Philly joe solo lp w/ hank mobley

[chewy-chew-chew-bean-benitez]

saw it tonite, the hank songs: only the last THREE TRACKS?!?!?! what the hell? did they really only reissue 1 side of this?!??!?!?!?!?!!

[Chuck Nessa]

You haven't listened to it have you.

The timings are way off on the cd.

Edited February 2, 2007 by Chuck Nessa

[bertrand]

A true Mobley fan collects all the shit now and worries about listening to it later, say in his retirement

Bertrand.

[gmonahan]

  bertrand said:

A true Mobley fan collects all the shit now and worries about listening to it later, say in his retirement

Bertrand.

Oh yeah! LOVE Hank!!

[Kevin Bresnahan]

  bertrand said:

A true Mobley fan collects all the shit now and worries about listening to it later, say in his retirement

Bertrand.

But what do you do when you have every session he ever played on?

Oh wait, I still haven't picked up that Archie Shepp date. Ha, I'm still not there yet.

[bertrand]

Do you have the French movie soundtrack he claims to have recorded for Blue Note? If not, you still have some hunting to do.

Bertrand.

[Kevin Bresnahan]

  bertrand said:

Do you have the French movie soundtrack he claims to have recorded for Blue Note? If not, you still have some hunting to do.

Bertrand.

I once asked Michael Cuscuna about this. He said Blue Note was very good at documenting their recording sessions. I am pretty sure that it's been determined that "Thinking of Home" was the Blue Note Session Hank was talking about. He mentioned a guitar player and a suite. "Thinking of Home" has both. He said it wasn't released and that was true at the time.

What's even weirder is that Hank isn't the only one feels there's a missing session. Guitarist Eddie Diehl remembers another session too. I was once contacted by someone who knew Eddie and he says that Eddie claims, like Hank, that there was another Blue Note session out there. Michael & I talked about this too and he figures both of them must be talking about "Thinking Of Home". I E-mailed the guy asking him to see if Diehl knew about the release of "Thinking of Home", but I never heard back from him. It may simply be that neither of them knew that Blue Note did actually release "Thinking of Home" in 1980, 10 years after they recorded it.

If it isn't "Thinking of Home", Blue Note doesn't have it in their records.

[Dan Gould]

  Kevin Bresnahan said:

  bertrand said:

Do you have the French movie soundtrack he claims to have recorded for Blue Note? If not, you still have some hunting to do.

Bertrand.

I once asked Michael Cuscuna about this. He said Blue Note was very good at documenting their recording sessions. I am pretty sure that it's been determined that "Thinking of Home" was the Blue Note Session Hank was talking about. He mentioned a guitar player and a suite. "Thinking of Home" has both. He said it wasn't released and that was true at the time.

What's even weirder is that Hank isn't the only one feels there's a missing session. Guitarist Eddie Diehl remembers another session too. I was once contacted by someone who knew Eddie and he says that Eddie claims, like Hank, that there was another Blue Note session out there. Michael & I talked about this too and he figures both of them must be talking about "Thinking Of Home". I E-mailed the guy asking him to see if Diehl knew about the release of "Thinking of Home", but I never heard back from him. It may simply be that neither of them knew that Blue Note did actually release "Thinking of Home" in 1980, 10 years after they recorded it.

If it isn't "Thinking of Home", Blue Note doesn't have it in their records.

I remember we had this discussion on the BNBB. While there was circumstantial evidence to suggest that he was speaking of Thinking of Home, other things Hank mentioned in the DB interview didn't at all fit into the theory.

[Swinging Swede]

Since it's about the Algerian war, Blue Note considers it offensive to release just like Basra, so therefore Cuscuna finds it more convenient to deny its existence, rather than having to deal with hordes of requests from Blue Note & Mobley fans. That's the insider information I have.

[robviti]

  Kevin Bresnahan said:

But what do you do when you have every session he ever played on?

kill yourself after bequeathing your cd collection to your best friend.

[clifford_thornton]

  Kevin Bresnahan said:

Oh wait, I still haven't picked up that Archie Shepp date. Ha, I'm still not there yet.

Which? There are two Shepp dates Mobley plays on!

[clifford_thornton]

  Swinging Swede said:

Since it's about the Algerian war, Blue Note considers it offensive to release just like Basra, so therefore Cuscuna finds it more convenient to deny its existence, rather than having to deal with hordes of requests from Blue Note & Mobley fans. That's the insider information I have.

Huh. Must've been recorded in '69 when Mobley was hanging around the Pan-African Festival set of folks. Too bad it wasn't with Burrell, CT, Grachan, Earl Freeman and Philly Joe!

[brownie]

  Swinging Swede said:

Since it's about the Algerian war, Blue Note considers it offensive to release just like Basra, so therefore Cuscuna finds it more convenient to deny its existence, rather than having to deal with hordes of requests from Blue Note & Mobley fans. That's the insider information I have.

Did search for an original when I was assigned to Algiers during my journalism days in the 70s and failed to score a copy in the local record stores

[sidewinder]

  brownie said:

  Swinging Swede said:

Since it's about the Algerian war, Blue Note considers it offensive to release just like Basra, so therefore Cuscuna finds it more convenient to deny its existence, rather than having to deal with hordes of requests from Blue Note & Mobley fans. That's the insider information I have.

Did search for an original when I was assigned to Algiers during my journalism days in the 70s and failed to score a copy in the local record stores

[bertrand]

Although I was being tongue in cheek about bringing up the mythical Algerian war movie soundtrack (I do remember we discussed it back then and determined that we didn't know what Hank was talking about), this is bringing up some interesting questions.

I can't remember how far we went in our previous discussions (are there still BNBB archives we can access), but here's some thoughts on the matter:

1) 'He said Blue Note was very good at documenting their recording sessions'.

I believe this to be true in the Alfred Lion years, but how about the later years? In the 70s, George Butler and co. did not have access to the session logs. For example, the liner notes to the mid-70s first-time release of Moto Grosso Feio clearly show this, since they had to hunt for a tape and they got the date wrong (Wayne got it mixed up with Odyssey Of Iska). When Michael finally did hook up with Alfred, he got the session logs. But wouldn't Alfred's logs have stopped after he left BN in the summer of 1967? Are there logs that are as detailed after that time period?

2) If the logs from the post-Lion years are less complete, then perhaps this mythical Mobley session was recorded for BN and not properly documented.

3) I doubt he was talking about Thinking Of Home, since he mentions Freddie Hubbard and not Woody Shaw (unless Freddie was using the pseudonym 'Woody Shaw' again). Also, TOH is neither a soundtrack or about the Algerian war (I always assumed 'Justine' was a tribute to the Marquis de Sade).

4) Alternatively, Mobley recorded this for a small label that did not document their sessions, although I can't think of which label that would be. Did he have an exclusive contract with BN? Would that have stopped him? When I first found a bunch of unrecorded Lee Morgan tunes years ago, my first thought was that there might be unissued sessions for a label other than BN made on the sly in violation of his BN contract. I have since found out that some of these were part of the live repertoire (which may explain why he copyrighted them), but it does not exclude the possibility of an unknown record date for a tiny label lost to history.

This brings up a general question: how do we know any discography is ever complete (I'm only talking about legit recordings, not private tapes). All discographers are limited by the information that was kept by the record labels and the memory of the actual musicians, which is often faulty.

Now time to hunt for the mythical small label that no one knows about that Hank and Lee recorded for when they needed bread between two Blue Note sessions

Bertrand.

Edited February 6, 2007 by bertrand

[bertrand]

Another thought: musicians nowadays sometimes do their own recordings, and pitch them to a label later. Was this common practice in the sixties? Wasn't this how Woody Shaw's Cassandranite got recorded?

Bertrand.

Edited February 6, 2007 by bertrand

[clifford_thornton]

I still think the idea of a Mobley-led LP on BYG/Actuel is pretty hot.

Perhaps impossible, but hot.

[brownie]

  clifford_thornton said:

I still think the idea of a Mobley-led LP on BYG/Actuel is pretty hot.

Perhaps impossible, but hot.

The idea is pretty hot but it just did not happen. Mobley was at two of the Archie Shepp sessions for Byg because Shepp invited him to participate. The idea did not originate from the Byg people.

Beside wasn't Hank Mobley still under contract (or at least loyal to) with BN at the time?

[clifford_thornton]

Yeah, that's what I figured...

One can dream, however!

[Guest youmustbe]

No musicians didn't put up their own money and then pitch the records to record companies back in the day.

[bertrand]

I suspected that, but then what was the deal with Cassandranite?

Bertrand.