Leonard Feather, one of the most powerful critics in jazz history, declared Hank Mobley “the middleweight champion of the tenor saxophone” in his liner note essay for Hank’s 1961 release, Workout. He didn’t mean it as a pejorative. After all, Sugar Ray Robinson was the legendary middleweight champ throughout the fifties, and was widely hailed as the greatest “pound for pound” fighter of all time. Feather used the term as a shorthand way of sizing up Mobley’s tone against the “heavyweights” John Coltrane and Coleman Hawkins and the “lightweight Stan Getz and the various brothers, step-brothers, and half-brothers of the 1950s.” (In other words, of Lester Young’s stylistic progeny.)
Feather’s observation was consistent with Mobley’s own self-description: “My sound is not a big sound, not a small sound, just a round sound.” But in spite of his praise for Mobley, Feather’s declaration is often perceived as a put down and cited as a reason for Mobley’s relative lack of historical and popular renown.
It was more likely Miles Davis’s disgruntlement with the Eastman, Georgia native that really hurt. Mobley, who’d already worked with Horace Silver and Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers in seminal hard bop bands of the fifties, was the second tenor player whom Miles hired following Coltrane’s departure in 1960. (Hank was also Max Roach’s first choice for the tenor chair in his band with Clifford Brown, but Mobley was nowhere to be found when Max sought him out in New York in 1953; he’d played in various Roach groups in the preceding two years.) Between Trane and Wayne Shorter, who joined in 1964, the tenor succession went like this: Sonny Stitt, Hank Mobley, Rocky Boyd, Sonny Rollins (for a short tour that also featured J.J. Johnson), Sam Rivers, and George Coleman.
In his autobiography, published in 1989, three years after Hank’s death, Miles said, “The music was starting to bore me because I didn’t like what Hank Mobley was playing in the band…Playing with Hank wasn’t fun for me; he didn’t stimulate my imagination.” Miles required powerful stimulation from collaborators, of course, and in that capacity he was in a class of his own. Coltrane, Shorter, and Rollins, who never accepted Miles’s offer of a permanent job, were Davis’s tenor ideals. On the only studio recording the trumpeter made during Mobley’s one-year tenure, Someday My Prince Will Come, he brought Coltrane back to play on two tunes. And according to Miles’s biographer Jack Chambers, Hank’s solos were heavily edited on the two volumes released from Davis’s appearances that year at the Blackhawk in San Francisco. Mobley was by all accounts a shy, retiring fellow who’d been struggling with drug addiction since he was 18; his deal with Miles couldn’t have helped.
Hank’s year with Davis continued his association with pianist Wynton Kelly, who’d joined Miles in 1959 and remained until 1963. Kelly played on Mobley’s 1958 Blue Note release, Peckin’ Time, and over the course of twelve months in 1960 and ’61, they recorded four more classic dates, Soul Station, Roll Call, Workout, and Another Workout, which was a later release. Soul Station is the crowning achievement of this series and is widely hailed as the masterpiece of Mobley’s career.
Mobley said of the pianist: “Wynton was the sort of person that a lot of people took a little bit for granted until they worked with him…He understood every direction that I was coming from and was right there all the time. You know, he could play 365 days a year and always sound the same way…no matter [what], he’d still have a certain happiness, that touch, that swing. And his touch– so full, so heavy.” He added that no matter the quality of the instrument, Kelly’s notes would “ring as if he was playing a horn.”