Roy Brooks was one of the premier percussionists of the hard bop generation. His iconic trap kit style wed the finesse, invention, and sophistication dictated by modern jazz to an unshakeable pulse that reflected his deep love of 1950s R&B, making him a perfect fit for classic dates led by Horace Silver, Yusef Lateef, and Sonny Stitt and literally hundreds of others. A co-founder of Max Roach's pioneering Afro-jazz vehicle M'Boom and his own band the Artistic Truth, he also played in Charles Mingus' and Abdullah Ibrahim's bands. Under his own name, he issued the classic The Free Slave in 1972, Ethnic Expressions in 1973, and The Smart Set in 1979. After a long battle with bipolar illness that saw him hospitalized and even imprisoned, he died in 2005. In 2021, a sprawling 1970 Baltimore concert was released as Understanding.