My father, Michael Brooks, who has died aged 85, was a Grammy award-winning archivist, historian and producer who introduced American roots music to a new generation of listeners. He had a lifelong passion for early jazz and blues, together with a knowledge of elusive 78rpm recordings that bordered on the uncanny. “He’s like Merlin the wizard,” his fellow producer Steve Berkowitz told Billboard magazine in 2004. “To try to find an obscure master or acetate, you can go to the vault or try the internet. Or you can just go to Michael.”
He was born in Tooting, south London, and largely raised by his grandparents. But he found his spiritual home in New York and his inspiration in the music of Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday. He barely knew his father, Alfred Brooks, who skipped town when he was four. His mother, Maude (nee Buttle), then remarried and left to run a pub in north London. Michael attended Mitcham county grammar school but left with few qualifications. He would later recall tearing his final report into pieces outside the school gates.
Music, though, was to provide his real education. By his early teens he was already trading jazz records and used the proceeds to supplement his income during early stints as an advertising copywriter and a hotel scout for Thomas Cook. By dint of skill and good fortune, he spun a cherished hobby into a career that he loved.
Adventurous by nature, he and his first wife (and my mother), Stella (nee Hoye), moved to Manhattan in 1966, initially intending to stay for three months. For several years he worked in the marketing department at St Martin’s Press, where he suggested the title for James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small (his first suggestion, Ill Creatures Great and Small, was rejected). He and Stella separated in 1974 and he married Pat Sweeting in 1982.
His big break in the business came when he caught the eye of John Hammond, the producer credited with discovering both Holiday and Bob Dylan. Michael served as his assistant from 1971 until Hammond’s retirement five years later, mastering the intricacies of the recording and restoration process along the way. Emerging from Hammond’s office one day, he stumbled upon a young hopeful named Bruce Springsteen waiting to step inside and audition.
Michael worked as a reissue producer at CBS and then as an archivist and consultant at Sony Music in Manhattan - a role he was still filling, very happily, well into his 80s. He won six Grammys in total, including prizes for reissues by his first loves, Holiday and Armstrong. In 2019, the Michael Brooks Collection - his personal archive of over 10,000 records - was acquired by the University of California Santa Barbara Performing Arts Library.
Born into a rackety, working-class background, my father was self-taught and self-made; a discerning consumer of news, politics and popular culture. Intimacy did not come easily to him. He regarded himself as a natural outsider. But his puckish dark humour masked a love of good company and a deep-seated concern for the wellbeing of others. He was a man who would never knowingly under-tip a waiter, or pass a beggar on the street without emptying his wallet. He never learned to drive, in part because he liked to walk. The world is a little less interesting without him walking through it.
He is survived by Pat, me and his grandchildren, Ada and Ira.