John Benson Brooks was an American jazz

Jazz

Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...

 pianist, songwriter, arranger, and composer.

Brooks worked early in his career as an arranger for Randy Brooks, Les Brown

Les Brown (bandleader)

Les Brown, Sr. and the Band of Renown are a big band that began in the late 1930s, initially as the group Les Brown and His Blue Devils that Brown led while a student at Duke University. He was the first president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences...

, Boyd Raeburn

Boyd Raeburn

Albert Boyd Raeburn was an American jazz bandleader and bass saxophonist.Boyd Raeburn was born in Faith, South Dakota, and became one of the greatest and least-known of jazz bandleaders during the 1940s...

, and Tommy Dorsey

Tommy Dorsey

Thomas Francis "Tommy" Dorsey, Jr. was an American jazz trombonist, trumpeter, composer, and bandleader of the Big Band era. He was known as "The Sentimental Gentleman of Swing", due to his smooth-toned trombone playing. He was the younger brother of bandleader Jimmy Dorsey...

. He worked often with lyricists Eddie DeLange

Eddie DeLange

Eddie DeLange was an American bandleader and lyricist. Famous artists who recorded some of DeLange's songs include Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, Duke Ellington, and Benny Goodman.-Biography:...

 and Bob Russell

Bob Russell (songwriter)

Sidney Keith "Bob" Russell, was an American songwriter born in Passaic, New Jersey.In 1968, Russell along with songwriting partner Quincy Jones was nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Original Song category...

 in the 1940s; he and DeLange wrote the song "Just as Though You Were Here," a hit for Tommy Dorsey with Frank Sinatra

Frank Sinatra

Francis Albert "Frank" Sinatra was an American singer and actor.Beginning his musical career in the swing era with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, Sinatra became an unprecedentedly successful solo artist in the early to mid-1940s, after being signed to Columbia Records in 1943. Being the idol of the...

 as vocalist. He wrote "You Came a Long Way from St. Louis" with Bob Russell for Ray McKinley

Ray McKinley

Ray McKinley was an American jazz drummer, singer, and bandleader.McKinley got his start working with local bands in the Dallas–Fort Worth area, before joining Smith Ballew in 1929, when he met Glenn Miller. The two formed a friendship which lasted from 1929 until Miller's death in 1944....

 in 1948.

In 1956 Brooks worked with Zoot Sims

Zoot Sims

John Haley "Zoot" Sims was an American jazz saxophonist, playing mainly tenor and soprano.-Biography:He was born in Inglewood, California, the son of vaudeville performers Kate Haley and John Sims. Growing up in a performing family, Sims learned to play both drums and clarinet at an early age...

 and Al Cohn

Al Cohn

Al Cohn was an American jazz saxophonist and arranger and composer.-Biography:Alvin Gilbert Cohn was born in Brooklyn, New York. He was initially known in the 1940s for playing in Woody Herman's Second Herd as one of the Four Brothers, along with Zoot Sims, Stan Getz, and Serge Chaloff...

 on a recording "Folk Jazz U.S.A." He became better-known as a composer during this time, and his works blend elements of folk music

Folk music

Folk music is an English term encompassing both traditional folk music and contemporary folk music. The term originated in the 19th century. Traditional folk music has been defined in several ways: as music transmitted by mouth, as music of the lower classes, and as music with unknown composers....

 and dodecaphony with the idioms of modern jazz. In 1958 he composed a work entitled Alabama Concerto and assembled a cast of sidemen for a recording which included Cannonball Adderley, Art Farmer

Art Farmer

Arthur Stewart "Art" Farmer was an American jazz trumpeter and flugelhorn player. He also played flumpet, a trumpet/flugelhorn combination designed for him by David Monette. His identical twin brother, Addison Farmer Arthur Stewart "Art" Farmer (August 21, 1928, Council Bluffs, Iowa –...

, Barry Galbraith

Barry Galbraith

Joseph Barry Galbraith was an American jazz guitarist.Galbraith moved to New York City from Vermont early in the 1940s and found work playing with Babe Russin, Art Tatum, Red Norvo, Hal McIntyre, and Teddy Powell...

, and Milt Hinton

Milt Hinton

Milton John "Milt" Hinton , "the dean of jazz bass players," was an American jazz double bassist and photographer. He was nicknamed "The Judge".-Biography:...

. The recording was eventually re-issued under Adderley's name.

Brooks was a close friend of Gil Evans

Gil Evans

Gil Evans was a jazz pianist, arranger, composer and bandleader, active in the United States...

. Evans later recorded his works "Sirhan's Blues" and "Where Flamingos Fly" (the last co-written with Harold Courlander

Harold Courlander

Harold Courlander was an American novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist, an expert in the study of Haitian life. The author of 35 books and plays and numerous scholarly articles, Courlander specialized in the study of African, Caribbean, Afro-American , and American Indian cultures...

 and Elthea Peale). Brooks and Courlander collaborated on a book of transcription

Transcription (music)

In music, transcription can mean notating a piece or a sound which was previously unnotated, as, for example, an improvised jazz solo. Further examples include ethnomusicological notation of oral traditions of folk music, such as Béla Bartók's and Ralph Vaughan Williams' collections of the national...

s of rural blues

Blues

Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...

 and spiritual

Spiritual (music)

Spirituals are religious songs which were created by enslaved African people in America.-Terminology and origin:...

s in Alabama

Alabama

Alabama is a state located in the southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered by Tennessee to the north, Georgia to the east, Florida and the Gulf of Mexico to the south, and Mississippi to the west. Alabama ranks 30th in total land area and ranks second in the size of its inland...

, which provided some of the inspiration for the Alabama Concerto. A trio Brooks formed In the 1960s performed at the International Jazz Festival in Washington in 1962 with a composition called "The Twelves," based on improvisations on twelve-tone rows. This became part of a LP called "Avant Slant," which was a collage of new and already recorded sounds and songs from Milt Gabler

Milt Gabler

Milton Gabler was an American record producer, responsible for many innovations in the recording industry of the 20th century.-Early life:...

, the poet Robert Graves

Robert Graves

Robert von Ranke Graves 24 July 1895 – 7 December 1985 was an English poet, translator and novelist. During his long life he produced more than 140 works...

, LeRoi Jones, Lightnin' Hopkins

Lightnin' Hopkins

Sam John Hopkins better known as Lightnin’ Hopkins, was an American country blues singer, songwriter, guitarist and occasional pianist, from Houston, Texas...

, and others.

Discography

• Folk Jazz USA (1956)
• Alabama Concerto (Riverside Records
  Riverside Records
  Riverside Records was a United States record label specializing in jazz. Founded by Orrin Keepnews and Bill Grauer under his firm Bill Grauer Productions, Inc. in 1953, the label was a major presence in the jazz record industry for a decade...
  
  , 1958) featuring Cannonball Adderley, Art Farmer
  Art Farmer
  Arthur Stewart "Art" Farmer was an American jazz trumpeter and flugelhorn player. He also played flumpet, a trumpet/flugelhorn combination designed for him by David Monette. His identical twin brother, Addison Farmer Arthur Stewart "Art" Farmer (August 21, 1928, Council Bluffs, Iowa –...
  
  
• Avant Slant (Decca, 1968)