Coleman Hawkins and The Jazz Tradition

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

For whatever reason, lately I’ve been spending a lot of time with “the sweep of history” as it pertains to Jazz. Maybe it because the music is only a few years away from celebrating the 100th anniversary of its first recordings which the Original Dixieland Jazz Band made in 1918.

In this regard, I’ve turned to three books to satisfy my historical curiosity: [1] Marshall Stearns, The Story of Jazz; Martin Williams, The Jazz Tradition and Ted Gioia’s The History of Jazz which is now in its second edition.

For sake of simplification, Professor Stearns, the founder of the Institute of Jazz Studies, talks about stylistic developments in the evolution of Jazz; Martin Williams one of Jazz’s most distinguished authors, critics and reviewers focused on key figures in the shaping of the music over its first century while Ted Gioia, the award winning author, teacher and scholar tends to blend both approaches in his seminal work on Jazz history.

Having previously spent time on these pages with the noted essayist Whitney Balliett’s New Yorker Magazine feature on tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins which he simply entitled Bean [Coleman’s nickname among musicians], the editorial staff at JazzProfiles wanted to return to the subject of the man who almost singlehanded “invented” the Jazz saxophone [apologies to Benny Carter], this time through the capable and insightful work of Martin Williams.

Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon and John Coltrane are deservedly considered to be the titans of the contemporary style of Jazz saxophone, but Coleman Hawkins, [along with Lester Young] was The Main Man for many years.

As Dizzy Gillespie said of Louis Armstrong: “No him, no me;” Sonny, Dexter and John could certainly say the same about Coleman Hawkins.

COLEMAN HAWKINS Some Comments on a Phoenix

“Periodically jazz musicians and listeners rediscover tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins. Even during the time of major changes in the mid-'forties, the avid bebop partisan accepted Hawkins as a part of the jazz scene, as he accepted no others of Hawkins's contemporaries of the 'twenties and few of his companions of the 'thirties. One might call Hawkins a thorough professional, but he was also a major performer and he belonged to a generation in which these two things might go together as a matter of course.

Periodically Hawkins also seemed to rediscover himself. He listened to everyone, but however much his own playing reflected what he heard around him, Hawkins remained Hawkins.

Probably everyone who knows Hawkins's work has a favorite, relatively late recording on which he feels the saxophonist played particularly well. My own is the Shelly Manne-Hawkins LP called "2 3 4." Not only did Hawkins remain an exceptional player for decades he also recorded prolifically. An exhaustive survey of his records would be a lengthy and perhaps pointless task. But it might be useful to suggest the nature of his early style, indicate the course of his development, and point out what seems to me some of his more durable performances.

Coleman Hawkins's contribution has been so comprehensive that it is impossible for any tenor saxophonist to avoid some reflection of his influence unless that player were to do a fairly direct imitation of Lester Young or perhaps Bud Freeman. Yet, when one listens to Hawkins on his very earliest records, one hears no promise of his stature as a player. One hears a young man performing with calculated and rather superficial raucousness, a slap-tongue tenor player with little more than shallow irreverence to recommend him.

However, one can note that this clowning soloist obviously knows his instrument, knows his chords, and has a sure sense of time and tempo. Thus the Coleman Hawkins heard on his 1923-24 solos with the Fletcher Henderson orchestra. However, the Coleman Hawkins heard on Henderson's T.N.T., recorded in October 1925, is a very different player. The basis of the difference is quite apparent: rhythmically and melodically, Hawkins's brief solo is early Armstrong. The Stampede, made a few months after Armstrong's departure from the orchestra, is even more revealing. Cornetists Rex Stewart and Joe Smith burst forth with brass hyperboles, reaching for Armstrong's excitement. Coleman Hawkins follows Armstrong's lead too, but he treats his style not as a series of effects but rather as a series of definite musical ideas in a cohesive structure.

A year or so later, on Goose Pimples, the young Hawkins has become more himself, cutting through with the hard staccato phrases that characterize his playing of this period. However, on the 1928 version of King Porter Stomp we hear Hawkins still echoing the young Armstrong fairly directly.

The disappointing Hawkins of this period is the Hawkins of the twelve-bar blues. He is not a blues man, and he seems to have known it. But unlike some of the early stride pianists, he was not content merely to play the blues form without the feeling. And unlike, say, Earl Hines or Benny Carter, he was not prone to work out a personal and introspective style within the idiom. Hawkins set out to learn to play the blues with blues feeling. He did learn and he has played some very good blues, but to the end of his life he sounded as if the slow blues were, for him, something acquired.

Blazin’ from early 1929, seems to me one of the best early revelations of a developing Coleman Hawkins style, and in it we hear the increasing reliance on the vertical, on Hawkins's exact and growing knowledge of chords, and on spreads of arpeggios. From a sound, youthful grounding in music, especially in piano instruction, Hawkins knew the notes in chords and learned to form passing chords between assigned ones. He also had the clear example of jazz reed players like Jimmy Noone and Buster Bailey who played arpeggio styles. But it is interesting to learn that an encounter with the harmonic and embellishmental sophistication of pianist Art Tatum was a turning point in Hawkins's development.

His solos on the Mound City Blue Blowers' Hello Lola from 1929, and Henderson's Chinatown from the following year, show some of the dangers of his new approach. It is as if in making all the chords, Hawkins also became determined to make all the beats, and he made them in a more or less regular, heavy/light/heavy/light pattern. At faster tempos, once he was past his entrance, Hawkins's phrasing settled into a rhythmic regularity, and an almost brilliant articulation of proper notes sometimes trails off into a kind of rhythmic mutter. The risks involved became increasingly obvious in later performances: his knowledge of harmony, his regularity of rhythm, and his hardness of tone could lead him to mechanically formed solos delivered with a forced emotion.

On New King Porter Stomp, Underneath the Harlem Moon, Honeysuckle Rose, and other pieces from 1932, Hawkins found a temporary rhythm solution. He would assume a momentary rhapsodic stance: triplets and more complex phrases flutter and curve away from the beat, apparently without intending to swing. Although the ideas in these solos are fine, the rhapsodic phrases are delivered with an earnestness that is almost affected. He was using the same approach as late as 1937 on the justly celebrated recordings of Honeysuckle Rose and Crazy Rhythm done with Benny Carter in Paris.

Hawkins's early celebrated ballads, One Hour with the Blue Blowers (1929) and Talk of the Town with Henderson (1933), are both exceptional and both indicative of the mood that would yield his later masterpieces. But both are imperfect in revealing ways. Talk of the Town is a good improvisation weakened by lush effusiveness. One Hour is a better solo, a combination of lyric ideas and traditional jazz phrases; it makes all the chord changes properly and it is showy without being untidy. But Hawkins's tone is still especially hard and brittle, as if his only protection against sentimentality were to take on the mask of toughness.

A blues man might not have had problems with excess of tone and emotion because he might not have had sentimental temptations. Not that the Hawkins of this period had no emotional protections. On Wherever There's a Will, Baby, with McKinney's Cotton Pickers, he combines a fine sense of musical fun and hokum with firm musical ideas. [1. On Henderson's Sweet Music (1931) and I Wanna Count Sheep (1932), however, Hawkins momentarily returned to Armstrong and, remarkably, the mature Armstrong of 1928-33].

One should also mention Queer Notions that Hawkins made with Henderson, on which the increasingly sophisticated Hawkins provided himself with just the sort of challenging medium-tempo vehicle he wanted. As one would expect, the challenge is largely harmonic. But I think that Hawkins's two choruses on Hokus Pokus from 1934 are probably the best of all his solos with Henderson. They are perhaps not typical, being more directly melodic and less arpeggiated, but they combine the robustness of his early work with a sophisticated melodic sense and a touching, almost nostalgic lyricism. The choruses seem also to have been highly influential: they outline the essentials of the style used by Herschel Evans and his associates and successors, Buddy Tate, Illinois Jacquet, and (most recently) Yusef Lateef. Of course it is possible that Hawkins, as a constant listener, may have picked up such phrases as these touring the Southwest with Henderson, but it is also possible that this so-called Southwest tenor style was first expounded by Coleman Hawkins in a New York recording studio.

When Coleman Hawkins returned from Europe in 1939, he entered his great period as a jazz soloist. He had continued to expand his basic harmonic techniques. He had come to terms with his own lush and sentimental temptations, which means that he had learned to sustain a true lyric mood and therefore no longer needed the sometimes forced and usually brittle edge to his tone that he had apparently found necessary before. The sharpness of vibrato heard on One Hour cannot be heard on Body and Soul.

Rhythmically, however, there sometimes seems to have been no solution, and Hawkins's double chorus on The Sheik of Araby, recorded in January 1940, fails almost as it succeeds. It is a tour de force of the sort which dazzled and delighted his fellow musicians, yet Hawkins's swift, knowing harmonic disentanglements are nearly lost in a predictably regular accentuation. In such moods Hawkins is in effect attempting to be not only his own soloist, but his own harmonist and his own rhythm section as well. However, he does build these choruses gradually, both emotionally and technically, without resorting to bathos or musical banality. Other solos from the same period show Hawkins's final and best rhythmic solution. His chorus on Dinah, recorded with Lionel Hampton a month earlier, is another harmonic delight. Rhythmically it frankly sets up the expectation of more or less regular heavy/light/heavy/light accents and varies them just briefly enough, often enough, and obviously enough to relieve any encroaching monotony.

Body and Soul (1939) is the accepted Hawkins's masterpiece. The record reveals not only Hawkins's knowing use of increasingly sophisticated techniques but his brilliant use of pacing, structure, and rhythmic relief. He saves his showiest arpeggios, opening melodiously and introducing implied double-time along the way. His second recorded improvisation on the Body and Soul chords, originally called Rainbow Mist (1944), is not quite the equal of the original but his absolute sureness and ease at what he is about, and his ability to let the performance build, are the work of a great musician.

They are also the work of a great improviser. I have heard Hawkins's work deprecated as "just arpeggios," and the complaint has been lodged that in his solos he leans heavily for a sense of order on the fact that the modifying chords in popular songs repeat in relatively short cycles. But arpeggios and cyclical patterns of harmony are Hawkins's means, much as they were J. S. Bach's in certain moods, never his end. Anyone who has heard him replay a standard Hawkins piece, or heard him play the same piece successively, will understand the committed creativity with which Hawkins approaches his means.

I would say that the great period that began in 1939 for Hawkins continued through 1944. That latter year was a prolific one in records for an always prolific player, and itfound Hawkins present on several very good sessions and two excellent ones. One of the finer sessions was with players who had also been outstanding in the mid-'thirties, Teddy Wilson and Roy Eldridge, and produced I'm in the Mood for Love. The other excellent session produced Sweet Lorraine, Crazy Rhythm, and the superb The Man I Love by Hawkins and a rhythm section.

Sweet Lorraine, the one slow ballad recorded on the date, shows Hawkins forming his chord-spreads into meaningful melodic phrases. Rhythmically he glides easily from one heavy beat to the next, variously curving around the light ones. His tone is firm but not harsh. Hawkins's decision to play The Man I Love at medium tempo, but with the soloists taking it in "long" meter, set up a dramatic basis for exploring Gershwin's chord changes. Hawkins plays with uncompromising involvement and a plentitude of ideas. A variety of traditional-sounding riffs and blues phrases interplay in surprising cohesiveness with showy arpeggios. Brief phrases which break up Hawkins's regular accents are placed with great effectiveness, and the performance is perhaps Hawkins's masterpiece of relieving rhythmic contrast.

The fact that the years 1939-44 found Hawkins at a peak had a more than personal importance, for in these years most young saxophonists were under Lester Young's influence, and Young often overrode harmony in the interests of melody and his original rhythmic ideas. After 1944 Hawkins fell in easily with the young modernists because his knowledge of chords, both theoretical and pragmatic, allowed him to. Rhythmically, he continued to live in the early 'thirties —  but, again, with more regular accents than many players of that period. Hawkins also did not seem out of place, I expect, because younger players like Dexter Gordon had arrived at a synthesis of Hawkins and Young.

Hawkins did begin to sound dated harmonically by the mid-'fifties. On a Thelonious Monk date, made in 1957, he was momentarily intimidated by some of the thick complexity Monk gives to his chords. However, Hawkins's quick solution, to go ahead and play what he knows, is the solution of a mature man, and his solos show it. Hawkins continued to listen: later he used simple scalar embellishments in his solos that echoed the more complex ones of John Coltrane.

Among Hawkins's more direct pupils, one thinks most particularly of two men. The most brilliant is Don Byas, but Byas was never as successful as Hawkins in varying his phrasing; even the staggeringly sophisticated techniques of finger and harmony on Byas's I Got Rhythm or Indiana are phrased and accented with freight-train regularity. Perhaps the greatest pupil Ben Webster, was almost Byas's opposite. Long an exceptional soloist, Webster became a great one, I think, after he accepted the limitations of his fingers and embouchure and became a simple and eloquent melodist.

The standard term for Hawkins's sensibility is romantic. Terry Martin has suggested, however, that, if Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster were romantic saxophonists, then Hawkins's work was by comparison both too ornate and too detached to be called romantic, and that it would be better to describe his talent as dramatic. I am inclined to agree, and I further suggest that the best critical touchstones and analogies for Hawkins's kind of drama lie outside jazz. His sense of drama was like that of the great aria and lieder singers, the special declamatory drama of the concert singer and the concert stage, a tradition which Hawkins himself deeply admired.

One might call Webster a player of great natural musical instincts, and Hawkins a player of great natural musical curiosity making use of the techniques that his innate curiosity led him to acquire and assimilate. Thus Hawkins survived more than four decades, a player whose commitment to improvisation was essential.”

The following video features Coleman Hawkins with Hank Jones on piano, George Duvivier on bass and Shelly Manne on drums performing Avalon.

Herbie Mann and Jazz Flute [From the Archives]

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

“Herbie Mann is a brilliant flautist with a light, skipping attack and an unfailing rhythmic sureness.

Mann occupies a similar position to Charles Lloyd's in recent jazz history. Influential, but cursed by commercial success and an unfashionable choice of instrument, both have been subject to knee-jerk critical put-down. Where Lloyd's flute was his 'double', Mann's concentration slowly evolved a powerful and adaptable technique which gave him access to virtually every mood, from a breathy etherealism, down through a smooth, semi-vocalized tone that sounded remarkably like clarinet (his first instrument), to a tough, metallic ring that ideally suited the funk contexts he explored in the late 1960s.”

- Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed.

“Herbie Mann was the first Jazz musician to establish his career performing only on flute.”

- Christopher Washburne, Bill Kirchner, Ed. The Oxford Companion to Jazz

Herbie Mann [1930-2003] was my introduction to Jazz flute. It came in the form of an album Herbie did for Mode Records in 1956 entitled Flute Fraternity [Mode #114; reissued on CD as V.S.O.P. #38].

Joining him on the LP was fellow flutist [flautist?] Buddy Collette and a rhythm section comprised on Jimmy Rowles, Buddy Clark and Mel Lewis [one of the most underrated rhythm sections of all time].

Over the span of his career,  Mann was a prodigiously versatile instrumentalist and one of the most talented of jazz flutists, playing Latin jazz, bop, cool jazz, and jazz-rock with equal brilliance. He has restlessly explored many other popular and ethnic styles, mixing them and changing from one to another as musical fashion and his own developing interests dictate.

Leroy Ostransky offers this synopsis of Herbie’s career in Barry Kernsfeld, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995]:

“Mann, Herbie [Solomon, Herbert Jay] (b New York, 16 April 1930). Flutist. He studied clarinet from the age of nine and later took up the flute and saxophone. He gained experience of playing during his three years' army service in Trieste, Italy, and after returning to the USA played and recorded with Mat Mathews (1953-4) and Pete Rugolo (1954). He toured France and Scandinavia in 1956, and in 1960 led a group which, under the sponsorship of the US State Department, visited 15 African countries; he became familiar with the bossa nova style on two tours of Brazil (1961—3) and in 1964 toured Japan. He then established a big band in which he played tenor saxophone and which was enthusiastically received when it appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1965. Over the next few years he used elements of ethnic music and blues in his compositions.

In 1969 Mann became a record producer for Embryo, a subsidiary of Atlantic Records. An astute sense of musical trends led him to begin playing rock music in 1971 and by 1973 he had formed his own group, Family of Mann, which incorporated sounds from many kinds of music, including Japanese court music, into its performances. In England in 1974 he experimented with rock once more and also played reggae; his disco recording Hi-jack was a hit in the USA in 1975, but after this success he immediately reverted to the style in which he had played in the early 1960s. Atlantic terminated his contract in 1979 and Mann started his own recording company, Herbie Mann Music, in 1981.”

Mann continued to lead his own groups that played a variety of musical styles including bossa-nova, reggae and Jazz fusion until his death in 2003 while occasionally celebrating his straight-ahead as was the case with a week-long residency at New York’s Blue Note Jazz club in honor of his 65th birthday.

Joe Quinn provided the following liner notes to Flute Fraternity [Mode #114; reissued on CD as V.S.O.P. #38].

“One of the happy by-products of the contemporary jazz scene has been the corporate union of identical instruments into small jazz groups. These ventures are the result of the musicians' experimental nature, and they have had wide popular acceptance as well as giving the performers an opportunity to realize fully the possibilities of their instruments. Jazz fans of varying intensity are thoroughly intrigued by the combination of two or more established jazz stars collaborating within the same framework.

The number of these sessions which have taken place after working hours is incalculable. The origin of such unions might be difficult to trace, but the impact on musician and listener alike is invariably one of stimulation and excitement. This MODE LP, featuring flutists Herbie Mann and Buddy Collette, adds still another chapter to the colorful history of fraternal instrumentation.

These two young men rank with half-a-dozen talented reed players who have lifted the flute from the confines of the classical orchestra to a place in the jazz spectrum. Independently, each man has advanced the stature of the instrument to a point where they have done LPs for various labels with everything from a trio to a full string orchestra. Musically, their lives are dedicated to enlarging the scope of the flute family because they believe that its piercing tone and subtle blending are deserving of full membership in the society of jazz instruments.

Herbie Mann has had a variety of jobs in the music business, relying on his clarinet tenor talents in the reed sections of various dance bands to sustain him during his break-in period. Once his reputation as a jazz flutist began to take shape, he formed his own group and has worked most of the major jazz clubs in America. In the late summer of 1956 he journeyed to Europe as a single and was an immediate success on the jazz-starved continent. His talents, as this LP will show, also extend to writing and arranging,

Buddy Collette is one of the most thoroughly schooled musicians to step into the jazz picture in the past decade. Although he came to national prominence as a member of the Chico Hamilton quintet, Buddy has had the respect of the music trade since his introduction. In addition to his brilliant flute work, Buddy is also proficient on clarinet and the tenor and alto saxophones. Twenty five of his original compositions have been recorded by major jazz stars, and his arrangements— two of which are heard here—have been among the most musically rewarding charts heard anywhere. At this writing, Buddy is fronting his own quartet, and is contemplating a national tour, possibly in union with Herbie Mann.

To support their collective instrumentation, Herbie and Buddy relied on the rhythm talents of three superior musicians who have attracted the approbation of jazz lovers everywhere. Pianist Jimmy Rowles has built a sterling reputation as a modernist with taste and touch adaptable to a variety of moods. Bassist Buddy Clark and drummer Mel Lewis make up 25 per cent of the Dave Pell Octet and contribute in their playing, the rapport that is born of frequent collaboration.”

My favorite track on Flute Fraternity is drummer Chico Hamilton’s bright composition Morning After which was arranged by Buddy Collette for the date and features his clarinet and Herbie's flute. The use of piano to underscore the voicing is in keeping with its classical lines.

You can listen to it on the following video tribute to Herbie Mann.

Hank Mobley - So Talented, So Often Overlooked [From The Archives]

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

“There is a place in modern jazz for a music that is technically enormously sophisticated, yet retains its creator's warmth; that is as intense as the greatest contemporary works, yet presents an open, welcoming surface wherein grace, even gentle humor, appear in the stead of the conventional fierceness; that is permeated with the blues, but without sentimentality or the kind of pandering that the work "funk" has come to represent. Hank Mobley has made that place for himself.

As H.L. Mencken wrote of Beethoven, there is no place for cheapness in Mobley's art; there is no evasion of the artist's responsibility for immediate communication (indeed, the absence of the cliche in Mobley's music can only be compared to the rare likes of Bud Powell). But the whole-hearted spirit of melody and swing on these rediscovered sides is the most direct kind of invitation to the listener: "The beat, the beat, they've got to have that beat!" says Mobley, and this set is typical of his work.”

-John B. Litweiler, insert notes to A Slice of the Top [Blue Note 33582]

"One thing about Hank,he sure plays relaxed. Hank's my favorite tenor player. He plays very fluently. He's very mature in his playing. I think he's very underrated."

- Freddie Hubbard, trumpet

“The hallmark of Mobley's playing is his precise and idiosyncratic use of rhythm. Initially this led him to produce very intricate improvised melodies whose impact was sometimes jeopardized by the extreme strain they imposed on his technique and timing. But he soon evolved a style in which his harmonic and rhythmic inventiveness was matched by an immaculate adherence to the beat, a subtly expressive use of tone, and beautifully relaxed delivery.”

- Michael James, The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, [p. 784]

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 the 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.

In Cookin’: Hard Bop and Soul Jazz, 1954-65, Kenny Mathieson puts these thoughts about Hank in a slightly different context when he writes:

“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 full.” [p. 153]

Bob Blumenthal echoes this theme in his insert notes to Hank’s Blue Note album No Room for Squares when he writes:

“... many listeners … simply relegated Mobley to the middle of the pack — ‘solid, but not indispensable,’ as one critic recently wrote.   Such judgements, while hardly universal, were common enough to rob Mobley of deserved accolades both in life and death.

If Mobley lacked anything, it was the drive to become a "star" in the context of the jazz world; he surely was not lacking in talent. In a sense he was the quintessential sideman, particularly during the years 1954-63, when he worked for virtually every important non-tenor-playing leader on the East Coast. His own star turns were confined primarily to Blue Note record dates, where Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff recognized his strengths and made him one of the most frequently featured artists on the label. Mobley repaid this confidence by producing sessions that survive as definitive and rarely equalled examples of hard bop. Yet there were always more flamboyant or more radical musicians around to overshadow

Mobley's achievements; during the first part of the 1960s, when he reached his creative peak in sessions such as those contained on the present compact disc, his work was considered irrelevant next to the manifestos of the free players. By the end of the '60s, with rock overwhelming all styles of jazz, Mobley had sunk into an obscurity from which he never really emerged.”

Bob elaborated a bit further on some of the factors associated with Mobley’s obscurity in these comments he prepared for the Mosaic Records boxed-set The Complete Blue Note Hank Mobley Fifties Sessions [MD6-181]:

“[According to] the baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter [a patron of Jazz musicians in New York City in the 1950s and 1960s], Hank Mobley's aspirations [having] to do with the conditions performing jazz musicians seek yet find all too rarely  … [included] ‘Somewhere to play where people aren't just comparing you to someone else’....

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.”

In this excerpt from his insert notes to Workout [Blue Note CDP 7 84080 2], Leonard Feather explains Hank’s distinctiveness this way:

“Perhaps the reason for this steady reputation is that Hank through all these years has remained more or less unclassifiable. Though he has worked with musicians of the hard bop school, his tone and conception scarcely qualify for the "hard" definition.

Nor is it possible for the experts to categorize him as a member of this or that school of tenor players. His only major influence has been an alto saxophonist, Charlie Parker. There is little in him of Hawkins, Young or Rollins, and not more than a trace of Coltrane, as far as I can detect.

The lack of a classification must be counted as a virtue rather than a shortcoming, since it indicates what many of us suspected all along: that Mobley has been basically his own man, with no restrictive allegiance to any one source of inspiration.”

In Roll Call [Blue Note CDP 7 46823 2], Ira Gitler states:

“Mobley has been underrated. It is more than unfortunate that certain terms generally and accurately employed to describe him; steady, reliable musicians' musician, etc. have lost the dignity of their definitions and have come to imply only mediocrity. If Mobley is too frequently ignored or relegated to the rear in discussions of modern tenor saxophonists it is probably due more to a hero-jaded public consciousness than to the real capacities or limitations of his talent.”

In his insert notes to A Caddy for Daddy [Blue Note 84230] Ira goes on to explain that regarding Hank’s output on Blue Note:

“It is instructive, and eminently enjoyable, to trace Hank's career through these recordings. His growth as a player is inextricably bound up with his development as a writer. Material dictates playing directions and Mobley has managed to find new combinations within the tradition of his chosen music to nurture his art. Remaps this does not seem like a great accomplishment but in light of the many absurdities being carried on in the name of jazz these days it certainly merits recognition and praise.”

Richard Cook,  in his The Biography of Blue Note Records offers this perspective on Mobley’s place in the history of this distinguished Jazz label:

Mobley has always been a favourite among Blue Note collectors - perhaps the favourite musician in such circles. Though a journeyman rather than any kind of ground-breaking voice, he was more influential than jazz histories have often allowed. Many British musicians of the fifties and sixties would seek out his elusive records. If a figure such as Sonny Rollins was too overpowering a voice to be useful as an influence, the more diplomatic Mobley could offer more practical material to work with. His three great records are surely Soul Station, Roll Call and Workout.

…. What swings [these] records on to the top level, though, is Mobley's extraordinary understanding of how he makes time work for him. For such a relaxed sounding tenorman, with his unruffled, lean tone and curling melody lines, the way he can handle the beat, every inflexion in the line timed to go with an aspect of the pulse, is little short of amazing. Mobley's mastery is so complete that it often deceives the ear. He might seem to be lagging behind, or staggering slightly, yet there's never any need to right himself - he had it in the pocket all along.” [pp. 146-147]

My favorite of Hank Mobley’s many Jazz compositions is his No Room for Squares, the title tune from a Blue Note LP by the same name [84149]. The tune forms the soundtrack for the following video tribute to Hank.