BST 84273

Hank Mobley - Hi Voltage

Released - March 1968

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, October 9, 1967
Blue Mitchell, trumpet #1-5; Jackie McLean, alto sax #1-5; Hank Mobley, tenor sax; John Hicks, piano; Bob Cranshaw, bass; Billy Higgins, drums.

1965 tk.4 Two And One
1966 tk.6 Bossa Deluxe
1967 tk.12 High Voltage
1968 tk.15 Flirty Girty
1969 tk.16 Advance Notice
1970 tk.18 No More Goodbyes

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
High Voltage	Hank Mobley	October 9 1967
Two and One	Hank Mobley	October 9 1967
No More Goodbyes	Hank Mobley	October 9 1967
Side Two
Advance Notice	Hank Mobley	October 9 1967
Bossa De Luxe	Hank Mobley	October 9 1967
Flirty Gerty	Hank Mobley	October 9 1967

Liner Notes

IT WAS a long time ago, so I cannot remember precisely the details of my first encounter with Hank Mobley. Possibly it was at Birdland or one of the other long-departed clubs; certainly it was the Max Roach Quintet that had lured me out for the evening. But Roach’s young tenor man was new to me; new in fact to most of those who were listening that night.

Even at that stage of his evolution (this was late in 1951) Mobley had the distinction of not being a carbon copy of some prevailing favorite. Around that time too many tenor players tended merely to imitate a very big sound, inspired by Gene Ammons, or the light, “four-brothers” tone quality of which Stan Getz was to become the most celebrated representative. The 21-year-old newcomer with Roach stood firmly in a middle ground between these popular extremes. As he later put it himself in an interview, his was not a big sound, not a small sound, just a round sound.

Today, thousands of gigs and scores of albums later, that thoroughly personal timbre has become very familiar, along with the style Hank brings to it. Familiarity, though, has not bred contempt; it has given every Mobley album a guarantee of quality.

The Mobley story goes back even further than my Roach recollections. Recently I ran into Paul Gayten, the pianist and former bandleader now living in Los Angeles, who gave Hank his first job of any consequence. “lt happened in a strange way,” he said. “Hank was recommended to me by someone who had never met or heard him, but simply knew about him by reputation—Clifford Brown. I was working around Newark, but Clifford was hospitalized in Wilmington after being seriously injured in a car crash. I saw him in Wilmington and he hipped me to some of the guys I could find to work for me in that area. He said he’d heard about this wonderful 19-year-old tenor man who was coming up fast. “I wound up with a band that included not only Hank, but also Sam Woodyard, Cecil Payne, Aaron Bell, and sometimes Clark Terry. “Hank was beautiful. He played alto, tenor and baritone, and did a lot of writing. He took care of business and I could really leave things up to him. He was on some records that we made, but the band had to play mostly rhythm and blues. Whenever we got a chance, though, we’d stretch out on something like Half Nelson and you could really hear that some exciting things were going to happen with Hank. He stayed with me until I broke up the band, at the Savoy in New York in 1951. He was one of the greatest sidemen I ever had.”

Hank’s path along the road to maturity took him on a level course through the latter days of the bebop era. While many musicians of the day were trying to smooth out some of the rough edges of bop (in certain cases this led to the so-called cool counter-revolution), Hank already had his own thing pretty well together. During the middle and late 1950s he seemed just as much at ease with the typical combos of that period (the hard bop phase) as he had in his earliest days. Some critics have detected in him, during his more recent performances, a slight Coltrane influence. It would be difficult indeed for any tenor saxophonist with open ears not to have absorbed a touch of Trane during the 1960s, but the inherent quality of the Mobley sound, and the craftsmanlike way in which he has evolved his own facility of phrasing (let’s call ¡t the Mobley Mobility) pre dudes any strong resemblance between the two. 

ln this new and potent collection of Mobley originals, Hank is flanked by some distinguished companions. Richard (Blue) Mitchell, the pride of Miami, Fia., was of course firmly fixed in the minds of Blue Note listeners as an authoritative voice in the Horace Silver Quintet from 1958 through 1964. He has worked frequently as leader of his own combo, in person and, of course, on Blue Note. Blue’s abundance of soul and lack of pretentious- ness made him an ideal colleague for Hank in the front line. “This was the first time Blue and I had recorded together,” says Hank. “I always dug his work, and it was no surprise to either of us that we got along just fine on this date.” The presence of Jackie McLean is a noteworthy and, as it turned out, completely compatible plus factor. His albums in the past few years (and some of his written comments) attest to McLean’s evolution in the direction of the avant garde, yet on this straight-down-the-middle date he is quite evidently at home. “Jackie is a very adaptable musician,” Hank observes. “so it was easy to steer him ¡n the direction that seemed right for this context.” John Hicks, though perhaps less familiar to some listeners, and riot as frequently heard on records as other members of the group, was a logical choice for the piano chair. “When we made this album,” says Hank, “we’d just finished working together at La Boheme. It was a kick to be able to follow it up by joining forces on a record date.” Born in 1941 in Atlanta, Hicks was raised in Los Angeles and St. Louis. He studied at Lincoln U. and at Boston’s Berklee School, worked with the Al Grey-Billy Mitchell combo in Chicago, then went to New York. He has been featured with the combos of Kenny Dorham, Lucky Thompson, Art Blakey and many others. Bob Cranshaw and Billy Higgins, of course, are too familiar to need any detailed introduction, particularly since they both contributed so valuably to Hank’s highly successful album A Caddy for Daddy (4230). High Voltage is one of those numbers that sets an immediate and irresistible groove. After a repeated figure used as an intro- duction, Blue Mitchell moves in and, as Hank says, “toys around with a little figure and goes straight ahead from there.” The theme, a 24-bar blues, later provides an equally suitable, down- home framework tor Hank (note how even his most emphatic, longest-held notes retain the easy-going tonal quality that is so characteristic of him); then for Jackie, who builds it up forcefully but funkily from where Hank left off; and finally by John Hicks, whose blues credentials become instantly apparent.

Two and One opens with a two-chord piano introduction that is retained as a sort of drone effect under the delineation of the theme. The melodic line, deceptively simple, has an arresting effect as Blue introduces its insistent downward plunges. The three horns and Hicks are featured arid Billy Higgins’ support is a galvanizing feature throughout. No More Goodbyes offers a peaceful, moving example of Hank’s ability to create and interpret a ballad. His experience as a sideman with Miles stood him ¡n good stead, as a graduate course in the art of lending meaning (and a personal quality) to a melody that has few notes but much harmonic beauty. Hicks, both in his backing for Hank and his impressionistic half-chorus solo, complements the overall mood. Play this one again and again; each time you will find new hidden nuances in its chordal and linear message.

Advance Notice lives up to its title as John Hicks, in an opening solo that is actually a first chorus rather than an introduction, serves advance notice of how the theme will sound when played by the ensemble. It’s a very basic 16-bar work in an A-A-A-B format. Hicks really digs in with full, funky force in a second solo right after the ensemble. The three horns then have their say, with Hank particularly engaging in a rather angular, motion- packed solo. . Bossa De Luxe, a minor theme at a moderate pace, reminds us that Hank is just as much at home with the Brazilian bossa as he was with the “Baptist beat” (to quote one of his earlier song titles). McLean reaches back to his Bird origins in an imaginative flight; Blue soars eloquently and elegantly; Hank adjusts his sense of timing and phrasing to the Rio-influenced character of this track. Hicks, with important cooperation from Bob Cranshaw and Higgins, lends a moody, wistful touch before the reprise of the melody. Flirty Gerly is a hip, jaunty unison theme that ambles along with the kind of happy, humorous feeling one often observes in the compositions of Horace Silver, in whose group Hank was the original tenor star. All four soloists dig in masterfully here. Notice too, incidentally, that Bob Cranshaw does a great deal more than merely walk his way through the proceedings. Postscript: Webster’s New International defines “voltage” (aside from its electrical significance) as “intensity of feeling.” Listen to this album and you’ll be convinced there could have been no more fitting title.

—LEONARD FEATHER

Cover photo by FRANCIS WOLFF
Cover Design by REID MILES
Recording by RUDY VAN GELDER

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT HI VOLTAGE

Hank Mobley found his own personality early, and maintained it through various changes in jazz directions and fashions, as Leonard Feather's original notes stress; but this is not to say that Mobley was untouched by a variety of divergent if not outright opposing stylistic forces. This session from 1967 is indicative of what we've come to recognize as late-period Mobley, and finds those forces clearly present.

No longer at the center of the music's development, as in his Jazz Messengers/Horace Silver/Miles Davis heyday of 1954—61, Mobley was now reflecting both the exploratory and more venerable populist impulses driving jazz musicians in the late 1960s. "Two and One" represents the freedom side, where open harmonic structures and more declarative improvisations invited the Coltrane comparisons Feather cites. Of course modal forms had been a regular part of Mobley's arsenal since his Davis days; but coupled with the blunter tone and less decorative lines heard here (and throughout the four years that remained of Mobley's recording career), the turn from dense changes to leaner scales produced a more direct mode of expression. There is a sacrifice in the surprising detail that Mobley uncovered with such regularity in his previous phases, but the unexpected turns and accents remain amidst a more rhythmically insistent environment.

The beat had indeed grown emphatic, reflecting a conjunction of such factors as the proven success of several soulful hits with danceable beats on this and other jazz labels throughout the past decade, the commercial explosion of pop music that the Beatles had triggered four years earlier, and Blue Note's new status as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Liberty Records. All of this is most obvious on the track "High Voltage," which advertises its kinship to Lee Morgan's "The Sidewinder" by giving trumpeter Blue Mitchell not only the ensemble lead but also both the opening solo and the inevitable fade-out blowing spot. On other Mobley sessions of the period, Francis Wolff (serving in the producer's slot previously occupied by Alfred Lion) attempted to make the pop connection through inclusion of a guitar, albeit all world-class jazz guitarists like Sonny Greenwich and George Benson. Here, Mobley enhances the grooves with effective writing for the three-horn front line and, on "Advance Notion," some winning contrary motion. The program's emphasis on funky beats may reflect a defensive move on Wolff's part to keep this venerable Blue Note artist (second only to Horace Silver in longevity as a leader on the label) in the good graces of new ownership, but the producer also made space for some of Mobley's trademark lyricism on "Bossa De Luxe" (which is Latin but hardly an authentic samba) and the ballad "No More Goodbys." The presence of Billy Higgins also guaranteed that any rhythmic pattern would dance — "Flirty Gerty" being a prime example.

The band represents a successful mixture of proven colleagues from the recent past (Cranshaw and Higgins), a fellow saxophonist and Messenger alumnus who crossed paths with Mobley most memorably on Lee Morgan's Cornbread album (Jackie McLean), and two musicians with less extensive ties to the leader. Mobley's memory fails him when he claims that this was his first recorded encounter with Blue Mitchell, as the pair is heard on the Atlantic album Together that drummers Elvin and Philly Joe Jones co-led in 1961, as well as on one of the 1963 sessions that produced Freddie Roach's Blue Note opus Good Move. In contrast, this was Mobley's one and only studio meeting with John Hicks. The pianist is another former Art Blakey sideman who was introduced to many listeners in the 1964—65 edition of the Jazz Messengers, and who was at the front end of two years of service as Woody Herman's pianist when Hi Voltage was recorded. Working under the direction of such proven talent scouts should have made Hicks a familiar presence on record far sooner than proved to be the case. As his work here demonstrates, he was already a spirited and flexible soloist and accompanist, yet many years would pass before the pianist's talents began to receive their due. In an earlier era, Hicks might have become a Blue Note leader on the strength of the promise shown here, yet he made but one further appearance on the label, accompanying Lee Morgan in February 1968 on the Taru session that first appeared more than a decade later, when Hicks was in the midst of his final key apprenticeship in Betty Carter's rhythm section.

— Bob Blumenthal, 2004