Music Monday: Tina Brooks

For whatever reason, I’ve been in a hard bop mood lately. Last week, while driving, I very much enjoyed Johnny Coles’s trumpet. This week, I’ve been enjoying some Tina Brooks, a relatively obscure and tragic sax player. In general, Brooks’s outputs as leader are of high quality which makes it curious that only one of his albums as leader appeared during his lifetime, True Blue (1960). True Blue features Brooks on tenor, Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Duke Jordan on piano, Sam Jones on bass, and Art Taylor on drums. It sounds very much the way that the best hard bop from the late 1950s should sound. I’ll listen to almost anything with Blue Mitchell on it and that includes Brooks’s 1961 date, released in 1998 as Back to the Tracks, where he’s joined by Kenny Drew on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Art Taylor on drums. Mitchell isn’t quite as assertive or soaring as he sometimes can be on this album as Brooks is in the spotlight. Finally, I’ve been enjoying Johnny Coles lately and it was…