Description

Detroit drummer Roy Brooks was a skilled player who performed with many of jazz’s most important names during the 1960s. While he was a widely respected and talented musician, playing with everyone from Horace Silver to Yusef Lateef to Charles Mingus, he never achieved the widespread fame of many of his contemporaries because much of his adult life was spent battling bipolar disease.

The quintet album The Free Slave is one of Brooks’ few recordings as a leader, and finds him backed by such stars as Woody Shaw, George Coleman, Hugh Lawson and Cecil McBee.