The Complete Blue Note Recordings of the Tina Brooks Quintets

Mosaic MR4-106 · hand-numbered copy 5589

Only one of the four albums Tina Brooks made as a leader for Blue Note came out while he was alive. Sit with that for a moment, because it's the reason this object exists. Inside the booklet of my copy, written by hand in green ink, is the number: «This is number 5589 of an edition limited to 7500 albums». Four LPs in a plain black box, and that green figure telling me mine is the five-thousand-five-hundred-and-eighty-ninth of the run. But the number matters less than the name above it — Tina Brooks, one of the great tenor saxophonists jazz very nearly forgot.

Nearly forgot is not a figure of speech. Brooks recorded four albums as a leader for Blue Note, and only True Blue (1960) was released in his lifetime. By every account a sweet, shy man, he was also in the grip of heroin, and unreliable enough that the label — which loved him as a sideman — never built the career his talent deserved around him. His last studio session was in early 1961. He died in 1974, aged 42, with the best of his work still locked in a vault. The critic Jack Chambers titled his famous essay "Who Killed Tina Brooks?", and the question isn't rhetorical.

Minor Move, his first leader date, surfaced only in Japan, in 1980. Back to the Tracks and The Waiting Game stayed unissued until this Mosaic box of 1985, which made them available to the world for the first time. That's what this set really is: not a deluxe reissue of familiar records, but the near-complete recovery of a body of work that for decades had simply not existed. To hold it is to hold a repair.

The box gathers Brooks's four quintets, all recorded by Rudy Van Gelder and originally produced by Alfred Lion. The names around him ache, when you think how little he was heard:

• 16 March 1958 (sides I–II): Lee Morgan on trumpet, Sonny Clark on piano, Doug Watkins on bass, Art Blakey on drums.
• 25 June 1960 (III–IV): Freddie Hubbard, Duke Jordan, Sam Jones, Art Taylor.
• 20 October 1960, with one number from 1 September 1960 featuring Jackie McLean on alto (V–VI): Blue Mitchell, Kenny Drew, Paul Chambers, Art Taylor.
• 2 March 1961 (VII–VIII): Johnny Coles, Kenny Drew, Wilbur Ware, Philly Joe Jones.

The cream of Blue Note, in service of a leader almost nobody heard play. That's the vertigo of the record before the needle even drops.

Four LPs, eight sides numbered in Roman numerals I to VIII, catalogue MR4-106 on the labels. The back of the box is entirely black, without a word: everything lives in the sixteen-page booklet, with production and notes by Michael Cuscuna, further notes by Robert Palmer, art direction by Richard Mandel and Charlie Lourie as executive producer. It's the green number, on the inside front cover, that makes the copy yours.

One detail of mine, which I note without explaining it: the side I label carries the address Mosaic Records, Inc. · 35 Melrose Place · Stamford, Connecticut 06902, while sides III and V read 197 Strawberry Hill Avenue · Stamford, Connecticut 06902. Two different addresses on the same box. Discogs doesn't mention it, and I have no explanation to offer — I write it down because that's how it is, not because I know why.

The mastering is EMI America's: stamped into the dead wax is «MASTERED BY EMI/A», with the Hauppauge triangle, Hauppauge Record Manufacturing being where the box was pressed. In the hand-etched matrices are the initials «McM», which Discogs attributes to Ron McMaster, the remastering engineer. I don't quote the exact matrix numbers — two sides in the Discogs list appear to share a code, probably a data-entry slip — but the MR4-106 catalogue, the McM initials and the EMI/A stamp are enough to place the pressing. Under all of it, of course, are Van Gelder's tapes: that's where everything begins.

What stays with me is a whole-set impression, across four discs, and I'll leave it as it is: very beautiful, a fine recording, fluid and warm in sound. I won't break it down track by track, because that isn't how I lived it — it's the feeling of a single body of music, heard straight through. And I have no second copy to compare against: one copy is not a test, and I won't fake a forensic verdict a single pressing can't give.

On vinyl there's nothing else: this 1985 Mosaic box — a US mail-order-only release, limited to seven thousand five hundred hand-numbered copies — is the only vinyl edition of this material gathered together. It's a very Mosaic story, that mail-order model, and a very familiar one to US and UK collectors of a certain vintage; True Blue itself has long been a grail in British collecting circles. On Discogs, read at the end of September 2026, logged sales run from €43.99 to €199.00, with a median of €93.22; the most recent was on 11 September 2026. The range covers every condition — take it as an order of magnitude, not a quote.

It comes from the same haul as the Dizzy Gillespie of the last piece: 2002, a collector selling off his whole collection, and me loading up the car. I paid around thirty euros for this box — a figure that's almost startling now, for four hand-numbered Mosaic LPs. It's a thread that will run through several pieces in this series: a good number of the records I'll write about came from that one afternoon. The copy is mint, box and booklet included — more than twenty years on, still as it left the factory.