#0044: This Week On The Air–December 9, 2025

Hey, y’all! Hope you’re doing your best. It’s Tuesday again, and you know what that means–it’s once again time for bad jokes¹ and research rabbit holes, as we go over tonight’s programming for Talkie Time and The Jazz Program on datafruits.fm!

It is worth noting that – as we are every year at this time – we are currently under the lead-fisted rule of the Holiday Seasonal Happenings Installments Table. If you don’t know what that is, check out last week’s post, where I explain the Totally Not A Hostage situation that we’ve got going. I say “totally not a hostage situation” because The Shrimpshake Co’s demonic contract legally forbids me from stating that I am in a hostage situation. It does not, however, preclude me from blinking the words “HELP ME” in Morse code. That’s more a limitation of the medium here. Hard to do that via text.

Anyways, onwards we go…

Talkie Time Presents The Holiday S.H.I.T. List : The Shadow - Joey’s Christmas Story / The Stockings Were Hung

We’ve had ol’ Lamont Cranston a couple of times and his hetero life mate Margo Lane on the program this year, but the Holiday S.H.I.T. List is immutable and cares not for your complaints. That’s what the straws drew, that’s what the list says, and – according to the threats that various skeletal figures dressed in black have been writing in goat’s blood on the side of my Corolla – either I’m going to make you all listen to The Shadow and friends simply having a murdery Christmas Time or the Shrimp Shake Co. Enforcers are going to stick my fingers in a blender. And I don’t know about you, but I hate getting my fingers stuck in a blender.

First up, it’s “Joey’s Christmas Story”, originally aired on December 22, 1940. I apparently did not write down much in my notes for this episode as far as things like “plot summaries” or “notable actors” or “doing any actual research” goes, but for some reason I did feel it necessary to write down that around the three-minute mark a taxi driver remarks that he got banned from the toy store for, and I quote, “givin’ Sanny Claus a hot foot”, and the rest of my notes are just bad-joke-doodles you do not need to see.

Look, I’m no Brothers Chaps, alright? But I do occasionally enjoy giving files on this here web page joke names, and I do want to point out that the file name for the image over there to your right is, and I quote, “thesejokesjustwritethemselves.jpeg”.

Speaking of jokes that just write themselves, next up is “The Stockings Were Hung”, originally aired on December 24th, 1939….okay, look, they didn’t have Internet in the ’30s, okay? They were still out there namin’ people “Dick”. This one probably has a plot. You can tune in to find out what it is. It probably doesn’t have anything to do with Lamont Cranston pulling a Red Hot Chili Peppers onstage at the Ritz. Probably.

The Jazz Program: Hank Mobley - No Room For Squares (1964) / Workout (1962) / Soul Station (1960)

The recording catalogue of Frank Mobley – the “middleweight champion of the tenor sax”, as Leonard Feather once called him – is lengthy, often challenging, and always smooth. The first record of his I ever picked up was 1966’s A Caddy For Daddy, and I’ve been a fan of his ever since.

Mobley’s tenor playing straddles the line between cool blues and intensity like few others, and while I could go on for a big about his work, life and career, I’d instead like to direct you to this fantastic 2020 piece by The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, written in review of the Mosaic Records-released The Complete Hank Mobley Blue Note Sessions 1963-70 and dripping with the kind of biographical insights and passion for sound that I love, executed on a level that I wish I could write. Highly recommend. Go give it a read, then come back.

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Oh, you’re back already? Great. Let’s take a look at the three records we’re playing tonight.

First up, we’ve got the seminal 1964 No Room For Squares, released on Blue Note and featuring even more fantastic cover photography by the fantastic Francis Wolff (who has already gotten at least one shoutout on this show, for his cover art work on Wayne Shorter’s Speak No Evil).

Designer Reid Miles also deserves a shoutout here for that gorgeous caution-yellow color pallete, and Herbie Hancock, Donald Byrd and Lee Morgan also throw in some of their best work on their performances on this record. Gorgeously crafted from cover to cover in multiple senses of the phrase.

Next up, it’s 1962’s Workout, with more gorgeous cover art work by Reid Miles and Francis Wolff and some heavy performances by Paul Chambers on the bass and the immortal Grant Green on guitar.

And, to close us on out, we’re heading back to 1960 for Soul Station, featuring none other than the godfather of The Jazz Messengers himself, Art Blakey, on drums.

Mobley was actually among the first incarnation of The Jazz Messengers, alongside Blakey, Horace Silver, Doug Watkins, and Kenny Dorham, and he also covers tenor sax duties on the first LP the collective ever released, 1956’s Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers. If you’re at all familiar with the later Blakey-led releases under the Messengers’ moniker–and if you’re not, you should be–you’ll feel right at home with this record.

(And yes, Wolff and Miles did their cover art thing on this one as well.)

Hank Mobley’s easily one of the best tenor sax players to ever pick up the instrument, and Stacia Proefrock’s assessment of him as “one of the more underrated musicians of the bop era” is not far off the mark. Don’t be a square; tune in tonight, light up a smoke in Mobley’s memory, and enjoy the cool sounds of the Soul Station conductor with us this evening.

That about covers this week’s show! I put a good amount of research into…well, one of these two writeups, and I hope you enjoyed reading them both!

If you’re reading this the day of, and you can make it in tonight, you should come hang out in the chat with us on Datafruits! We’ve got a good crowd of folks in the chat every week, and whether you have a suggestion for a future show or just want to hang out and chat with fellow jazz enjoyers, you’re welcome here with us.

You’re all amazing and don’t let anyone tell you that you’re not. Stay safe out there, and I’ll see you back again next week. Same time, same station: on datafruits dot fm..

Footnotes…