Tina Brooks was the most enigmatic of all the Blue Note recording artists. This album, the only one issued under his own name during his lifetime, reveals him at his best – as an exceptionally gifted saxophonist. He possessed what can only be described as a soulful tone on saxophone, and there are moments in his solos that evoke the ‘cry’ of blues singers. He combined a lyrical approach to improvisation that produced solos of grace and beauty in a way that evoked, but did not copy, Lester Young’s more horizontal approach to improvisation. As this album, and the three albums that remained unissued in his lifetime, Minor Move(1958), Back to the Tracks (1960) and The Waiting Game (1961) reveal, Brooks’ compositions are some of the most original and distinctive of the hard bop era. A feature of his writing was to juxtapose a Latin section within the overall architecture of his compositions – episodes of respite that broke up the often relentlessness nature of hard bop. Good examples of this technique are ‘Up Tight’s Creek’ and ‘Good Old Soul’, the latter whose introduction includes a Brooks’ hallmark, concealing the tempo of the composition with a deliberately confusing metre. On the album’s title track, this ambiguous tempo delineation seems to have two possibilities which become a central feature and by cleverly juxtaposing metre against tempo he transforms a 12 bar blues into something special. Hubbard’s crisp assertive solo bubbles with ideas, the perfect foil for Brooks, who contributes three choruses that are essentially a manifesto of his style – a calm unruffled lyricism where each phrase seems like a logical extension of the previous one and a mellow tone that is bent one way, then the other to bring expressive weight to his solos. As hard bop compositions go, ‘Theme For Doris’ is quite sophisticated – again the play-off between metre and tempo with ABC form that juxtaposes Latin sections and ostinatos, and the introduction of a fourth hard swinging D section. Brooks is at his peak here, assertive, expressive and in an unusual role reversal between trumpet and saxophone, leads the ensemble and contributes a solo that slyly references the A, B and C themes. True Blue is a good representation of hard bop at its best, combining highly creative solos, imaginative compositions and a touch of genuine flair that still sparkles today.