Well, Thanksgiving has me horribly behind on everything yet again, so let the catch-up begin! Like most of the jazz here, this one was identified via "core listening" lists. Prior to scooping up the contents of these lists, Hank Mobley was pretty much unknown to me. He was virtually a lifer for Blue Note Records, and was that label's tenor mainstay, in competition with better known names like Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane. I'm not the first one to point out the similarities between this album and Rollins' Saxophone Colossus. Both albums are a mix of originals and standards, with Mobley preferring to sandwich his originals with the covers.
Hank Mobley borrowed two guys (Kelly and Chambers) from Miles Davis, who would in turn borrow Mobley himself as his sax man, one among a few in the interim period between Coltrane and Wayne Shorter. By the early 1970's, Mobley retired from music due to ill health, which, unfortunately, did not give him the opportunity to raise his name to the same level as his better-known tenor colleagues.
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