Critics called Hank Mobley the middleweight champion of the tenor saxophone, a player who sat between the aggressive and the mellow and developed a laid-back, melodic tone all his own. Born in Eastman, Georgia in 1930 and raised near Newark, he received a saxophone from his grandmother during months of illness at 16, was rejected by a local music school on residency grounds, and taught himself theory and harmony from books.

The episode traces his fast rise with Max Roach, a two-week stint in Duke Ellington’s orchestra, Charlie Parker’s advice to weave in the blues, and his role as a founding architect of hard bop with Art Blakey and Horace Silver in the Jazz Messengers. It covers the rehearsal-driven studio culture at Blue Note under Alfred Lion, the 1960 masterpiece Soul Station, the pressure of replacing John Coltrane in Miles Davis’s band, his heroin addiction and prison sentences, shelved albums, forced retirement from lung problems, and the critical reevaluation that followed his death in 1986 at 55.

• Why learning a wind instrument from a textbook builds an internal sense of melody
• How hard bop brought soul, gospel and rhythm and blues back into jazz
• The physical changes Mobley made to sound harder in the Coltrane chair
• Recording new material written in prison, only to see Blue Note shelve it
• Mosaic Records and the archival work that restored his catalog