Folk Roots and Jazz Ambition in Alabama
Brooks built something neither strictly jazz nor strictly classical—a suite that feels caught between two worlds.
Alabama Concerto opens with a mood that is deliberate and almost orchestral in its slowness. John Benson Brooks sits at the piano with Cannonball Adderley on alto saxophone and Art Farmer on trumpet, supported by Barry Galbraith on guitar and Milt Hinton on bass. The horns don't rush; they drift over Brooks' composed arrangements with the patience of musicians exploring a hymn rather than trading bebop licks. This is not the blues in any traditional sense, and it's not straight-ahead swing either. The texture is cool and deliberate, sometimes hushed, with long melodic lines that feel more like chamber music than a jazz date.
Brooks drew the album's concept from folk recordings made in Alabama by ethnographer Harold Courlander—recordings that captured something older and more elemental than what jazz was doing in the late 1950s. Rather than quote folk melodies directly, Brooks seemed interested in their emotional quality: the rural, the austere, the patient. He composed extended pieces that gave Adderley and Farmer room to bend and interpret, but within a framework that kept pulling them back toward restraint. The result is unusual for a Riverside session of this era—less concerned with display and more interested in atmosphere.
The album's weakness is also its ambition. Critic Wilson noted that the work "lacks movement and explicit development," and he wasn't wrong; the suite can feel static, even lost in its own deliberation. For some listeners, this will be exactly the point—a rare moment when jazz stepped sideways into something more introspective. For others, it's a record that means well but doesn't quite land. It remains an artifact of a composer trying to bend jazz toward a different history altogether.
Who's playing
Milt Hintonbass
John Benson Brookspiano
Barry Galbraithguitar
Cannonball Adderleyalto saxophone
Art Farmertrumpet
Where next?
More by Art Farmer
All 32 albums →
The musicians on this record
Their own records, close in time
