Hank Mobley

Workout Hank Mobley Japan Import edition

Tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley was at the height of his career in the early 1960s, producing a breathtaking series of hard bop classics, including “Soul Station”, “Roll Call”, “No Room For Squares”, “The Turnaround” and “Workout.” Recorded in 1961, the album is an energetic quintet session featuring Mobley with guitarist Grant Green, pianist Wynton Kelly, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Philly Joe Jones. The spirited five-song set consisted of four dynamic Mobley originals that proved ideal vehicles for the powerful improvisations of the individual soloists. The only standard, “The Best Things In Life Are Free” – from the musical “Good News” – was a demonstration of Mobley's more lyrical side.

Critic Leonard Feather once described Hank Mobley, who died in 1986, as the “middleweight champion of the tenor saxophone”. By this he meant that Mobley's phrasing ranked him between two other tenor sax champions: the “heavyweight” John Coltrane and the “lightweight” Stan Getz.

As part of the extremely popular “Blue Note 85th Anniversary Reissue Series”, Universal Music Japan presents the sonically impressive remastering of this jazz classic by the legendary Kevin Gray, who is also responsible for the analog reissues of Blue Note US such as “Tone Poet” and “Classic Vinyl” – as a limited-edition Japan only UHQCD with OBI Stripe. The recording session for “Workout” took place on March 26, 1961 at the Rudy Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.

UHQCD stands for Ultimate High Quality Compact Disc and is a joint development of the Japanese CD replication company Memory-Tech and the Audio Quality CD Company from Hong Kong. Unlike conventional CDs, UHQCDs are not pressed from polycarbonate, but cast from a photopolymer and cured with UV light. Another layer of high-purity polycarbonate is applied to the softer photopolymer for scratch protection. The combination results in significantly reduced reflection of laser light inside the CD and an unmatched precise edge transition between pits and lands of the CD. UHQCDs are 100% compatible with standard CD players. Musically, the result is a sound image strongly reminiscent of analog master tapes.

While Universal Music Japan's first UHQCD series relied on the DSD data of previous SHM-SACD releases, with increasing popularity, albums that had not previously been released as SHM-SACD are now appearing. Typically, the Universal Archive master tapes are re-converted to DSD for this purpose. UHQCDs are ideal for music lovers who want to get as close as possible to the sound of the recording, but do not own an SACD player.