Hank Mobley/Lee Morgan: Peckin' Time (clear vinyl) [SOWING]

Why you'll love it

This pressing comes on clear vinyl. Mobley wrote four of the five tunes, and the band behind the two horns, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Charlie Persip, is about as good as 1958 got.

This edition

• Clear vinyl
• Stereo mix

About the album

Lee Morgan walked into Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Hackensack on February 9, 1958, and plays like a man with somewhere to be. Hank Mobley, the warm, round-toned tenor man of hard bop, makes the perfect foil, and the two horns trade ideas like old friends rather than rivals.

Mobley wrote everything here except the Kurt Weill standard "Speak Low," which gets a breezy, unhurried reading. "High & Flighty" kicks things off at a gallop, the title track struts, "Stretchin' Out" lives up to its name and "Git-Go Blues" closes things in a relaxed, after-hours mood. Wynton Kelly's piano sparkles throughout, with Paul Chambers on bass and Charlie Persip on drums. Ira Gitler wrote the original liner notes and Francis Wolff took the photographs, the full Blue Note treatment.

Alfred Lion produced the session and it came out on Blue Note in 1959. Mobley sounds so at ease you'd think he'd brought his own chair.

Also at Kops: more Hank Mobley on vinyl · browse Classic Jazz

Tracklist

Listen

On Sowing Records (cat# SOW055), a reissue of the 1959 album.