Renowned saxophonist Cedric ‘Im’ Brooks’, up to press time yesterday was in a coma at the Bronx Lebanon Hospital in New York.

According to Brook’s associate, broadcaster Junior Blake, the sax player was admitted to hospital on Monday, after he was found at home unresponsive.

“He slipped into a coma yesterday (Monday) and has been admitted. He has been in and out of a coma since,” a distraught sounding Blake told the Observer.

Doctors, he explained, did not say what exactly was the nature of Brooks’ illness.

He said that Brooks, who has been in good health, should have been on a tour with the Skatalites, but there was a change of plans at the last minute.

Cedric ‘Im’ Brooks is regarded as one of the most innovative saxophone players in all of reggae music. According to one writer, his “stunning fusion of jazz, Afro-beat, funk and Latin with reggae sets him apart as a true pioneer, radically altering the limits and expectations of what reggae music could sound like”.

Born in Kingston, Cedric Brooks became a pupil at the renowned Alpha Boys School at age 11, where he learned music theory and clarinet. In his late teens he took up tenor saxophone and flute and subsequently toured Caribbean hotels and clubs with various big bands and combos.

His online biography states that Brooks was a member of groups such as The Vagabonds and the Granville Williams Band in the early 1960s, but it would be the late 1960s when he would find his first major commercial success, as part of a duo with trumpeter David Madden, Im & David. The duo released a series of instrumental singles for Clement ‘Coxsone’ Dodd’s Studio One label. Brooks also became a regular studio musician at the Brentford Road studio, playing on many recording sessions, and released several solo singles in the early 1970s.

He is known for his solo recordings and as a member of The Mystic Revelation of Rastafari, The Light of Saba, and The Skatalites. — Yasmine Peru