Harvey Brooks

Harvey Brooks is a bass player who, in his late teen and early twenty’s started playing in New York City and learned to play, like bass players that followed him, myself included, many styles of music, from folk, blues, rock, and jazz. I really attribute to him with helping bring the bass guitar to the forefront in all genres of music from the 60’s through today. 

His career really got going when he was picked to be the bass player of Bob Dylan's backing band on the sessions that yielded the song "Like a Rolling Stone" and the album Highway 61 Revisited which were in contrast to the kind of folkie-electric sound by the band on Dylan’s previous album.  Dylan was looking for a harder, in-your-face electric sound, and Harvey Brooks, helped provided exactly what was needed on one of the most famous recordings of the 1960s.

Because of his association with Columbia Records and producer Tom Wilson, Harvey became a producer a Columbia Records which led his association with legendary jazz trumpeter Miles Davis. Working with Davis he was involved in a freer manner of making music and was a contributor on two of Davis’s albums. Between his work with Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, guitarist Michael Bloomfield, organist Al Kooper, and singer Cass Elliot, Harvey’s career was made. He became a familiar name and from the 1970s into the mid-1990s. Brooks was one of the busiest bassists in music, working with such varied artists as John Martyn, the Fabulous Rhinestones, Seals & Crofts, John Sebastian, Loudon Wainwright III, John Cale, the Fabulous Rhinestones and Paul Burlison.

Harvey has been somewhat less active since the early 1990s, having relocated to Arizona, but has continued to perform and record. Harvey also played with Donald Fagen (Rock 'n' Soul Revue). In 2006, Light In The Attic, a Seattle-based record label, reissued the 1971 album In My Own Time by Karen Dalton, which he arranged, produced and played bass on.

Relocating to Tucson, Arizona Harvey started and played with “The 17th Street Band”. In late 2009 Harvey and his wife moved to Israel where he resides today.

I invite you to look at Harvey' video blog "Veiw from the bottom" where he chronicles his life and times as a bass player.

Blues Travelers

Delbert McClinton

Gerry Talent

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