World of Jamaican Music

Discover artists and hear songs from everyone on the site! Log in to Spotify in this browser to hear full songs. SourcesYour Voice

An illustrated map of the creators of Jamaican music and how they are connected.

Remembering Derrick Harriott (1939-2026), rocksteady singer and producer. Read his story →

Cedric Brooks

Artist. Ska, rocksteady, reggae

Active
1960s-2010
Sunrise
1943, Kingston
Sunset
May 3, 2013, New York
Also known as
Im, Cedric Im Brooks, Cedric Roy Brooks, Im & David, The Light of Saba, Light of Saba

Cedric "Im" Brooks was a tenor saxophonist, flautist and arranger who joined the horns of Jamaican jazz and Studio One to Rastafari drumming, most famously as the arranger of Count Ossie's Grounation.

A pupil of the Alpha Boys School, of the generation after Tommy McCook and Don Drummond, he played in the Jamaica Military Band and embraced Rastafari at Count Ossie's camp on Wareika Hill. He played with the Vagabonds, the Granville Williams Orchestra and Carlos Malcolm's Afro-Jamaican Rhythms before going abroad, first to the Bahamas and then, in 1968, to Philadelphia, where he studied at Combs College of Music, met Sun Ra's Arkestra and took the name "Im"; he came home in 1970.

His records of the 1970s were, for Jesse Serwer, "some of the most far-out Jamaican records of their day," with jazz the strongest of the elements he blended. Back in Jamaica he became an arranger and session player at Studio One, where he was one of the saxophonists in the house band, Sound Dimension, alongside Roland Alphonso and Headley Bennett, and Horace Andy named him among the people he learned from. His instrumentals there, among them "Ethiopia," a cut of "Java," and "Sata," a cut of "Satta Massa Gana," were collected with others on Im Flash Forward (1977), and as Im and David, with the trumpeter David Madden, he cut further horn sides. With Count Ossie he recorded Rasta pieces such as "So Long Rastafari Calling" (1970-71) for Dodd's labels.

In 1971 he merged his band, the Mystics, with Count Ossie's drummers to form the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari, and on their triple album Grounation (1973) he played tenor saxophone, clarinet and flute and arranged the music. He then led the Light of Saba, whose "Lambs Bread Collie" (1978), with an atmospheric version side engineered by Sylvan Morris, was its best-known record. A member of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, he studied for the priesthood and lived for a time in Ethiopia, moved again to the United States in the mid-1980s, and later played tenor in the reformed Skatalites after Roland Alphonso's sunset. Serwer calls his solo on Burning Spear's "Door Peep Shall Not Enter" "one of the greatest in reggae history," and he played congas on Beres Hammond's debut album Soul of a Man. In the 1980s he taught African and Caribbean rhythms at the Edna Manley College, and with his sister Ettosi he ran a nonprofit, Journey to Africa. He collapsed in his New York apartment around 2010, spent three years critically ill, and departed in New York, aged seventy.

Last updated November 5, 2026

Connections

Notes

  1. Steve Barrow and Peter Dalton, The Rough Guide to Reggae, 3rd ed. (London: Rough Guides, 2004), 172; Herbie Miller, "Cedric ‘Im’ Brooks: Eclectic and Eccentric," Jamaica Gleaner, May 19, 2013, https://old.jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20130519/ent/ent5.html.
  2. Katz says he went to Alpha at eight, played clarinet in the Jamaica Military Band, joined the Vagabonds on tenor and the Granville Williams Orchestra on baritone, spent a year at Club 35 in Montego Bay, went to the Bahamas, moved to the United States in 1968 to study at Combs College of Music in Philadelphia, where he met Sun Ra's Arkestra, and returned to Jamaica in 1970. David Katz, "Cedric Brooks Obituary," Guardian, May 8, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/may/08/cedric-brooks. Miller gives the name "Im" and the Rastafari conversion at Wareika, and describes ten years abroad. Miller, "Cedric ‘Im’ Brooks."
  3. Jesse Serwer, "R.I.P: Cedric Im Brooks, Jamaican Saxophone Great," LargeUp, May 6, 2013, https://www.largeup.com/2013/05/06/r-i-p-cedric-im-brooks/.
  4. Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 90. Horace Andy's account in Lloyd Bradley, This Is Reggae Music: The Story of Jamaica's Music (New York: Grove Press, 2001), 221. Bradley also lists him in the Studio One horn section. Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 214. Miller, "Cedric ‘Im’ Brooks."
  5. Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 92, 96, 97.
  6. Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 132.
  7. Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 172. Miller, "Cedric ‘Im’ Brooks." Katz dates the formation to 1971 and adds tours of Guyana, Trinidad, the United States and Canada in 1972. Katz, "Cedric Brooks Obituary."
  8. Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 172, 235.
  9. Miller, "Cedric ‘Im’ Brooks."
  10. Serwer, "R.I.P: Cedric Im Brooks."
  11. Basil Walters, "Cedric Brooks's Journey to Africa," Jamaica Observer, May 8, 2013, https://jamaicaobserver.com/2013/05/08/cedric-brookss-journey-to-africa.
  12. Miller, "Cedric ‘Im’ Brooks." Discogs gives his birthplace as Denham Town, Kingston. "Cedric 'Im' Brooks," Discogs, accessed October 6, 2026, https://www.discogs.com/artist/333839-Cedric-Im-Brooks. Katz also gives Denham Town. Katz, "Cedric Brooks Obituary."

World of Jamaican Music: the whole map