Hank Mobley, Blue Note, 1960. Catalog number BLP 4031. It is the record I reach for when I want something great that is not going to yell at me before 8 a.m.
Mobley cut it in one day, February 7, 1960, at Van Gelder's place in Englewood Cliffs, Alfred Lion producing, Reid Miles on the cover design, Francis Wolff on the photograph. The usual Blue Note machine running at full speed.
The band is a quartet. Mobley on tenor, Wynton Kelly on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, Art Blakey on drums, and no second horn. Nobody to hide behind for 37 minutes.
That is why the record works. Mobley has to carry every head and every solo himself, and he does it without ever pushing his tone past where it wants to sit.
Leonard Feather called him the middleweight champion of the tenor saxophone, and it fits. He does not have Coltrane's fire or Rollins's size. He plays in the middle of the horn with a soft round sound and phrases that never quite land where you expect. You have to lean in a little. Once you do, it is hard to listen to anything else.
The rhythm section is the tell. Kelly and Chambers were Miles Davis's guys in 1960, and Mobley would join that band himself before the year was out. Blakey had been his boss in the Jazz Messengers. So these are four musicians who already knew each other cold, walking in with nothing to prove to each other.
Blakey is the surprise here. He is famous for the press roll and the volume, and on this session he plays quieter than he does almost anywhere else in his catalog. He is still driving it. He just does it with brushes and touch instead of force. Listen to what he is doing behind Kelly and you will hear a completely different drummer than the one on Moanin'.
The album opens with Irving Berlin's Remember, taken bright, and closes with If I Should Lose You. Two standards as bookends. Everything in between is Mobley's own writing.
This I Dig of You is the one people know. It is uptempo, the melody is catchy in a way jazz tunes usually are not, and it has been covered constantly since. If you only take one track off this record, take that one.
The title track is the other essential. Just over nine minutes, a slow blues, and nothing about it is in a hurry. Mobley takes his time getting to the point and the point turns out to be worth waiting for. This is the one that eats up a chunk of the commute and leaves you calmer than you started.
Dig Dis is more blues, shorter and grittier. Split Feelin's runs just under five minutes and swings hard. Neither one is filler and neither one is trying to be the big statement.
Six tracks, four of them originals, one session, no wasted space. Bob Blumenthal put it well in the reissue notes: this is understood to be, for Mobley, what Saxophone Colossus is for Rollins and Giant Steps is for Coltrane. That is the right comparison. It is the record where a very good player made something undeniable.
The catch is that Mobley never got the credit those other two got. He recorded a mountain of Blue Note sessions through the 1960s, played on some of the best records anyone made in that decade, and stayed underrated the entire time. He is still underrated. People who love jazz will list ten tenor players before they get to him.
Their loss. This one is right there and it has been right there since 1960.
If you like it, Roll Call was recorded that November with Freddie Hubbard added on trumpet and issued the following year, and it is nearly as good.
Nobody was ever going to call Mobley the best tenor player alive. He did not need to be. He needed one record where everything lined up, and this is the one.