CONSERVATIVE, NOT pROGRESSIVE:

Hank Mobley was born in Depression-era rural Georgia but raised in Elizabeth, New Jersey. In 1946, aged 16, he picked up a saxophone and taught himself theory and harmony from books that his grandmother bought for him. By 19 he was playing in local R&B bands, and he soon began working with jazz greats such as Gordon and Lester Young, who visited nearby Newark for gigs. Through playing in Newark, he met the pioneering bebop drummer Max Roach, with whom he played intermittently for two years, and Dizzy Gillespie, who also hired Mobley to play in his band.

In 1954, Mobley joined Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, a new five-piece that included Blakey on drums, Horace Silver on piano, Kenny Dorham on trumpet, and Doug Watkins on bass. The group, led nominally in its early years by Silver and Blakey, is widely held to have founded the new genre, 'hard bop', a response to both the cushy pleasantness of West Coast jazz and the introverted intellectualism of New York bebop. The name 'Messengers', with its evangelical overtones, hints at the inflections of gospel and blues that would give hard bop its audience-friendly flavour. No more beatnik berets and professorial pipes -- with hard bop, swing was most definitely the thing.

Mobley embodied the budding hard bop scene. Leaving the Messengers in 1956, he embarked on a remarkably prolific recording and composing career, and became a solid fixture of Blue Note's sessions. Even in his earliest recordings, Mobley seems to have already come upon a sound that was all his own -- bluesy but not clichéd, soulful but smart, and with little of the caustic bark with which Rollins and Coltrane muscled out their improvisations. In the liner notes of the 1961 album Workout, critic Leonard Feather named Hank Mobley 'the middleweight champion of the tenor saxophone'. The praise might seem backhanded, but Feather intended the 'middleweight' designation to describe the tonal balance of Mobley's sound -- not too brazen, not too 'cool' -- than the quality of Mobley's imagination. As Mobley himself described it, 'My sound is not a big sound, not a small sound, just a round sound.' [...]

In 1961, Miles Davis, struggling to find a replacement for John Coltrane, hired Mobley for his quintet. The career break was Mobley's shot at immortality, but Miles was dissatisfied with the addition: 'playing with Hank just wasn't fun for me; he didn't stimulate my imagination'. This bullet to the heart, and from the 'Prince of Darkness' himself, has popularised a negative perception of Mobley's aesthetic as conservative, cautious, boring, and completely incompatible with the progressive aesthetic movements of the 1960s.

To be sure, unlike Trane and Miles, Hank was uninterested in forging the sorts of conceptual paths that the Sixties required of the artist interested in remaining 'relevant'. While Coltrane pursued his meditative metaphysics and Miles went fusion-electric, Mobley largely stuck to his hard bop guns. Now, however, Mobley's 'stubbornness' sounds like a virtue, and central to the sustained quality of his recordings. 

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