Tina Brooks

During the peak years of hard bop, Tina Brooks maintained only a brief career and made no further recordings during the final twelve years of his life. Even so, the albums issued under his name and the dates he recorded with Freddie Hubbard, Jackie McLean, Freddie Redd, Jimmy Smith, and Kenny Burrell convey the sense that he was developing into a major tenor voice before drug-related health problems curtailed his progress. Although Brooks appeared on sessions for Amos Milburn and Lionel Hampton, the core of his work lies in the Blue Note catalog. In his lifetime he led just four Blue Note sessions, all between 1958 and 1961. The earliest two, Minor Move and True Blue, reveal both the robust attack of his tenor playing and the wealth of melodic ideas with which he stretched the blues-based forms he employed beyond the practices of most musicians of the period. His consistent use of minor-key centers and unresolved harmonic movement became widely admired traits among his contemporaries. Blue Note also preserves his work alongside McLean and Redd, both of whom participated in Brooks-led dates. His most consequential recorded improvisation may nevertheless be found on Redd’s score for Jack Gelber’s Beat play The Connection, presented by the Living Theater, in which the musicians portrayed themselves as drug addicts—a depiction that closely matched, if it did not precisely reproduce, their actual circumstances. In those performances Brooks and McLean converted hard bop blues into an intense, emotionally charged cry of honesty and lyricism, their lines interweaving in concise phrases and extended statements while Redd dismantled intervals to supply material for their solos. Brooks’ playing on McLean’s Street Singer and Jackie's Bag, recorded in 1959 and 1960, as well as on Shades of Redd, remains equally striking.