Roy Brooks was a brilliant drummer whose later life was marred by mental illness and a stint in prison, but whose playing throughout the 1960s and 1970s put him at the forefront of the music. He was born at exactly the right time and place — in Detroit, 1938 — and grew up surrounded by music: at home, in church, and everywhere else. Two other incredible drummers, Elvin Jones and Louis Hayes, were childhood friends.

He made his first studio recordings when he joined Horace Silver’s band in 1959. He can be heard on Horace-Scope, Silver’s Serenade, the live Doin’ the Thing, and one of the pianist’s most famous releases, Song for My Father. On all four albums, he lays down a funky, hard-swinging backbeat, propelling the band through a slew of hard bop classics. Around the same time, he also recorded with saxophonist Buddy Tate, organist Shirley Scott, trumpeter Blue Mitchell and others.

In 1965, he recorded five albums with trumpeter Chet Baker over the course of a week, with a band that also included tenor saxophonist George Coleman. When I interviewed him in 2017, Coleman said of that session, “I was astounded, and pleasantly surprised, cause I didn’t know [Baker] could play like that. And the contributing factors — [bassist] Herman Wright and [pianist] Kirk Lightsey and Roy Brooks — they were great too. They were fantastic. I listen to some of those old records, and I say, Wow.”

In the late ’60s, Brooks recorded with Yusef Lateef (with whom he’d toured at the beginning of his career), and joined Max Roach’s all-percussion ensemble M’Boom. But he also struck out on his own, recording his second album as a leader — following 1963’s Beat — in April 1970, with the help of Baltimore’s West Bank Jazz Society.

The Free Slave, released in 1972 on the Muse label, featured trumpeter Woody Shaw, George Coleman on tenor, Hugh Lawson on piano, and Cecil McBee on bass. Given the year, the title, and the cover photo (Brooks behind the kit, staring stoically into the middle distance), a listener could be forgiven for expecting a blaring, fiery blowout. But in fact, the album — which has just been remastered and reissued on the new Time Traveler label, with the help of producer Zev Feldman — is a classic of funky hard bop, with just a few surprises tucked into its thick grooves.

The opening title track is a 12-minute workout in the spirit of Lee Morgan’s “The Sidewinder” or “The Rumproller”. Lawson, McBee and Brooks — all of whom had played together on Yusef Lateef’s The Complete Yusef Lateef, The Blue Yusef Lateef, Yusef Lateef’s Detroit and The Diverse Yusef Lateef between 1967 and 1969 — get deep into the groove, allowing the horns to take extended, exploratory solos on top. The next track, “The Understanding”, is slightly mellower, with a subtle Latin rhythm, and makes room for a brief but powerful bass solo. Brooks ends the piece with several forcceful gong strikes.

The album’s second side begins with “Will Pan’s Walk”, a McBee composition. This piece is also known just as “Wilpan’s”: it was first recorded under that title on the Charles Lloyd album The Flowering, then again on Vol. II of Live at Slugs’, by Charles Tolliver’s Music Inc. But in 1981, Chico Freeman recorded it as “Wilpan’s Walk”. “Will Pan’s Walk” seems to be a misspelling. In any case, it’s a burning hard bop tune with a winding but memorable melody, and the band takes it almost at a sprint. The final track is the longest, the nearly 14-minute “Five for Max”, on which his playing — precise, explosive, polyrhythmic and melodic — does remind me of Max Roach, particularly his 1950s work with Clifford Brown. The crowd is screaming and hollering throughout, with justification.

The contrast between the two horns is one of the best things about The Free Slave. Woody Shaw, who was only 25 at the time, had already been on the scene for years, working with Larry Young, Horace Silver, Eric Dolphy, Chick Corea and many others. He was a formidable player with remarkable technical and harmonic skills, but he always served the song, never going so far out that he couldn’t find his way back in an instant. Meanwhile, Coleman, a decade older and a veteran of Max Roach’s 1950s bands and the Miles Davis quintet (he was replaced by Wayne Shorter), was rooted in bebop and blues, and not much interested in avant-garde forms. But his solos here have some of the same fiery ecstasy of free jazz, which may seem surprising until you consider that the same effects being employed by Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp et al. were part of the vocabulary of Illinois Jacquet and others as early as the 1940s. So Coleman isn’t playing “free” here, he’s just playing a little rougher than he had with Davis or Jimmy Smith.

Less than a year later, Brooks was back in Baltimore, performing at the Famous Ballroom on November 1, 1970 with a new group. Woody Shaw and Cecil McBee were still part of the ensemble, but Carlos Garnett was the saxophonist, and Harold Mabern was on piano. Understanding is a two-hour 2CD set (or 3LP set, if you’re one of those) from 2021 that contains just five, maybe five and a half compositions: an opening version of Brooks’ “Understanding” divided into two 20-minute halves, “Prelude to Understanding” and “Understanding”; a version of Charlie Parker’s “Billie’s Bounce”; a version of Shaw’s “Zoltan”; the Carlos Garnett composition “Taurus Woman”, which runs more than a half hour; and finally a take on Miles Davis’s old show-closer, “The Theme”.

The music is very different from what Brooks and his sidemen were playing just seven months earlier. The melodic heads and driving hard bop grooves are gone; this is loud, fiery jazz with the impact of rock, even if it eschews a simple backbeat. Shaw’s trumpet solos are less complex than before, featuring squealing high notes and fierce cries. Garnett’s playing, too, is pretty grounded, and raucous at times. Mabern’s piano playing is ornate, though, his solos full of McCoy Tyner-esque filigree.

The final minutes of “Prelude to Understanding” are when things slip sideways for the first time. After an extended McBee solo (he takes another in “Understanding” proper, which fact alone gives you some sense of this music), Brooks is heard playing… the musical saw. He taps it with a violin bow to create an effect that’s simultaneously theremin-like and percussive, and in the process brings proceedings totally to a halt, surprising the audience into a trance which he then breaks with an absolutely thunderous drum solo.

It’s very interesting to hear the group shift, after 42 minutes of expansive post-bop, to the lightning-fast hairpin curves of “Billie’s Bounce”, which they stretch into a 21-minute intra-band cutting contest, each soloist (Garnett first, followed by Shaw, then Mabern, then Garnett and Shaw trading fours with Brooks, before the drummer takes off on his own) striving to push the energy level higher than his predecessor. Early in Garnett’s solo, Shaw tries to cut in with some piercing upper-register squeals, but the saxophonist ignores him; he’s nowhere near done.

The second set kicks off with “Zoltan”, written by Woody Shaw but here very much a showcase for Carlos Garnett, who takes another long solo that erupts multiple times into Pharoah Sanders-ish tongues of flame. Then we get a nearly 33-minute version of Garnett’s “Taurus Woman” that actually fades in, which means the actual performance was even longer! Mabern is pounding out the chords as the horns offer a ragged fanfare, harmonizing loosely over a boogaloo groove. The saxophonist takes the first solo, going all the way out into piercing squeals and tyrannosaurus roars, as Brooks assaults the kit behind him. Finally, after about 10 minutes, Shaw tags in, and embarks on a much more lyrical and disciplined solo flight; although he too is emitting fierce high notes, and handling the piece’s Latin beat quite well (with Garnett behind him on cowbell), he never seems as willing to totally cut loose as his bandmate.

This music, rooted in hard bop but pushing the limits of that style about as far as it can go, only really existed for a couple of years at the end of the Sixties (if one takes “the Sixties” to mean an era that lasted from about 1964 to 1972). Although the performances were often very long, as they are here, the music was operating within a pretty narrow range — it was blustery, athletic and aggressive. It was a very macho, unsubtle style of jazz. And the relative roughness of the recording — Brooks’ drums are frequently distorted — makes Understanding even more sonically aggressive; it’s almost punk rock in its intensity at times.

I would put The Free Slave and Understanding alongside three other albums from that era, all coincidentally recorded at the Lighthouse Café in Hermosa Beach, California: Joe Henderson’s At the Lighthouse/“If You’re Not Part of the Solution, You’re Part of the Problem” (Woody Shaw played on that one), Lee Morgan’s Live at the Lighthouse (Harold Mabern’s on that one), and Elvin Jones’ Live at the Lighthouse. I’m sure there are plenty of other examples, too. If you’ve got a favorite you think I should hear, drop it in comments.

Like I mentioned up top, Roy Brooks’ life ended badly. He suffered from bipolar disorder, which wrecked his professional career after the 1970s and eventually landed him in prison. This JazzTimes story from 2002 has more information about the dark years. He died in a Detroit nursing home in 2005.