Cedric Brooks / United Africa X Dubism / Pressure Sounds

Jamaican saxophonist Cedric Brooks had a long, and industrious career. Brooks began his musical journey as a pupil of Kingston’s legendary Alpha School for Boys, where underprivileged youth were taken in, and to keep them out of trouble, given an instrument to learn. The school subsequently cultivated scores of students who would become maestros and shape the sound and course of the island’s reggae legacy. In the mid-60s Brooks joined fellow Alpha alumni, including Tommy McCook and Don Drummond, in The Skatalites. In their capacity as Clement “Coxsone” Dodd’s Studio One house band they contributed to countless ska and rocksteady hits. In the late `60s, The Skatalites morphed into Sound Dimension, still at Studio One, but by 1970 Brooks had also connected with Rastafari devotees and nyabinghi / grounation practioneers Count Ossie and his Mystic Revelation. This collaboration sending some of Brooks’ subsequent work in a far more spiritual direction. He continued to record and perform…