E-Mail   |   Print   |   Request Reprints   |   E-Mail Newsletters   |   RSS

An interview with Derek Ansell, author of Workout: The Music of Hank Mobley ($33.50/£13.99, Northway Publications, 2008).

The tenor saxophonist and composer, Hank Mobley, appeared on scores of jazz recordings in the 1950s and 1960s, with over 25 LPs released under his name. He was a draw in jazz clubs but never a major attraction. Though admired by his peers--he was known as a "musician's musician"--he attracted scant critical praise. Quiet and reserved and with little talent for self-promotion, he rarely performed in the last decade of his life. Since his death, his reputation has grown, with new attention to his compositions and the release of a steady stream of remastered CDs. The star treatment continues with Derek Ansell's new book devoted to Mobley's recorded legacy.

Forbes.com: Though your book contains almost all the biographical information that's available on Hank Mobley, there's very little known about Mobley's personal life. Would the book have taken a different form if more were known about him?

Derek Ansell: I don't think more info on Hank's life would have been particularly relevant. Jazz folk, I've found, are interested in the man standing out front at the club and blowing his horn, or listening to him on record. I honestly don't think they much care what he had for breakfast or if he had one, two, three or no wives at all. The music is everything. Likewise with Hank, the music was truly everything. If we had known a lot about his private life, I don't think it would have altered my approach to and work on the finished book. If, for example, he had experienced bad relationships with several women, would his music have indicated that? I don't really think so.

Mobley and the musicians he recorded with most often, including other first-rate musicians like Jackie McLean, Donald Byrd and Kenny Dorham, were contemporaries of the better-known and much more influential Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins. What's the place of musicians like Mobley in the musical history of their era?

I think he was a one-off who went his own way, and after initial influences early on, like Lester Young and Parker, he plowed his own field and never changed drastically, as, for example, Rollins and Coltrane did. Hank is to them, I feel, as Lester Young was to Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster and company. A unique, true original and an innovator who came up with his own truly personal sound and style.

Mobley's sound is distinctive even on his earliest recordings--particularly on ballads--and there's a sense that over the course of his career he kept moving toward realizing his famous "round" tone, almost as if it had always existed in an idealized form. So although, like Coltrane, he was for a period in the bands of Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis, Mobley--unlike Coltrane--seems to have emerged from those experiences relatively unchanged. What does this tell us about him?

I think it tells us that he was totally original, not easily influenced by what was going on around him but determined to develop and expand his own style and individual sound. He didn't get on too well with Miles, but perhaps that was because they really were too much alike, individualists, only prepared to go their own way in their own time and to hell with everybody else.

Despite pronounced critical indifference to Mobley's recordings during the first part of his career, producers at Blue Note Records kept calling him in for record dates. Considering his posthumous fame and the number of Mobley's recordings still in print, that was a wise business choice. Was that decision based on sales or Blue Note's commitment to a favorite artist?

Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, Blue Note's founders, cared deeply about the music and the musicians they recorded. Music came first with those two, money second. They stayed with unfashionable (at the time) musicians like Hank and Tina Brooks and kept recording them, even though sales were sometimes poor. Tina never made it commercially, but Hank started selling reasonably well and, possibly against expectations, sold really well and consistently over a long period of time. And that's jazz! Pop records may sell a million in three months and die, never to be heard again. Jazz records live on through decade after decade and are still selling steadily after 70-odd years. Louis Armstrong is a prime example.

Mobley was a prolific composer, and Blue Note encouraged him to record new material at most of his recording dates. Consequently, much of his recorded work is on tunes that he's playing for the first time (or close to it), while club dates probably included a lot of standards and other material that he was more familiar with. So to what extent does his recorded work represent the musician audiences would have heard?

Mobley's work on record does seem to be rather different from his live performances. He was a good composer of original material suitable for extemporization and particularly gifted at ballad writing. As to the lengths of performances, on the record Workout this selection runs for about 10 minutes, and that includes four solos, tenor, guitar, piano and drums. When he played this piece at the Jazzhus in Denmark, his solo alone was over 15 minutes. This was a bootleg recording but probably typical of unrecorded performances in jazz clubs and concert halls. So the records are most likely not typical of the way he played live but do, of course, give an accurate example of his great talent.

In the book you reserve your highest praise for Mobley's 1960 recording, Soul Station. What makes it his best?

Soul Station was the recording where everything that Hank had been building towards seemed to coalesce at once into a near-perfect record. Everything was right: the material, a consummate mix of standards, originals and blues; the rhythm section of Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Art Blakey; and the obviously buoyant atmosphere in the studio on that particular day. Even so, records like Workout particularly were very close behind; and super sessions like Another Workout, Roll Call and Hank Mobley and His All Stars represent the very best of Hank Mobley on record.

Article Controls

E-Mail   |   Print   |   Request Reprints   |   E-Mail Newsletters

del.icio.us   |   Digg It!   |   My Yahoo!   |   Share   |   RSS