Cashbox : 09/24/1960

Mobley is a tenorman with a compulsion to swing, and this he does here, for not only does his own rhythmic sense stand him in good stead, he has the good fortune of the Kelly–Chambers–Blakey rhythm section. And these three also contribute their own outstanding solo work to the session. Excitement is generated throughout especially on Remember, Spirit Feelin’s and If I Should Lose You.

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Hackensack Record
Douglas Hall : 02/04/1961

Jazz tenor sax man Hank Mobley is a much improved horn player here, although he at times clings to a few of his old cliches. His staccato rendition of Remember is particularly good. Strong support by a star rhythm section that includes Art Blakey, his former employer and Jazz Messenger head.

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San Francisco Chronicle
Ralph J. Gleason : 04/02/1961

This is the best LP Hank Mobley has yet made. Several of the tracks, especially This I Dig of You and Dig Dis are great, cohesive swinging efforts. Accompaniment is by Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Art Blakey.

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Stoke-On-Trent Evening Sentinel
Stylus : 05/27/1961

In the cold atmosphere of a recording session – or what musicians call “a blowing date” – it is a rare occurrence when all the performers knit together and each solo is capped by the next.

It happens on This I Dig of You – a highlight from the Soul Station album – with pianist Wynton Kelly, tenor saxist Hank Mobley and drummer Art Blakey flowing loosely and powerfully. A high-standard LP by jazz craftsmen.

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Down Beat : 12/08/1960
Pete Welding : 4 stars

Mobley‘s latest album, a well-balanced and tasty blowing session that benefits from thoughtful preparation, finds the tenor saxophonist fronting a quartet composed of three of the finest rhythm men in the business.

This is a real cooking session with a good bit of supercharged playing by both Mobley and Kelly, and firm, resilient support by the rhythm section. The four originals by Mobley are attractive pieces and provide solid frameworks for the soloists who maintain a consistently high degree of invention.

Mobley convincingly demonstrates that he is his own man, having evolved an original voice of his own, which is at once both thoroughly modern, yet rooted in traditionalism.

He apparently owes a stylistic debt to no one modernist, though there is strong evidence of his having strengthened his playing recently through the assimilation of some of John Coltrane‘s more effective and dramatic devices. Notice in particular his solo on Dig Dis, in which there is an obvious employment of rapid arpeggio figures (Coltrane’s “sheets of sound”).

Split Feelin’s is a minor-keyed, Latin-flavored original with some interesting changes that permit Mobley to spin out a telling, long-lined melodic excursion, with Kelly contributing a light, pulsant triplet-based solo. There are, as is to be expected, two excursions into the land of funk – the relaxed Soul Station, with its attractive descending figure much in the manner of the several-themed originals Horace Silver writes, and the blues, Dig Dis.

Kelly contributes an especially fine solo on Station, an improvisation that is distinguished by a fresh and variegated treatment of rhythm. The two ballads, Remember and If I Should Lose You, display Mobley’s virile tone and the strength and imagination of his extemporizing on this kind of material. On the second, a tune almost irrevocably connected with Charlie Parker, his solo is moving, impassioned, and lyrical.

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Liner Notes by Joe Goldberg

Recently, it has become more and more incorrect to pass off a jazz record as a “blowing date” (a term, by the way, that has become at least semi-derogatory) simply because there are only four or five musicians involved. The days of men coming into a studio and “just blowing” (a practice that only the very greatest jazzmen have ever been able to get away with) are apparently over, for the most part. At one time you could safely assume that a forty-minute LP had taken, at most, an hour to put together. No more.

What has this to do with Hank Mobley? Quite a bit, to judge from this LP, Soul Station. On the surface, it contains all the elements of a blowing session – tenor and rhythm, a few originals, a couple of seldom-done standards, and a blues. But the difference is to be heard as soon as you begin to listen to the record. And let us take things in what might seem to be reverse order for a moment, and discuss the reasons for the difference itself. Hank has always been a musician’s musician – a designation that can easily become the kiss of death for the man who holds it. Fans and critics will reel off their list of tenor players, a list that is as easily changed by fashion as not, and then the musician over in the corner will say, “Yes, but have you heard Hank Mobley?” The musician saying that, in this particular case, might very well be a drummer. The groups Hank works with are often led by drummers – Art Blakey and Max Roach, to name two men who need, as they say, no introduction, and the first of whom contributes a great degree to the success of this album. One might suppose, considering this, that Hank is possessed of an unusual rhythmic sense, and one would be right. In a conversation I had with Art Blakey while preparing the notes for his two Blue Note LPs called Holiday for Skins (BLP 4004-5), he was discussing the fact that while many songs are written in complex rhythms, the solos generally revert to a straight four. His reason for this was that most soloists probably could not play them any other way. “Hank Mobley could do it, though,” he said. But even while possessing this definite asset, Hank has also carried a liability around with him for a long time – a liability, that is, as far as commercialism is concerned: he is not easily classified. Everyone knows by now how writers on jazz like to trot out phrases like Hawkins-informed, Rollins-derived, Young-influenced and the like, and then, having formed their pigeon-hole, they proceed to drop the musician under discussion into it and fill the dirt in over him. That is not easily done with Hank Mobley. He is, to be sure, associated with East coast musicians and material, but he has never had the so-called “hard bop” sound that is generally a standard part of the equipment of such tenormen. At the same time, Charlie Parker was certainly a greater part of his playing than Lester Young, which is often enough to label a man as a bopper, so what was Mobley doing? The answer is so simple as to be completely overlooked in a mass of theory, digging for influences, and the like: he was working out his own style.

But – and here again, he suffers from a commercial liability – he did not do it in a spectacular way. He did not, in the manner of Sonny Rollins, in 1955 emerge from a long self-imposed retirement with a startling new approach. Nor did he, in the manner of John Coltrane, come almost completely unknown under the teaching influence of the great Miles Davis (for how many men has that recently been the key to success). Instead, he worked slowly and carefully, in the manner of a craftsman, building the foundations of a style, taking what he needed to take from whom he need to take it (everyone does that, the difference between genius and hackwork is the manner in which it is done), and finally emerging, on this album, not with a disconnected series of tunes, but with a definite statement to make.

Evidence of that, to get back to the idea with which these comments began, is to be found in the care with which this set has been assembled. First of all, there are the sidemen – Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, and Art Blakey. To discuss Blakey again on each now record release is almost to insult him and his contribution to jazz, particularly since he says it himself very well, clearly, and with great authority in his solo on This I Dig Of You. But about Wynton Kelly and Paul Chambers, for a moment. It is probably no accident that both of them are members of Miles Davis’ group – I hesitate to call it a quintet or sextet, since that is so often in doubt. Miles has been famous for the superb quality of his rhythm sections as much as for any of his other contributions, and some of the ideas that started in his group or in his observance of Ahmad Jamal‘s group as to be found on this record. The basis of these ideas – pedalpoint, rhythmic suspensions, a general lightness of approach – all have their basis in one underlying idea – the best music is never very far from dance. This concept can be found not only in Miles’ work, but in the solo albums made by Coltrane, in those of Sonny Rollins, and even in the work of Thelonious Monk, who has taken to doing his own extremely expressive dance in front of his group. This is not to say that any of these men, or Hank Mobley either, “play for dancing,” although what they play is certainly more conducive to dancing than the music of Freddy Martin or Guy Lombardo, but that the qualities that are essential to dance – a lightness, flow, and flexibility, all within the confines of a definite form and overall sense of a structure – are essential to their music.

The unusual sound of Mobley’s tenor might very well come of this idea of dance. Jazz is rich in legends of unknown saxophonists, celebrated only in their immediate area, but having an enormous effect on men who went on to much wider acclaim. These men being small-town on-the-stand musicians, playing for dances, for the most part, have had, in all likelihood, a sound very much like the sound of Mobley’s tenor, or like Coltrane’s or Rollins’, for that matter. And it would take a man with a knowledge of dance music to pick as fine and unlikely an old song as Irving Berlin‘s Remember to start this set with. (Monk, incidentally, also has a penchant for old Berlin tunes.)

I think also, that dance must be behind as charming, lightly swinging, and immediately attractive a song (song is the right word here, not “tune” or “original”) as Hank Mobley’s composition This I Dig Of You, which brings out the best of all the musicians – Blakey’s solo has been mentioned before, and I am particularly charmed by Wynton Kelly’s solo, with its ever-present echoes of The Party’s Over.

These ideas are present, but the four men involved are all excellent craftsmen, so the ideas do not intrude upon the music, as sometimes happens with the sometimes over-selfconscious Modern Jazz Quartet. You do not think of dance, of rhythmic shifts, or the changing approach to the tenor saxophone, or the old tunes, or the inevitable funky blues. You simply hear, at first, four men swinging lightly, powerfully, and with great assurance and authority. You relax, listen, and enjoy yourself. And then later, when you think about it, you realize just how much of an achievement this apparently casual LP represents. And you think with new admiration and respect about Hank Mobley, because you realize how much of that achievement he has been able to make his own.