BLP 4080

Hank Mobley - Workout

Released - February 1962

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, March 26, 1961
Hank Mobley, tenor sax; Wynton Kelly, piano; Grant Green, guitar; Paul Chambers, bass; Philly Joe Jones, drums.

tk.3 Smokin'
tk.4 Uh Huh
tk.8 The Best Things In Life Are Free
tk.11 Workout
tk.15 Greasin' Easy

Session Photos

Photos: © Francis Wolff/ Blue Note Records

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Workout	Hank Mobley	26 March 1961
Uh Huh	Hank Mobley	26 March 1961
Side Two
Smokin'	Hank Mobley	26 March 1961
The Best Things in Life Are Free	Lew Brown, Buddy DeSylva, Ray Henderson	26 March 1961
Greasin' Easy	Hank Mobley	26 March 1961

Liner Notes

HENRY MOBLEY is the middleweight champion of the tenor saxophone.

That is to say, he is not to be compared (and this judgment is made in terms of size of sound as well as fame/fortune and poll victories) with such heavyweights as Coleman Hawkins or John Coltrane, both of whom, in their respective eras, can be considered the most consistently unvanquished. Nor is there any necessity to relate Hank to the lightweights, headed by Stan Getz and the various brothers, step-brothers and half-brothers of the 1950s.

Hank is the middleweight champion because his sound, as he once put it himself, is "not a big sound, not a small sound, just a round sound" And because, while fads and fancies change, while poll winners come and go, he has remained for the past decade a consistently successful performer, working almost exclusively as a sideman except on records, and retaining a firm, loyal following.

Perhaps the reason for this steady reputation is that Hank through all these years has remained more or less unclassifiable. Though he has worked with musicians of the hard bop school, his tone and conception scarcely qualify for the "hard" definition. Nor is it possible for the experts to categorize him as a member of this or that school of tenor players. His only major influence has been an alto saxophonist, Charlie Parker. There is little in him of Hawkins, Young or Rollins, and not more than a trace of Coltrane, as far as I can detect. The lack of a classification must be counted as a virtue rather than a shortcoming, since it indicates what many of us suspected all along: that Mobley has been basically his own man, with no restrictive allegiance to any one source of inspiration.

Hank was just 21 when he first came on the big time scene in 1951. At that time he was beginning an association with Max Roach that lasted off and on for two or three years. He had been with Dizzy Gillespie for a few months, and had just joined Horace Silver, when I heard him in the fall of 1954 with a quartet Horace was leading at Minton's Play House.

It was around that time that Hank began to acquire a full grasp of what he wanted to do, a definite direction in terms of style and sound, plus the necessary technique with which to carry out his precepts. At least, that was the way it seemed to me at the time.

As his numerous Blue Note appearances through the years make clear, this sense of direction became even more conspicuous as Hank matured in the late 1950s. Space prohibits a full listing, but a representative sampling of his progress can be gleaned from a study of the Jazz Messengers sets under Horace's direction on 1518, Horace's own quintet date on 1539, Mobley's All Stars with Bags, Blakey and Horace on 1544, and the more recent Soul Station on 4031.

The present set is of particular interest since it brings Hank together with a somewhat different personnel. The most interesting feature is the presence of Grant Green, the remarkable 30-year-old guitarist from St. Louis who, though he has only been in New York and the big time for a very short while, already has gained the acceptance and respect of every musician with whom he has come in contact. Grant's own LPs to date are Grant's First Stand, 4064, and Green Street, 4071.

The rest of the personnel comprises longer-established associates of Hank. Wynton Kelly has been heard on dates with Lee Morgan, Johnny Griffin and others as well as in previous work with Mobley. Paul Chambers, at 26, probably has more first-rate record sessions to his credit than this album has grooves. Philly Joe, now 38, has been a well known jazz figure since 1952, when he joined Miles Davis; a vital force in modern music since about 1955, and today has precisely the kind of influence on other drummers that Chicago Jo Jones had after he came East from Kansas City with Basie in 1936.

It is Philly who sets the groove for Workout, the opening track. This minor theme is composed of two-bar phrases that leave alternating two-bar gaps for Philly to fill. Hank is relatively reserved in his first blowing chorus, but gathers steam during the second, in which, by the way, you'll notice a couple of Bird-like phrases showing the Parker impact has not been lost along the way. An expressive moment is the series of short, gasping notes in the release of the third chorus. Grant Green arid Wynton follow, then Philly has a solo for sticks in which you may notice that everything, even the hi-hat, achieves rhythmic variety.

Uh Huh, another Mobley original, is intriguing in its simplicity, basing the melody almost entirely on B Flat, D Flat and E Flat (including the release). Hank has some voluble moments that spill over into sixteenth notes at times without ever destroying his sharp sense of continuity and ability to maintain a flowing melodic line. Green is at his most Christianesque and Wynton, as is often the case, is strongly blues-oriented. Paul Chambers' solo, inventive and fluent, gains suspense from the device (often used by the late Oscar Pettiford) of hesitating for a beat or two and starting a phrase on or just before the third beat of the measure.

Smokin' is an up-tempo blues in which Hank consistently lives up to the title. Grant Green gets a light, easy sound yet is never overbalanced by Philly Joe or any of the rhythm section-a credit to Rudy Van Gelder's engineering, which gives full life to soloists and accompaniment while achieving all the necessary separation. Wynton has an extraordinary degree of control, mentally and manually, at tough tempos. You'll notice during his fifth 12-bar go-round that he hits on a little descending figure: then repeats it rhythmically but alters it melodically to give a sense of symmetry to much of the next eight bars. Hank is brilliant on this track: dynamic in his solo, varied and relaxed in the fours with Philly.

The Best Things in Life Are Free, the only standard in the set, is ancient history, a 1927 pop song, treated by Hank in a manner I always find attractive: the melody played more or less straight for the opening chorus, with the bass in two to give it a loping feel, but walking in four during the release for a swinging contrast. Hank, Grant, Wynton and Paul all seem equally at home with the agreeable changes in their blowing passages.

Hank's tune Greasin' Easy is a moderate, modern-with-traditional-roots blues, funky without any of the tonal degeneration or derisive condescension that sometimes goes along with the younger modernists' concept of funk. Hank, it seems to me, demonstrates his confidence and ingratiating warmth most completely when he plays blues at this tempo. Grant Green's solo has two aspects, thanks to Philly Joe, who throws him into dual relief by playing for a while in double time and then relaxing into a regular four. Wynton builds a deft solo, graduating from single-note lines into what is, toward the last 12, mainly a full-chorded statement.

After listening to these sides, and recalling too the impression Hank made on me a couple of months ago when I caught him with Miles Davis' combo, I decided out of idle curiosity to dig back into some of the record reviews in which Hank had been mentioned in the past few years. I found, not much to my surprise, that he had been called all the following things, by a dozen of the leading jazz writers: fluent, tasty, assured, mature, authoritative, individual, big, bustling, hard, virile, very masculine, sinuous, sinewy, muscular, thoughtful, modern (yet rooted in tradition), imaginative, sensitive, consistently fine.

These, Hank, are all the things you are. Or at least some of the things you are. I'm sure there will be many more such bouquets tossed your way with the release of this album and of others to follow it in the years ahead. That is, if we critics don't run out of adjectives.

-LEONARD FEATHER
(Author of The New Encyclopedia of Jazz)

Cover Photo by FRANCIS WOLFF
Recording by RUDY VAN GELDER

Wynton Kelly and Paul Chambers play by courtesy of Vee Jay Records.

This is one of Hank Mobley's four great recording sessions in 1960 and 1961, all of which also feature Paul Chambers and Wynton Kelly. WORKOUT was the third session and included Grant Green and Philly Joe Jones. One additional tune from this album remained unissued until 1985. It is a swinging, unique version of "Three Coins In The Fountain" which was issued on Another Workout. Green is not heard on this selection.

- Michael Cuscuna

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT WORKOUT

Forget middleweights, the music from the middle of Hank Mobley's recording career is invariably of championship caliber. Workout is almost dead-center, the middle of the middle, and as such has widely been considered at least near, if not at, the pinnacle of his consensus masterpiece, the early-middle Soul Station of the previous year.

It is probably not coincidental that the phases of Mobley's music conform roughly to his employment status. During the '50s, the saxophonist was heard most often under the leadership of his fellow Jazz Messengers, Art Blakey and Horace Silver, while his most notable job in the early '60s was with Miles Davis. These were the leading small groups of the hard bop period and hardly incompatible conceptually, although Davis and the Messengers displayed divergent approaches to various matters of time and space and texture. Mobley was clearly at home in each setting, though his own sessions turned in the direction of the more streamlined Davis groove in 1960, when Soul Station and the subsequent Roll Call featured Davis sidemen Wynton Kelly and Paul Chambers, with Blakey on drums. The drummer here is Philly Joe Jones, who had worked with Kelly and Chambers in and out of the Davis band, and who would occasionally appear in Jimmy Cobb's place during Mobley's 1961 tenure with Davis that commenced around the time Workout was recorded.

Mobley had a history with each member of this rhythm section, and rarely went through radical adjustments at this time, but the refinements of sound and phrasing that Leonard Feather alludes to in the original liner notes had brought the saxophonist to a leaner, more lyrical peak that was tailor-made for a Miles Davis rhythm section. One sign is the patented in-two, then straight-four pocket on "The Best Things in Life Are Free," another is the way in which Mobley sustains invention over the harmonically static main phrase of "Uh Huh." Kelly, already a superb accompanist when he and Mobley first encountered each other on Blue Note (including the saxophonist's 1958 album Peckin' Time), had become a definitive groove setter after nightly work with Chambers and Jimmy Cobb in the Davis band. He excels here as he always did with Chambers and either Jones or Cobb alongside, as does Philly Joe, who pushes on the title track in a manner that recalls Blakey on '"Workout" and takes an equally inspirational if less extroverted role elsewhere.

Grant Green's presence is a bonus, as well as the first Blue Note appearance by the guitarist without organ in the ensemble. (Green had taped five titles with the same rhythm section four months earlier, though they were not released until 2001 on the guitarist's First Session.) It is not surprising that Green, who considered Davis to be as important an influence as any guitarist, was a perfect choice for the present band, or that his declarative style would thrive equally well alongside organ, piano or — as he would prove six days later when he taped Green Street — with just bass and drums.

Mobley's year with Miles Davis accounted for some of the most treasured chapters of the saxophonist's recorded legacy, including some spectacular live solos ("Walkin"' from Friday Night at the Blackhawk and "No Blues" from Miles Davis at Carnegie Hal/ are particularly outstanding). There was also the great "Old Folks" tenor solo on the Davis studio album Someday My Prince Will Come (Jones, like John Coltrane, returned for some of the Prince sessions) and, under Mobley's own name, the December 1961 session with Kelly, Chambers, and Jones that surfaced in 1988 as Another Workout. When Another Workout did finally appear, it also included the debut of the extra track from the present session, "Three Coins in a Fountain," for which space was not available on the original Workout LP. It is another excellent performance, which is reunited here with the remainder of the March 1961 session.

While most of Mobley's later recordings represent a turn to a harder sound and more blunt attack, the middle period did run at least through the beginning of 1963, when the saxophonist led a quintet with Jones on drums and soon-to-be-Davis-sideman Herbie Hancock on piano that cut some gems originally spread between the Mobley discs No Room for Squares and The Turnaround.

— Bob Blumenthal, 2005