Tina Brooks - True Blue

The only album that Tina Brooks released during his lifetime, True Blue is a reminder that the saxophonist remains one of Blue Note’s unsung heroes. The record features performances by Brooks, Freddie Hubbard, Duke Jordan, Sam Jones and Art Taylor.

Tina Brooks was a hard bop tenor saxophonist and composer who had the talent to go far in the jazz world but who never got his just desserts. Though he recorded four album sessions for Alfred Lion and Frank Wolff’s Blue Note label, only one was issued in his lifetime: True Blue.

On True Blue, Tina Brooks, then 28, showed that he was a gifted composer as well as a fluid improviser by writing all six tracks. On the session he was joined by his young friend, trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, then 24, whom he had met on a Count Basie session (Brooks also appeared on the session for Hubbard’s Blue Note debut, Open Sesame, recorded six days earlier, and wrote two songs for it, including the classic title cut). On True Blue, Hubbard is joined by pianist Duke Jordan, a former sideman for Charlie Parker and Stan Getz; bassist Sam Jones (then with the Cannonball Adderley group); and drummer Art Taylor, a ubiquitous session veteran whose credits at that point included sessions with Gene Ammons, Donald Byrd and John Coltrane.

Though True Blue, now regarded as a hard bop masterpiece and one of Blue Note’s greatest ever albums, should have established Tina Brooks as an exciting new talent in jazz, it proved to be his swan-song as well as his debut. Three other sessions for Blue Note (one with altoist Jackie McLean) were also discarded and, after 1961, Brooks would never record again.

Heavyweight vinyl produced by Blue Note Records for their 'Blue Note 75' campaign.