but there's never more than just so much you can get out of a book. You've got to get out and do it sometime. I have a fast ear and if I hear a thing down once I'll play it the second time, I don't care what it is. A teacher may say, 'Now you're qualified to play,' but you get in a band, and the tempo drops, and the leader says, 'What's the matter with you? Just play! You're a drummer. Listen, and keep swinging.' And you can't do it. What the teacher taught you was correct procedure, but what does 'correct' mean in a situation like that?

There aren't many opportunities today for young drummers to get experience in carrying the weight of a band like Duke Ellington's. You sit there behind the drums, look around the bandstand, and there are those fourteen musicians, and it's an awful lot of musical weight. Everybody's patting his foot, and thinking right, but you've actually got fourteen different tempos, because everybody's got his own way of patting his foot. One's a little bit behind the beat and another's on top of it. It would be easy to be swayed, but you can't let yourself be. You've got to think, too, in terms of sections and the overall scheme. To keep the whole thing going, plus pleasing the bandleader, often means sacrificing yourself.

I had the chance to play with Basie's band one night when we were laying off. This scared me, too, as long as I'd been with Duke's band. You might think it would be the other way 'round, the kind of arrangements and the way we play in this band, but I didn't want to be a drag and it had been so long since I played with a guitarist. When I got on the bandstand, I soon felt the difference between four rhythm and our three—often two when Duke is conducting. I didn't know the arrangements, but Freddie Greene was sitting right in front of the bass drum and Thad Jones was on my left, and between the two of them they cued me in, just like Clark Terry used to do….

No one is perfect. To me, anybody who can sit, stand, lean against a wall, or hang by his toes and say he's perfect is a damn liar. Because man made it, even a metronome isn't perfect. In a rhythm section, it's all a matter of listening. The tempo varies for many reasons. Maybe it's fatigue. It may drop through disinterest or go up through enthusiasm. Sometimes the tempo doesn't change, but the color of the tune changes. It may take fire in the last choruses and the extra excitement makes listeners think the tempo went up. You go with the change of feeling, but the tempo hasn't necessarily changed. The main thing is if you've got it off the ground and are still swinging. There is, though, a tendency for musicians to start climbing together, and before you know it color and dynamics go out the window—and if there isn't a window, then they make one.

A rhythm section is often criticized from different angles by people with different conceptions of how it should play. A drummer may have a four-bar break in an arrangement, but if someone doesn't come in on time afterwards, some people will say it's the drummer's fault, because they didn't really listen to what he played. They'll say he should have played something more simple, but those were the drummer's four bars and as long as he got back for the first beat of the fifth bar he could have gone out and run around the block. It's not his fault if someone else can't keep time.

I've come up through those grooves where there are not so many in the rhythm section, where the drummer has got to be the strong one all the time. Jimmie Crawford, to me, was one of the greatest drummers in the world. What that cat got under the Jimmie Lunceford band was something else. Papa Jo Jones is another one.

I heard Chick Webb mostly on records, but I stood outside the Savoy once when I was too young to go in and they had the windows open. He was the first drummer who made sense in a big band, and that stuck with me. His time was right there. He knew how to shade and color, and how to bring a band up and keep it there. Big Sid Catlett was like that, too. I heard him at Frank Dailey's Meadowbrook in New Jersey when he was with Benny Goodman. The difference was that Chick was a bandleader and obliged to do things that you wouldn't do as a sideman, not that he wasn't a great accompanist. Sid was a big man and anytime he wanted to get powerful you knew it, but the personal touch, in the sound of his drums and in his style, was very crisp and tasteful. Dave Tough influenced me, too, with his simplicity. If there was any way he could get out of taking solos, he would. He had a good sound to his drums and he always kept his bass drum under the bass fiddle, so that you could hear the tune the bassist was playing.

In fact, you could feel his bass drum rather than hear it, and it didn't conflict with the rest of the band. Even on those old Chick Webb records, you could often feel the bass drum as much as you could hear it, and that's how it was at the Savoy. It's very easy to get over-enthused at the drums and overshadow other people in the band, especially if you've got the drums too tight so that you sound like a machine gun back there. Then you start playing rim shots and all the people near you begin to flinch….

I love everybody who's playing from the heart. I just dig people who like to live. There are only twenty-four hours in a day and you'll never get them back, so you do the best you can however you can and wherever you can. 'Wherever' has been a big word for our band the past few years, we've traveled so much, but everybody really speaks the same language. It's just a matter of putting the pots on!

It's an old Southern expression, Woodyard explained. ‘Give the man some ham hocks, greens, and cornbread!’ Originally, when the man came home for dinner and there wasn't anything ready, he'd say, 'Well, put the pots and pans on!' What we mean by it in the band is,  ‘Swing and get off the ground—and stay off until you're ready to come down!' I could add that the prettiest meal in the world isn't anything unless you have salt and pepper to go with it, and that's how it is with a band if the rhythm section isn't right. [1965]”

Richard Cook's Jazz Encyclopedia

© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

How this for a subtitle?

“THE TUNES, THE TANTRUMS, THE LICKS, THE SPATS, THE CATS, THE TRAGEDIES, THE GREATS, THE NOT-SO-GREATS AND THE JOY OF JAZZ”

Welcome to the world of Richard Cook and his Jazz Encyclopedia about which the newspaper The Independent, in choosing it as one of its “Books of the Year” described it as “erudite, lively and up to date,” and asked [somewhat facetiously] “ Where else could you find Buddy Bolden and Jamie Cullum almost side by side?”

Other comments about the book went like this - 

'Slightly different and seriously useful, this is a jazz book to own'

- BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

'I take my hat off to Richard Cook ... extraordinarily comprehensive and also retains plenty of wit, personality and variety right the way through to Zurke, Zwerin and Zwingenberger'

- JAZZWISE

'Reading Cook is like sitting down with someone ready to share

his extensive knowledge and to air his views... Above all, he

conveys a strong sense of the adventure of it all'

- WIRED

'Fascinating snippets [that] wouldn't appear in any other jazz A-Z but his ... for aficionados and newcomers alike'

- JAZZ UK

“Whatever you want to know about jazz, this brilliant A to Z guide has the answers, guiding you through everything from trad to free, boogie woogie to swing, bebop to scat, and telling you the entertaining, sometimes tragic stories of the people behind the music - from Louis Armstrong to John Coltrane, Django Reinhardt to John Zorn, and everyone in between.”

- Penguin Books publicity annotation

Until his death in 2007 at the relative young age of 50, Richard D. Cook had been writing about music since the 1970s.

In his Obituary for The Independent, fellow and co-author Brian Cook said of Cook:

“Cook wrote with an accuracy and consistency of judgement that made him one of the most perceptive and admired commentators, not just on his beloved jazz, but on a whole range of other "sonics" (as he liked to put it), and not just in Britain but internationally. Though his fabled impatience was part of an Englishness cultivated quite without irony, it was also a measure of Cook's utter rejection – in life and music – of the sub-standard. He had an unerring nose for the ersatz and fudged, and though his opinions were strong, sometimes too strong for those who prefer a more liberal rhetoric, he was anything but a bully. He was very happy to see his few loose deliveries driven into the covers, his more controversial assertions batted straight back at him … 

In a decade that elevated style over substance and put old-fashioned musicianship at a discount, Cook always looked for substance and often found it in unexpected places. He wrote as trenchantly about Abba as he did about the improvising ensemble AMM, and his passion for singers, female singers in particular, enabled him to write perceptively about Nina Simone, Joan Armatrading and the soul diva Anita Baker …

The largest of his writing projects was The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, co-authored with Brian Morton, now in its eighth edition (and retitled The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings). Other books followed, including a "biography" of the Blue Note label in 2001, and in 2006 a study, It's About That Time, of Miles Davis. The year before, Richard Cook's Jazz Encyclopedia, its title a reflection of his authority, was published by Penguin…….

He was endlessly curious, almost hyperactively busy and, for all the Eeyorish gloom he affected when talking about the English weather – too wet in winter, too hot in summer – the Jockey Club, Surrey's batting and bowling statistics, phenomena like Nu-Jazz, he maintained an exuberant optimism.”

In his INTRODUCTION to his Jazz Encyclopedia, Richard Cook’s suggests that: “Whether one is in search of timeless, immortal art or the high spirits of a musician simply having fun, jazz has it both ways. I might even suggest that it is unrivalled at delivering both of those extremes within the same piece of music.”

He also goes on to stress the following point:

“ … not … every musician herein receives unstinting praise. I've attempted to be as honest as I can in writing each entry. Jazz writers are often (despite what some musicians think) afraid to be critical, because of a saintly belief that the benighted jazz player has it so tough that words of dissent are somehow dishonourable. This ignores the point that a jazz writer's first responsibility is to the jazz audience - the people who buy CDs and pay for concert tickets - rather than jazz musicians.”

And this is the way Mr. Cook approaches the subject in his delightful and informative Jazz Encyclopedia, never taking the music or himself too seriously.

Here’s the rest of what he has to say in his INTRODUCTION to a book that belongs on every Jazz fan’s library shelf.

“Considering that, for a large part of its existence, jazz was the popular music of choice in Western society, it's surprising what a complicated, obscure and often plain bewildering matter it is. Like most British people under 50,1 grew up with the sounds of pop ringing helplessly in my ears, and while there was some jazz mixed in with it - my cousin had a 45 by The Temperance Seven early on - it was hardly a pressing part of the culture by the middle 6os. I had to make my own way into the music, and it was a long and difficult journey. Because I started collecting records from an early age, going to jumble sales looking for 78s,I inevitably began finding discs by musicians such as Jelly Roll Morton, whose 'Dr Jazz Stomp' was one of my early favourites, and from there I embarked on a precipitous voyage of discovery. In my early teens, I didn't know anyone else who liked jazz, and I didn't know how to find out about it. The few accessible books on the subject seemed to talk in code, fascinating though it was. There was no jazz on television that I could find, and not much on the radio, although I thank Humphrey Lyttelton, Charles Fox, Brian Priestley, Peter Clayton and Steve Race for their efforts. I couldn't really understand how what Morton played had somehow turned into what musicians such as Albert Ayler were playing.

Many years later, that progression seems straightforward enough to me now. But it's not hard to understand how most find jazz a very awkward conundrum. The evangelist in me feels infuriated when I hear someone saying, if only facetiously, 'Why can't they play the tune?' The pragmatist just smiles and shrugs. Most of us just want to be entertained by music. But jazz is entertaining, whether it's Louis Armstrong scatting his way through 'Heebie Jeebies' or Charlie Parker hurtling around the curves of 'Ornithology'. As listeners, we can linger over Billie Holiday's mythopoeic pain or be drenched by Cecil Taylor's marathon improvisations, but they are just a small part of what is a jostling and superbly crowded idiom. Whether one is in search of timeless, immortal art or the high spirits of a musician simply having fun, jazz has it both ways. I might even suggest that it is unrivaled at delivering both of those extremes within the same piece of music.

Making sense of it all is a challenge for any listener, no doubt of that. Like the grand  history of Western classical music, jazz has its own genealogies, and its onward march can be studied by any willing student. But one curiosity of the music is the way its various stylistic schools have all remained current, at least since earlier approaches began to be 'revived' in the 40s: jazz is as subject to the whims of fashion as any other kind of music, yet if you live in a major city, it won't be hard to find musicians playing in the style of traditional or swing or bebop or free jazz somewhere on the same evening. Once upon a time, these various styles created warring factions of fans, but today the jazz audience is much more of a United Nations. Since the music has, since the end of the big-band era at least, prospered far away from mass audiences, there is an unspoken bond within the jazz listenership which has always tended to foster an us-and-them feeling. We treasure our elitism, while grumbling about jazz's marginalization within an increasingly unsophisticated culture.

But if you want to join in the fun, all you really need is a sympathetic pair of ears. Many popular jazz musicians - such as Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, David Sanborn, Billie Holiday, Herbie Hancock, George Benson - aren't even regarded as 'jazz' by many of their admirers. There's no point in pretending that jazz is simple and undemanding: it isn't. Absorbing the music of Parker or Taylor can be the greatest challenge a listener can set him- or herself. But, to return to the top of the page, jazz was, during the swing era at least, a music admired and danced to and listened to by an audience in the tens of millions. The principles which fired that music - for more detail, you might like to turn to the entry on 'Jazz', under the letter J - remain good for everything which came before it, and most of what has come after. Jazz spread around the world very quickly - there are recordings from almost every territory on earth which was able to make records and which, by the 30s and 40s at least, showed some trace of jazz in their popular music - and its stature as an international musical practice continues to evolve. American players far from home often had the complaint that, away from the US, they couldn't find a swinging rhythm section to work with; but that old sore has been largely healed. I won't perpetrate the familiar nonsense about music being a 'universal language', but, as a musical procedure at least, jazz is more universal than most.

The convenience of an A to Z format doesn't hurt in the task of trying to sift through something which has a cast of thousands and far, far more foot soldiers than generals. An enduring fascination of this music is the way it can accommodate so many individuals, even within relatively strict parameters (another cliched idea, that jazz is mainly about 'breaking down barriers', is a further nonsense. If it were, all the barriers would have disappeared long ago). Jazz has a modest genius count: you might like to use the fingers of each hand to count them, but that's probably as many as you'll need. That doesn't prevent every instrument in every style from throwing up musicians who can be identified with just a few bars of their playing. Perhaps the classical aficionado can pass a blindfold test and spot different interpreters of Beethoven's Appassionato. They surely cannot have the jazz fan's legerdemain in hearing and enjoying the dramatic differences between Earl Hines, Hampton Hawes, Andre Previn, Tommy Flanagan, Willie 'The Lion' Smith, Diana Krall and Oscar Peterson, all of whom recorded piano versions of 'Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea', and all of whom (well, Previn might give a few problems, and Diana sings too, so that's a slight cheat) are easily identified.

This book celebrates as many of these players as I felt it was sensible to include. Inevitably, some will ask why X was included when Y is absent. It is entirely my choice, and I am sure there have been unfair and neglectful omissions. American musicians necessarily dominate, and since I have grown up in the environment of British jazz, there are probably more UK musicians included than are justified by their overall eminence. There should probably be more from Italy, France, Australia, Denmark and other jazz-loving countries with healthy communities of players. But I drew the line where I did, and there it is for now. It is, perhaps, the individuality discussed above which has largely been the deciding factor in including a musician or not.

Which is not to say that every musician herein receives unstinting praise. I've attempted to be as honest as I can in writing each entry. Jazz writers are often (despite what some musicians think) afraid to be critical, because of a saintly belief that the benighted jazz player has it so tough that words of dissent are somehow dishonourable. This ignores the point that a jazz writer's first responsibility is to the jazz audience - the people who buy CDs and pay for concert tickets - rather than jazz musicians. To read some reference works on the music, you'd think that jazz is stuffed with godlike figures who never played a bad gig or made a dull record in their lives. I've done my level best to avoid both that starting point, and what I would call the one-of-the-finest school of jazz writing. This is where so-and-so is 'one of the finest bassists/trumpeters/bandleaders/composers in Britain/ the world/Dixieland/jazz' (delete as applicable), and can recur so frequently that the reader starts wondering just who isn't one-of-the-finest. Whoever they are, good for them: jazz is and should be full of vulnerable, inconsistent and unpredictable human beings, and that's another thing that makes it fascinating.

Along with the artist entries are those which cover musical terminology, jazz jargon, venues, festivals, writers, record labels, and whatever other matters seemed appropriate in an A to Z of jazz. I've often discussed a musician's career on record, because jazz has been documented by gramophone recordings for almost its entire history, to an amazingly comprehensive degree, and we can only guess at the abilities of those musicians who, through their own choice or the intercession of fate, chose not to make records. Most of the artist entries conclude with the listing of a single CD (in a few rare instances, a vinyl LP) which seems to me to be especially characteristic of the artist in question - although that doesn't necessarily mean it's either their very finest work or, in some cases, even a good record. If you wish for more information, I would point you in the direction of the rather useful Penguin Guide To Jazz On CD.

I've tried to avoid making the artist entries slavishly biographical, since such an approach is rarely fun to read: if you must know exactly who played with whom and for how long, consult The New Grove Dictionary Of Jazz, a peerless factual resource which I am happy to acknowledge. Instead, I've attempted either a lightning sketch or a more detailed and considered portrait. At the same time, please excuse me if there are any errors of fact.

Finally, I hope that the contents herein will also raise an occasional smile as well as offering some measure of enlightenment. For a music which is so full of laughter and sheer joy, it's surprising how so many jazz reference works aspire to being solemn, worthy and unswinging.”

R. D. Cook

Hank Mobley in the Down Beat Hall of Fame - 2019

© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

It’s hard to think of any other Jazz musician whose recorded work was as consistently pleasing as that of tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley’s efforts on Blue Note in the 1950’s and 60’s.

I’m sure the fact that Hank had a talent for composing catchy and intriguing hard bop compositions may have had something to do with this, but I always liked the sound he got on tenor saxophone, too. Unfortunately with the likes of Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter still on the scene when Hank was at the height of his popularity, the sound he got on the big horn was difficult for some to hear over the work of these trend-setters on tenor sax.

What is remarkable, too, is the fact that while there are many tenor saxophonists who get a sound like Dex, Sonny, Coltrane and Shorter, few players today sound like Hank and that’s a shame because Hank’s purity of tone and endless ideas helped make the instrument’s sonority softer, more mellow and less angular than the tone achieved by many of his contemporaries.

Kenny Mathieson put some thoughts about Hank in a slightly different context when he wrote”

“Hank Mobley occupies an odd position in the hard bop pantheon. If Lee Morgan was the quintessential hard bop trumpeter, Mobley sometimes seemed miscast within the genre, sporting a tenor saxophone sound which was almost the antithesis of everything which hard bop implied.

The confusion is a surface one - his music was fundamentally part of the movement, and he is one of its master craftsmen. He has been routinely passed over - both David Rosenthal in Hard Bop and Thomas Owens in Bebop hardly mention him other than in passing as a sideman, and Rosenthal does not include any of his records in his selected hard bop discography - or described as undervalued so often now that it has become a cliche, but his career reflects that neglect in unmistakable fashion.

Even his most ardent admirers concede that he lacked the power and individuality of the premier tenormen of the day, Coltrane and Rollins, but his contribution to the music was an important and lasting one, and he is hardly to be ignored simply because he stood in the shadow of giants. Jazz is much more than a history of its greatest figures, and Hank Mobley played his part to the fullest.” In Cookin’: Hard Bop and Soul Jazz, 1954-65, [p. 153]

Well, it would seem that Kenny Mathieson and I along with legions of other Mobley supporters now have something to celebrate as Hank finally got some of the recognition he so justly deserves with his election to the Down Beat Hall of Fame via the 84th annual Readers Poll.

Here’s the article from the December 2019 edition of the magazine which announced this momentous occasion and describes the salient features of Hank’s background and the milestones in his Jazz career.

"Hank Mobley MASTER OF CONTRASTS" By Aaron Cohen

One night in November 1955, a cooperative then known as The Jazz Messengers took the stage of New York's Cafe Bohemia. Their performance would yield two albums (At The Cafe Bohemia, Volume 1 and Volume 2 on Blue Note) and help spark the rise of hard-bop.

“At 25 years old, tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley should already have been widely acclaimed for what he brought to the ensemble: making tricky tempo changes sound easy, playing with a big, full sound on ballads and penning strong compositions. But when his name was introduced on the first night at the Cafe Bohemia, he received just a brief smattering of applause. That contrast between his incredible artistry and an audience's understated reaction encapsulates his career.

Critic Leonard Feather described Mobley as "the middleweight champion of the tenor saxophone." Likely not intended to be disrespectful, the phrase implied that his sound was somewhere between a heavy, aggressive style (like Sonny Rollins), and gently swinging one (like Lester Young). But the "middleweight" designation left him underappreciated in the annals of jazz history.

Additionally, Mobley retreated from the public eye for a number of years, which earned him a reputation for reclusive-ness. Still, just as middleweight champion boxer Sugar Ray Robinson inspired the legendary Muhammad AH, Mobley set the pace for many celebrated tenor saxophonists who followed his path, including his friend John Coltrane.

Now, with his induction into the DownBeat Hall of Fame more than 33 years after his death at age 55, Mobley s name has joined the ranks of the esteemed artists he influenced. Much of his best work has been assembled for the newly released eight-disc box set The Complete Hank Mobley Blue Note Sessions 1963-70 (Mosaic). The collection illustrates the evolution of Mobley's instantly identifiable sound and his unique compositional approach. His muted harmonic twists and flowing rhythmic exchanges—while often hewing close to the blues— offer a crucial statement on how jazz was transformed during that decade. Dissonance, electronic experimentation and more open-ended collective improvisation were not the only stylistic advances that marked what became known as "The '60s." Mobley's warm tone didn't necessarily coincide with cliches of the tumultuous era, as the saxophonist purposefully placed himself beyond perceived trends.

That individualism came across in one of his rare interviews, which he gave to writer John Litweiler for "Hank Mobley: The Integrity of the Artist-The Soul of the Man," which ran in the March 29,1973, issue of DownBeat.

Mobley said to Litweiler: "When I was about 18, [my uncle] 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."

That uncle, multi-instrumentalist Dave Mobley, encouraged the musical inclinations of his nephew, who picked up the tenor saxophone at around age 16. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Mobley's experiences ranged from playing in r&b bands to a brief stint in the Duke Ellington Orchestra. But the bop revolution captured Mobley's passion as he started recording his own compositions in 1953, two years after drummer Max Roach brought him to New York.

In the early Jazz Messengers (before Art Blakey took the helm), Mobley's writing and improvisations incorporated advanced harmonic ideas while maintaining strong ties to the blues. On his mid-'50s Savoy records, Mobley's challenging compositions emboldened teenage trumpeter Lee Morgan, who would become one of the saxophonist's ongoing musical foils.

Blue Note signed Mobley as a bandleader in 1955, and for the next 15 years he would record extensively for the label. The fervor in his playing and writing while he was in his mid to late twenties remains astonishing. Mobley recorded one of his landmark albums. Soul Station, in 1960, highlighting how, as the sole horn player, he engaged with a formidable rhythm section of Blakey, bassist Paul Chambers and pianist Wynton Kelly. The results are a triumph, especially the group's modern-leaning take on Irving Berlin's "Remember" and Mobleys assertiveness on his own "This I Dig Of You."

Mobley gained much wider attention when he joined Miles Davis' group in 1961. He plays on the trumpeter's album Someday My Prince Will Come, as well as two live LPs recorded at The Blackhawk in San Francisco. Mobley’s earlier experience with Chambers and Kelly, Davis' rhythm section stalwarts, proved valuable. The saxophonist's tone highlighted what he described as "not a big sound, not a small sound, but a round sound," most vividly on ballads. This approach blended impeccably with the bandleader's muted tone.

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 Down Beat 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.”   

                          

Night in Tunisia

Here Comes - Frank Foster（Blue Note 5043）

Joe Morello Drum Solo 1964

Jimmy Heath REALLY BIG The Picture of Heath

Remembering Jimmy Heath 1926 -2020. R.I.P.