2. “A Touch of Blue,” Hank Mobley, from A Slice of the Top (1966)

​Like Grant Green, Hank Mobley was most firmly associated with hard bop and soul jazz. His 1960 album for Blue Note, Soul Station, is generally regarded as his high point as tenor saxophonist and bandleader—not a groundbreaking album, but nonetheless one of those hard-swinging, delectable records that everyone interested in jazz probably ought to own. It highlights Mobley’s signature “round” tone—warm and inviting yet free of stage-y affectations.
 
In the 1950s, Mobley made the rounds, playing with trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, drummer Max Roach, and as a founding member of the Jazz Messengers with Art Blakey and Horace Silver. In 1961, he replaced John Coltrane in Miles Davis’s quintet, but left within a year, frustrated by a band in transition—and possibly unable to fill Coltrane’s outsized shoes. “When I left Miles,” he explained in a 1973 interview, “I was so tired of music, the whole world, man, I just went back to drugs.”
 
In 1964, Mobley was arrested for heroin possession; throughout the prison stint that followed, he refocused and wrote a slew of ambitious new tunes, many of which would be recorded in 1966 for A Slice of the Top. The album brings together a curious yet potent assortment of sounds: Mobley arranged it with pianist Duke Pearson for an octet, and it features parts for both tuba and euphonium. Players included trumpeter Lee Morgan, who had been a member of the third incarnation of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in the late ‘50s; pianist McCoy Tyner, known for his pyrotechnics in Coltrane’s A Love Supreme-era classic quartet; and alto sax player and Sun Ra Arkestra veteran James Spaulding.
 
Mobley considered it his finest album—yet sadly it wasn’t released until more than a decade later, in 1979. As Mobley explained in the same interview: “I have about five records on the shelf—Blue Note had half the black musicians around New York City, and now the records are just lying around. What they do is just hold it and wait for you to die.”