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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pw: sgtg

Oliver Nelson - The Blues And The Abstract Truth (1961)

Simply one of the greatest jazz albums ever made.  More details needed?  Have a look at the all-star cast on the cover.  Still not convinced?  Download and enjoy. Six perfectly composed instant classics, with wonderfully harmonized main melodies each giving way to a round of solo spotlights, either in blues measure or near enough, and a sumptuous, reverb-bathed production.

The Blues And The Abstract Truth has always been a November album for me, ever since checking it out of the library at university, popping it in my Discman and walking through the darkening, windswept and rainy streets of Edinburgh listening to Stolen Moments for the first time.  Kind Of Blue, Blue Train et al became part of my life around that same month, but this album has stayed with me more consistently than any other from the 50s-early 60s canon.

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