BABBLING BROOKS

Have you discovered TINA BROOKS?

No, not a female movie star of the silent era.

He was a tenor saxophonist called Harold Brooks. The nickname “Tina” seems to have been a verbal variant on “Teeny” referring to his diminutive stature.

As for my title, I’m told a “babbling brook” is Australian rhyming slang for a “cook” and my thought was that Tina on tenor certainly cooks in the jazz sense. A lot more in my view than his fellow tenorist Junior Cook (ho ho) but you may disagree (and I do like Junior’s work with Horace Silver).

Stylistically, Tina sounds like an animated and fleet-footed Hank Mobley. He has mastered all the hard-bop language and displays it with ease in his soloing.

His tone is light but steely and a lot of his orthodox phrases remind me rhythmically of Ronnie Scott at his best. But the amazing thing is that you nod along, thinking yes, this is very hip and then suddenly (often at the end of eight bars) he floors you with an unexpected smear or accent out of the flow which is entirely his own. Where did that come from?

He also wrote a lot of original material and arranged it for quintet on his recordings. His tunes are mostly blues-based or bluesy and are very catchy.

I am only echoing the opinion of many distinguished critics and commentators when I say Tina Brooks is extremely talented, highly original and woefully underrated and neglected.

Why is that? What’s the story here?

Apart from some long lost 78s on the King label by an R&B band in 1951, there are no recordings of Tina until 1958 when he was 26 years old.

We know that he played in Lionel Hampton’s band briefly in 1955 and started hanging out with veteran be-bop trumpeter Little Benny Harris around jazz clubs in the Bronx area of New York, where he had moved with his family at the age of 12.

It was Little Benny who introduced Tina to Alfred Lion of Blue Note records and he then pops up on odd tracks from live Jimmy Smith and Kenny Burrell recordings.

The extraordinary thing is that he sounds already at the height of his powers. Fully mature like Lester Young in 1936.

I am particularly impressed and amused by the standard I never knew from a gig with Kenny Burrell at the Five Spot where Tina blithely sails over Art Blakey’s intrusive bombs.

Blue Note gave Tina his own record date (Minor move) in 1958 and, in June 1960, Freddie Hubbard used Tina on his debut album Open sesame and Tina reciprocated six days later by featuring Freddie on Tina’s second album True blue.

I spoke to (and played with) Freddie a few years later when he was in London and I told him how much I dug Open sesame. Clifford Jarvis, the drummer on the date, was a hero of mine and I asked Freddie why he hadn’t used him more. He said he was a great drummer but very unreliable as a person. He felt the same way about Tina Brooks………..

Tina recorded four albums under his own name for Blue Note between 1958 and 1961. Only one was ever released in his own lifetime! The rest were sat on by the company. Nobody knows why.

It fell to Michael Cuscuna, when he resurrected the Blue Note label, to issue these treasures posthumously. He prepared  a limited edition (7500 pressings) box set of 4 LPs for Mosaic. I am the proud owner of No.2599!

Tina never recorded again after June 17th 1961. He died 17 years later in poverty and obscurity of kidney failure at the age of 42.

His career was certainly blighted by the failure to release his excellent recordings but it was otherwise the familiar sad story of too many black modern jazz musicians in the early 1960s. Tina became addicted to heroin and couldn’t work while he was either in prison or in hospital. He scuffled for a while, doing odd gigs including a brief trip with the Ray Charles big band. Then he became too sick to play any more.

At least his output is readily available today to listen to online, on CD or LP. So dive in there and knock yourselves out!

I leave the last word to Tina’s close friend (and for a time fellow sufferer) Jackie McLean:

Tina Brooks was a sensitive human being and a brilliant saxophonist, who was crushed under the pressure of this industry. And he took the same route as a lot of guys did: self-destruction.