One of Jazz’s Most Underrated Saxophonists: Hank Mobley

When my coworker Robert heard that I was getting into jazz, he brought a CD into work for me. “You need this,” he said smiling. He slid the jewel case across the dusty top of my computer terminal. It was Hank Mobley’s Soul Station.

Set against a black background, beneath three rows of simple text, Mobley’s face and shoulders hovered in the center of the album cover, a statuary bust awash in aquamarine. “He looks like he’s high out of his mind,” Robert said. It was true. Head back, eyes hidden beneath heavy lids, the young tenor wore a euphoric smirk whose mix of bliss and self-assurance seemed to dare you to ask what he was so ecstatic about. But what if he wasn’t high, just ecstatic? Couldn’t this be a smile of satisfaction and excitement, the pure childlike reverie musicians feel when playing stirring music in a well-equipped studio? Although I didn’t know it then, Mobley had had drug problems off and on — many jazz players had — but at the time of this recording, he was as clear as his polished horn. You can hear it in the music. This album is his masterpiece. That’s why it’s fitting that he holds up his saxophone in triumph on the cover.

In 1979, at age forty-nine, Mobley told journalist John Litweiler, “It’s hard for me to think of what could be and what should have been. I lived with Charlie Parker, Bud Powell…