I heard Brooks several times at the Famous but not this one. He always brought top flight talent and they palyed their hearts out for us in Bmore on Sunday evenings. The group I remember included Carlos Garnett and James Spaulding. It was just another Sunday in the 70's. This is a great reflection of what it was like and the sad thing is that the Left Bank Jazz Society taped every concert but the majority have disappeared. Great mystery.
From the nineteen-fifties through the seventies, the jazz drummer Roy Brooks performed with some of the major musicians of the time, such as Charles Mingus and Dexter Gordon, and led some talented groups of his own. But as he was making a name for himself as a leader, in the seventies, his career was interrupted by mental illness; he died in 2005, at the age of sixty-seven. Today, he’s among the great jazz musicians whose enormous artistry stands in unfortunate contrast to their relative obscurity. The release, last week, of “Understanding”—a two-CD set of a live recording, from 1970, of a quintet led by Brooks, which is also available on vinyl and digital stream—should suffice to establish him as one of the most original jazz performers of the era.
The instrumentation of Brooks’s quintet is classical—trumpet, tenor sax, piano, bass, drums—but its mix of musical personalities is volatile, ranging from post-bop to avant-garde. The venue where the band recorded, the Left Bank Jazz Society, in Baltimore, was known for its engaged and enthusiastic audiences, and the rediscovered tapes of “Understanding” reflect the sympathetic vibe between the crowd and the musicians, who pour themselves into the music with an uninhibited energy. They break the boundaries of the familiar post-bop format with the heroic length and fervor of their solos—all energized by the inspirations of Brooks’s drumming. The album includes five main pieces, each more than twenty minutes long and one running past a half hour, and the solos have a dramatic and athletic span to match; the tempos range from brisk to rocking and jet-propelled. The music’s tone, too, has a ferocious expressivity that’s on display from the very start of the concert.
The first track, “Prelude to Understanding,” begins with Brooks setting not a tempo but a turbulent tone, before the trumpeter, Woody Shaw, comes in and launches a majestic, furious eleven-minute solo that’s something of a manifesto of the moment. The piece, by Brooks, begins themelessly, with merely Brooks’s drum thunder, and Shaw leaps in to mesh with Brooks in a rhythm that shifts between—and even daringly intertwines—an extremely fast double time and a hefty, straight-ahead jaunt. Here, as throughout the concert, Brooks channels the mountainous energy of Elvin Jones, the drummer in John Coltrane’s classic quartet, with rhythmic solidity and weighty swing balanced by a free rumbling that rises to near-catastrophic tumult, all while keeping, with a daring tenuousness, the thread of the beat.
his two-CD set comes from the archives of the Left Bank Jazz Society. From the mid-1960s into the 1980s, this organization presented Sunday concerts at the Famous Ballroom on Charles Street in Baltimore. A self-taught engineer, Vernon Welsh, recorded hundreds of shows on his Akai home tape deck. In recent years over a dozen releases on several labels have been sourced from the Welsh tapes. One of the most essential is Understanding.
Roy Brooks was from Detroit. When he died there in 2005 at 67, he had been off the jazz radar for years because of mental illness and incarceration. He was a unique, creative drummer who is remembered today (when he is remembered) for his four years with Horace Silver’s quintet in the early 1960s. Occasionally Brooks led his own bands, like the quintet that played Baltimore on November 1, 1970.
Brooks, trumpeter Woody Shaw, tenor saxophonist Carlos Garnett, pianist Harold Mabern, and bassist Cecil McBee light the Famous Ballroom on fire. They unleash raw passion for two hours. Shaw, at 25, with daredevil chops, was in a zone that day. On the opening “Prelude to Understanding,” for 11 minutes, his brilliant short ricochets gather into more brilliant long streaks of resolution. He is rough, reckless, and wildly exciting.
Each song overwhelms the room for 20 or 30 minutes. Garnett has the unenviable task of following Shaw. He matches Shaw’s energy if not his artistic individuality. Mabern is blocky and powerful, but in this ferocious ensemble he is the voice of reason. McBee is quick-on-quick. Brooks is relentless. Sometimes, with his explosive press rolls, he sounds like Art Blakey on steroids. But he was more than a basher; he varied his vehemence.
There are actual compositions, like Brooks’ attractive, lyrical title track, Shaw’s intriguing “Zoltan,” and an epic, over-the-top version of Charlie Parker’s “Billie’s Bounce.” But the improvisations leave these starting points far behind. This is music of its turbulent time. It occupies a productive historical interval between hard bop and freedom.
The sound of a Vernon Welsh recording is far from perfect. It is harsh, glaring, and sometimes out of balance. But it puts you there, smack in the front row. When the two discs are over, you are exhilarated and exhausted, like those lucky folks who were in the Famous Ballroom on that Sunday long ago.
In 1991, as part of its Magic Music Days initiative, Disneyland hosted the International Musical Saw Festival. Fifty people who played the instrument — the actual tool, held between one’s knees and stroked with a violin bow — descended on Anaheim, Calif., to compete in different genres. Roy Brooks, a drummer from Detroit, took home third place in the pop/jazz category.
Two decades earlier, while touring Europe with Charles Mingus’s band, Brooks received a more prestigious honor: a regular feature called “Blues for Roy’s Saw,” where the drummer would step away from his kit and solo on his side instrument. (Instead of a bow, Brooks used a mallet.)
Brooks, who died in 2005 at 67 after a life of ecstatic highs and perilous lows, worked with jazz legends like Horace Silver, Yusef Lateef and Mingus; he also had bipolar disorder, and served a sentence for felony assault from 2000 to 2004. On Friday, a previously unreleased Brooks live album from 1970 titled “Understanding” arrives on vinyl, providing an opportunity to deepen listeners’ comprehension of his talent. (Digital and CD releases will come out July 23.)
The seven-track “Understanding” was made at Baltimore’s Famous Ballroom, where Brooks and his band had recorded their lauded live set “The Free Slave” only six months prior. The concert features the trumpeter Woody Shaw and the bassist Cecil McBee — holdovers from the night that resulted in “The Free Slave” — plus Harold Mabern on piano and Carlos Garnett on tenor saxophone.
Despite similar personnel and only a brief interval between engagements, “The Free Slave” and “Understanding” are worlds apart. Where the first release is a euphoric joy ride that touches on funk and odd-time grooving, the new album is an intense, hypnotic journey that seems immovable even at its gentlest moments. What a difference a half-year makes.
Zev Feldman, a co-producer of “Understanding,” was struck by the LP’s sprawling nature. A typical track runs about 20 minutes, making room for multiple unhurried solos. (Brooks breaks out the saw on “Prelude to Understanding.”)
“There’s expansive boundaries here,” Feldman said. “It’s so adventuresome. They’re really going out there.”
Brooks, who grew up in Detroit playing basketball and in jazz bands, was in a pivotal place in 1970. He had just wrapped a three-year stint with Lateef (he can be heard on “The Golden Flute” and “The Blue Yusef Lateef”) and was newly a member of M’Boom, the Max Roach group featuring seven or more percussionists.
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