This review is from: Soul Station (Audio CD) There are many excellent Hank Mobley records, and thankfully Blue Note has been quite good about reissuing them on CD. "Soul Station," along with "Workout," is the most consistently satisfying.

The lineup tells you that you will be hearing a professional presentation of the music: Mobley, Wynton Kelly on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Art Blakey on drums on a February 1960 recording date. Still, great lineups sometimes fail to deliver the intangibles that make for a great session. Not so here.

For me, the track that sums up the date best is "This I Dig of You," a medium-tempo take that is so relaxed it sounds effortless, but delivers unforced emotion and swing. Mobley delivers a sweetly lyrical line that Kelly comments on fluidly, and then Hank delivers a solo with his signature midregister, buttery tone. I admire him greatly because he was surrounded by other greats: Hawkins and Young before him; Coltrane, Gordon, Coleman as his contemporaries; and he cut his own ground.

There is nothing revolutionary here. It's honest, unadorned swinging using simple, effective melodies as the base. But it's like saying "Over the Rainbow" is a simple tune. The genius of these musicians is to take the middle ground material and turn it into personal, deeply felt statements that you can sing, dance to, and just kick back and enjoy, from the deep groove of "Dig Dis" to the Latin rhythms of "Split Feelin's" to the blues of "Soul Station" to the heartfelt "If I Should Lose You." The nearly perfect fusion of this quartet comes through on each of these tunes.

Mobley may slip past you if you are dipping into the archives of the great Blue Note recordings, but don't let that happen for long.