ELI DEGIBRI: SOUL STATION - A TRIBUTE TO HANK MOBLEY

Israeli saxophonist Eli Degibri, a sometime sideman for Herbie Hancock, Al Foster, and the Mingus Big Band, has made a tribute album to his personal hero Hank Mobley that closely follows the latter’s most famous work, the 1960 Blue Note release, Soul Station. Like the late Ronnie Scott, Degibri reveres Mobley, the overlooked and shortlived Georgia-born saxophonist who blended earthiness with a soft tone and offbeat rhythmic imagination more in keeping with the era’s ‘cool school’ than its hard-bop movement. But though Degibri’s devotion to what he calls Mobley’s ‘loud whisper’ is palpable all through, he reflects that sensibility in more muscular ways, more like a hybrid of Mobley and Sonny Rollins. Irving Berlin’s ‘Remember’ rolls out as an effortless flow of gruff low tones, canny turns and sparing double-time sprints. A shrill, soprano-delivered ‘This I Dig Of You’ is more vivaciously perky and rather showier than Mobley’s drier account, but the funkily hooky ‘Dig Dis’ and the title-track feature rugged stop-time tenor interludes, and ‘If I Should Lose You’ is a patiently caressed love song. Degibri’s composition ‘Dear Hank’, the seductively sleazy finale, is right in the pocket of the 1960s Blue Note soul-blues sound, with polished pianist Tom Oren showing that he gets the idea just as eloquently as his boss. Perhaps Eli Degibri could have conveyed no less gratitude to Hank Mobley while risking a few more surprises, but this is a classy revisit to a timeless jazz era.

Author: John Fordham
Publication: Jazzwise Magazine