Hank Mobley

Henry "Hank" Mobley was born on the seventh of July 1930 at Eastman, Georgia, and raised in Elizabeth, New Jersey, near Newark, in a musical family. During a months-long illness at sixteen an uncle put a tenor saxophone in his hands, and he taught himself — theory from books, the horn from the woodshed. By nineteen he was in Paul Gayten's rhythm-and-blues band, and in 1951 Max Roach brought him into the New York circle.

In September 1954 he joined Horace Silver's quintet — Silver, Art Blakey, Kenny Dorham, Doug Watkins, and Mobley — the five who took the name the Jazz Messengers as a cooperative in 1955 and set hard bop's foundation stone. He stayed with Silver's own quintet after the split, and in 1961 filled the tenor chair in Miles Davis's band after John Coltrane — a stormy year that left Someday My Prince Will Come and the Blackhawk and Carnegie Hall recordings.

His true home was Blue Note: more than two dozen albums as leader between 1955 and 1970. On the seventh of February 1960, with Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, and Art Blakey, he made Soul Station — the quartet session held ever since as his masterpiece and a summit of hard bop — with Roll Call, Workout, No Room for Squares, and Dippin' beside it. Leonard Feather called him "the middleweight champion of the tenor saxophone," and meant it as placement, not slight: neither Coltrane's heavyweight fire nor the cool school's whisper — in Mobley's own words, "not a big sound, not a small sound, just a round sound."

The road was not kind: addiction and a 1958 imprisonment interrupted the music, and failing lungs ended it in the mid-seventies. He died of pneumonia at Philadelphia on the thirtieth of May 1986, at fifty-five. Honored be Hank Mobley, whose round sound outlasted every verdict but the music's.