Tina Brooks

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Harold Floyd "Tina" Brooks (born June 7, 1932 in Fayetteville , North Carolina , † August 13, 1974 in New York City ), was an American jazz musician and tenor saxophonist of hard bop .

life and work

Brooks moved to the Bronx with his parents in 1944 . He first learned alto saxophone and then tenor saxophone at school and with his older brother " Bubba " and had his first engagement in 1950 in the rhythm and blues band of pianist Sonny Thompson . Dissatisfied with his role as an accompanying musician (e.g. in 1955 in Lionel Hampton's big band ), he took theory lessons and was finally introduced to hardbop as the protégé of trumpeter "Little" Benny Harris (with Wardell Gray and Dexter Gordon as role models) with an engagement in a small theater in the Bronx, the "Blue Morocco". There he heard the producer Alfred Lion of Blue Note Records , who first made recordings with him in 1957 as a sideman of Jimmy Smith . He later took on as a sideman of Kenny Burrell , Freddie Hubbard (the two met through Ike Quebec at Count Basies Club and Hubbard loved him so much that he invited him to his debut album Open Sesame ), Jackie McLean and Freddie Redd and made four albums as leader between 1958 and 1961, of which only True Blue was released during his lifetime , a major hardbop work on which he left his trademark not only as an improviser, but also as a composer and arranger. Although the other albums were all finished and some of them had already been announced in the program, they were not released by Blue Note. Apparently commercial considerations played a role here (as is not uncommon with Blue Note Records) (at the same time Blue Note promoted the hardbop tenorist and Blakey man Hank Mobley ).

McLean and Redd also played on Brooks' albums. Redd also wrote the music for Jack Gelber's The Connection, played by critics around 1960 at the Living Theater in New York , in which Brooks was only McLean's substitute, but on the album by Howard McGhee and Redd, which was released afterwards played along. Ironically, the play was about drug junkies. Brooks himself was addicted and had drug-related health problems. After 1961 (when he was dropped on Blue Note) he stopped recording. He still played with rhythm and blues and latino bands and now and then with jazz musicians such as Elmo Hope and Don Pullen , but died in 1974 at the age of 42, completely forgotten, of liver failure. His music didn't make a comeback until the 1980s when the "suppressed" Blue Note albums came out in Japan.

Discography (selection)

As a leader at Blue Note:

collection

As a sideman:

literature

  • Ansell The forgotten Tina Brooks , Jazz Journal International, Vol. 42, 1992, 26
  • Michael Cuscuna , Palmer, Liner Notes for the Complete Blue Note Recordings of Tina Brooks (Mosaic 1985)
  • Richard Cook Blue Note , joke 2004

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Brooks, Tina
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Brooks, Harold Floyd (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American jazz alto saxophonist
DATE OF BIRTH June 7, 1932
PLACE OF BIRTH Fayetteville , North Carolina
DATE OF DEATH August 13, 1974
Place of death New York City