Free Spirit: Roy Brooks and The Free Slave

by Fritz Byers

Forty or so years ago, I was listening to the radio one evening, tuned to the jazz show of Detroit legend Ed Love, which was the nighttime music of that pre-children era of my life. (I didn’t know at the time Ed also grew up in Kansas; maybe that was the source of the bond.) The music I heard that evening was stirring – high-octane trumpet wizardry over the bassist’s searching harmonic undercurrent. But you could hear, you could feel, that the drummer’s funk-tinged polyrhythmic groove was the organizing intelligence that drove everything. I thought, Who is this? And I knew Ed would let us know at the end of the tune.

Which he did: “That’s the drummer Roy Brooks, live in Baltimore, 1970. I know you enjoyed. It’s called ‘The Free Slave.’ You dig? ‘The free slave.’”

I did dig, and I still do. Roy’s album The Free Slave is featured this week on Jazz Spectrum Friday.

Some of jazz’s greatest ensembles have been, and are, led by drummers: Chick Webb, Buddy Rich, Max Roach, Art Blakey, Terri Lyne Carrington, Tyshawn Sorey. We could go on. But even in that company, Roy Brooks stands a little apart. He didn’t just drive a band from behind the kit. He seemed to be listening from six different angles at once, and building something new for the band to stand on with every chorus.

The Free Slave was recorded live at the Famous Ballroom, the venue operated by the Left Bank Jazz Society, on April 26, 1970, and issued two years later on the Muse label. It is to my ears Roy’s high-water mark as a leader, the record where his gifts as composer, band leader, and rhythmic thinker cohere most powerfully. For the date, Roy assembled a quintet that reads now like a small hall of fame: Woody Shaw, all of twenty-five and already playing like the future, on trumpet; George Coleman, the relative veteran of the group, on tenor; Hugh Lawson on piano; and Cecil McBee on bass.

Roy wrote three of the date’s four extended pieces: the title track, “Understanding,” and “Five for Max,” a 5/4 samba tribute to Max Roach that closes the album with Roy working the whole kit, rim clicks and all, with a precise confidence that never sacrifices heat for structure; or vice versa. Cecil contributes the fourth tune , “Will Pan’s Walk.” The crowd is audibly, gloriously part of the record – the recording captures a band that was playing to people who were paying close attention, and that responded to their evident appreciation by going deeper, and further.

There’s a companion to The Free Slave worth knowing about. In 2021, sixteen years after Roy’s death, the archival label Reel to Real released Understanding, named for one of Roy’s compositions that appears on the earlier record. This later record is drawn from a concert recorded also in 1970, six months later, at the same Baltimore venue. Roy, Woody Shaw, and Cecil McBee return; Carlos Garnett is in for George Coleman on tenor, Harold Mabern for Hugh Lawson on piano. Two more hours of Roy’s music, six tunes averaging twenty minutes apiece. This record gives us a second look at the same fertile moment in Roy’s career, and confirmation, if any were needed, that he and his bands were onto something extraordinary.

These two recordings are pillars of a significant career. From the late 1950s through the mid-1970s, Roy anchored the rhythm section on dozens of important records headlined by others, and he made his first album as a leader in 1963. But his recorded output is relatively small. His life in music was often interrupted by real struggles along the way – bouts of illness sidelined him more than once. But that is not what the records, or this appreciation, is about.

What strikes me most about Roy, as I’ve come to deepen my attention to his music, isn’t only what’s captured on record – it is the appetite behind the music. He was a restless inventor. He played musical saw. He rigged up a set of drums with tubes that let him bend their pitch by breathing in and out through them, a contraption as strange and questing as anything in the music.

Curiosity like that can’t be contained by a drum kit, no matter how creatively it is deployed. Having returned home to Detroit in the mid-1970s, Roy, along with Detroit jazz greats Kenny Cox, Harold McKinney, and Wendell Harrison, co-founded M.U.S.I.C. – Musicians United to Save Indigenous Culture – mentoring young players from the city’s hard-hit neighborhoods. Through that organization, his world-music innovations, and his generous, mentoring nature, Roy lived his view that jazz is ordained to keep reaching outward, to keep including people.

I first felt drawn in forty years ago by a chance encounter on the radio, so I suppose I’m handing that forward this Friday.