Cedric 'Im' Brooks: eclectic and eccentric

Herbie Miller, Contributor

For just over three years, the eclectic tenor saxophonist Cedric 'Im' Brooks had been critically ill in a New York hospital and nursing home. Brooks, 70 years old, died on May 3.

An alumnus of the celebrated Alpha Boys' School, Brooks succeeded in becoming another of that institution's poster figures. He is of the generation that followed saxophonist Tommy McCook and trombonist Don Drummond.

On leaving Alpha, Brooks joined the Jamaica Military Band. He later honed his skills and embraced Rastafari at Count Ossie's Wareika Hill camp. During the last days of horn-dominated bands in the 1960s, he was a member of the Vagabonds and the Granville Williams Orchestra. The saxophonist then joined Carlos Malcolm's Afro-Jamaican Rhythms before a 10-year migration that began in Nassau, Bahamas.

There, he worked and recorded with fellow Jamaican Teddy Greaves' band at the Turtle Walk Supper Club inside the Grand Bahama Hotel before moving on to the United States in the late 1960s.

Settling in Philadelphia, Brooks played at local clubs, impressing audiences and attracting peer attention with his lilting Caribbean style. But, most importantly, he established an association with the Arkestra of Sun Ra. Sun Ra was organiser and guru of a commune made up of musicians, dancers, poets, singers, artists and hangers-on. It was during that time that Brooks adopted the name 'Im'.

Informed by those experiences, Im Brooks returned to Jamaica and pursued a musical path freelancing as a jazz soloist. He became an arranger and studio musician at Studio One, at the same time leading his own groups, each grounded in Rastafari philosophy.

Attentive to tradition

Brooks was an emphatic modernist, who was attentive to tradition. He was hip without being trendy. Over the past four decades, he pursued his own course rather than conforming. Since the early '70s, he pioneered the concept of Afro-jazz, a synthesis of jazz horns and Rastafari drumming. His various ensembles - Light of Saba, One Essence and United Africa - recorded and performed music that not only reflected jazz's modernist ideas, but also linked it to Africa and African sensibilities, something that shaped Brooks' philosophical and musical identity in the years to come.

It was also in the 1970s that he merged his band, the Mystics, with Count Ossie's Rastafarian drummers, giving birth to the seminal Mystic Revelation of Rastafari.

A devoted member of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, Brooks doubled as musician and religious student and, in studying for the priesthood, lived for some time in Ethiopia. By the mid-1980s, he again migrated to the USA, continued his studies and musical career and travelled occasionally to Addis Ababa for religious and cultural education.

On the death of Skatalites tenor saxophonist Roland Alphonso, relatively shortly after the passing of its leader and other tenor Tommy McCook, at my recommendation Brooks was offered the saxophone chair in the Skatalites, the band in which he attracted his widest attention. While sporadic, his singularly remarkable body of work includes a repertoire that's not only of impeccable quality, but that also bears the imprint of his own important style.

Through his different bands, Brooks personalised each piece of music he played, both those from his own deep cache of compositions as well as those of others, to remarkable effect. His touchstone was his trademark ability to transform the tender allure of a ballad to the rustic realm of Rastafari's percussive celebration with an easy elegance that attracted popular attention, both from those who share his Afro-centred point of view, as well as those who would prefer to overlook it.

At its most innovative, Brooks' music is a complex of rhythms and clear-cut melodic lines that were constantly changing and never stagnant. His solos were always challenging, indefinable and unexpected.

Complexity

While some may consider social, political and historical realities as extraneous to music, Brooks created all this music with an attention to these realities. He opted for an understanding of the complexity of being Caribbean: the first real melting pot of peoples and cultures long before globalisation was even a thought. Of the collection One Essence (High Note, 197) Cedric highlighted, in poetic terms, individual songs from the recording.

He noted: "We the African people are of one essence, who have been in the blackness of darkness for a million years. We were awakened when we heard Africa calling and we ran a mile and a half like Mattie through Fern Gully cutting down all obstacles before us with only a small axe."

The influence of two later 1960s avant-garde or free form saxophonists Pharaoh Sanders and Abert Ayler provided Brooks with the authority to expand his musical boundaries. With this, the melodic structure of his tunes became dominated by rhythmic thrusts, unembellished note choices and attention to timbre and texture. Rhythmically, mento, Nyahbingi and other Jamaican folk forms played equally important roles.

In live performances, Brooks' imaginatively conceived sets combined examples of epochal songs with modern jazz compositions and never without being grounded in indigenous idioms. Therefore, the 1950s classic Song For My Father by the jazz pianist/composer Horace Silver employs Nyahbingi percussive drive with a tinge of rhythmic colour from old Cuba. It is freely juxtaposed alongside Ogetnom (Montego in reverse) a salvaged 1970s tune by Jamaican tenor saxophonist Wilton Gaynair.

The blues based origin of the Rastafarian imbued Wilton Felder composition, Way Back Home, a hit for the Crusaders, and the warm earthy quality of the Tommy McCook influenced Sea Breeze are the montage effects Brooks favoured. Of course, a fair amount of mento, ska or other vernacular forms balanced his programmes.

Brooks' art not only seems to draw from the collective unconscious of the black diaspora, but also those European encounters that affected it. Seemingly simple and not overtly complex, his music is like the dialect of an unsettled 'tribe' to which we all belong.

A folk melody embellished by a jazzy solo, a quote from a schoolyard ditty, or a well-known pop standard familiar to everyone was never trivialised, but rather, on closer listening, accounted for Brooks' deeper fascination with idiomatic resources.

Philosophically, the creative energy that fuelled Brooks' ideas came from an Afro-centred muse, sense of history and social connectivity; he was eccentric, modest and Rastafarian. He was also eclectic, disciplined and creative. He remained one of the island's most committed believers in the use of and respect for truly Jamaican/Caribbean elements in popular and art music.

Ultimately, the inventive source to his creativity was the use of Afro- beats, established blues and jazz forms included in broader Caribbean soundscapes. The result was a musical montage that resulted in a seamless confluence of motherland, metropolis and island sensibility.

The compilation CD Cedric Im Brooks and the Light of Saba (Honest Jons Records HJRCD4, 2003) collects some of Brooks' most important material and for any serious collector of Jamaican or world music is a required disc.

A partial discography that demands repeated listening and study includes Light of Saba, In Reggae released in the mid 1970s; Im Flash Forward (1977) featuring seminal Studio One tracks, and the woodwind, brass, string, percussion and voice ensemble masterpiece, United Africa, which came in 1978.

The groundbreaking Rastafari drumming and jazz inflected albums with Count Ossie, Grounation (1973) and Tales of Mozambique (1975) were arranged by Brooks and he played saxophone and flute. Together with the above-mentioned compilation Light of Saba on Honest Johns label and Brooks' Doctor Bird release From Mento to Reggae to Third World Music (1975), reissued by VP on CD in 2008, they represent a perfect collection of his material.

Prior to being hospitalised, Cedric Im Brooks had been touring, recording, teaching and mentoring regularly up to the moment he collapsed in his New York apartment.