John Benson Brooks (February 23, 1917, in Houlton, Maine – November 13, 1999, in New York City) was an American jazz pianist, songwriter, arranger, and composer.
In 1958, he composed a work entitled Alabama Concerto and assembled a cast of sidemen for a recording which included Cannonball Adderley, Art Farmer, Barry Galbraith, and Milt Hinton.
A trio Brooks formed In the 1960s performed at the International Jazz Festival in Washington in 1962 with a composition called "The Twelves," based on improvisations on twelve-tone rows.
This became part of an LP called Avant Slant which was a collage of new and already recorded sounds and songs from Milt Gabler, the poet Robert Graves, LeRoi Jones, Lightnin' Hopkins, and others.
On February 26, 1939, he wed fellow Houlton native Helen Walton Hughes, an Emerson College senior then heard on a five-day-a-week show on Boston's WCOP, whose first-place finish in talent searches sponsored, respectively, by MGM and Kate Smith, had resulted in her uncredited appearance in the 1938 film, Arsène Lupin Returns (recounted in the serialized, Hughes-authored "Helen Hughes' Hollywood Diary," published in the Boston American[2]), as well as a guest spot on Smith's national radio program.