The Complete Blue Note Hank Mobley Fifties Sessions (Mosaic)
Mobley (1930-1986) personified what was right with the music and wrong with the culture in jazz in the 1950s. The resonance of his tenor saxophone sound and his gifts of melodic inventiveness and harmonic acuity made him a consistently rewarding improviser. Heroin addiction undoubtedly spurred his early death. From his  beginnings with Max Roach and Dizzy Gillespie through his brilliant series of Blue Note albums in the 1960s, Mobley was an ideal collaborator with Horace Silver, Art Blakey, Lee Morgan, Milt Jackson, Miles Davis and other stars. Davis’s belittling of Mobley in his autobiography may have sprung from irritation with Mobley’s heroin problem. Regardless, in the six-CD album at hand Mobley plays brilliantly. Among the tracks with Silver, Blakey, bassist Doug Watkins and trumpeter Art Farmer are two takes of the Mobley classic “Funk in Deep Freeze.†The set abounds with such treasures.