Hank Mobley - Soul Station (1960)

Superior Blue Note session from February 1960.  I reckoned this would round out a week of otherwise avant-garde music quite nicely as it's just so much good clean fun: Hank Mobley, the "middleweight champion of the tenor saxophone" (jazz writer Leonard Feather) might not have reshaped postwar jazz as dramatically as Davis, Coltrane et al, but he could write a clutch of neat tunes and turn out a superb record that sounds fresh as a daisy when it's about to turn 60 years old.

Soul Station is bookended by two great covers, Irving Berlin's Remember and the Rainger/Robin movie song If I Should Lose You, with the four Mobley originals in between carrying the same breezy melodiousness and adding up to an album without a single weak spot.  The more I listen to Soul Station (about three times a week on average whenever I dig it out, like this month), the more I appreciate Paul Chambers and Art Blakey as a superb rhythm section, Wyn Kelly as an underrated pianist, and every spirits-lifting line from Mobley. Just dig dis.

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