Gil Scott-Heron (1949-2011): Legendary, iconic, and innovative musician, composer, singer, songwriter, ensemble leader, producer, activist, and teacher

SOUND PROJECTIONS

AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE

EDITOR:  KOFI NATAMBU

WINTER, 2018

VOLUME FIVE     NUMBER ONE

ORNETTE COLEMAN    

 

Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:       

TYSHAWN SOREY

(November 4-10)

 

JALEEL SHAW

(November 11-17)

 

COUNT BASIE

(November 18-24)

 

NICHOLAS PAYTON

(November 25-December 1)

 

JONATHAN FINLAYSON

(December 2-8)

 

JIMMY HEATH

(December 9-15)

 

BRIAN BLADE

(December 16-22)

 

RAVI COLTRANE

(December 23-29)

 

CHRISTIAN SCOTT

(December 30-January 5)

 

GIL SCOTT-HERON 

(January 6-12)

 

MARK TURNER

(January 13-19)

 

CRAIG TABORN

(January 20-26)

 

 

https://www.allmusic.com/artist/gil-scott-heron-mn0000658346/biography

Gil Scott-Heron

(1949-2011)

Artist Biography by John Bush

One of the most important progenitors of rap music, Gil Scott-Heron's aggressive, no-nonsense street poetry inspired a legion of intelligent rappers while his engaging songwriting skills placed him square in the R&B charts later in his career, backed by increasingly contemporary production courtesy of Malcolm Cecil and Nile Rodgers (of Chic). Born in Chicago but transplanted to Tennessee for his early years, Scott-Heron spent most of his high-school years in the Bronx, where he learned firsthand many of the experiences that later made up his songwriting material. He had begun writing before reaching his teenage years, however, and completed his first volume of poetry at the age of 13. Though he attended college in Pennsylvania, he dropped out after one year to concentrate on his writing career and earned plaudits for his novel, The Vulture.

Encouraged at the end of the '60s to begin recording by legendary jazz producer Bob Thiele -- who had worked with every major jazz great from Louis Armstrong to John Coltrane -- Scott-Heron released his 1970 debut, Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, inspired by a volume of poetry of the same name. With Thiele's Flying Dutchman Records until the mid-'70s, he signed to Arista soon after and found success on the R&B charts. Though his jazz-based work of the early '70s was tempered by a slicker disco-inspired production, Scott-Heron's message was as clear as ever on the Top 30 single "Johannesburg" and the number 15 hit "Angel Dust." Silent for almost a decade, after the release of his 1984 single "Re-Ron," the proto-rapper returned to recording in the mid-'90s with a message for the gangsta rappers who had come in his wake; Scott-Heron's 1994 album Spirits began with "Message to the Messengers," pointed squarely at the rappers whose influence -- positive or negative -- meant much to the children of the 1990s.

In a touching bit of irony that he himself was quick to joke about, Gil Scott-Heron was born on April Fool's Day 1949 in Chicago, the son of a Jamaican professional soccer player (who spent time playing for Glasgow Celtic) and a college-graduate mother who worked as a librarian. His parents divorced early in his life, and Scott-Heron was sent to live with his grandmother in Lincoln, TN. Learning musical and literary instruction from her, Scott-Heron also learned about prejudice firsthand, as he was one of three children picked to integrate an elementary school in nearby Jackson. The abuse proved too much to bear, however, and the eighth-grader was sent to New York to live with his mother, first in the Bronx and later in the Hispanic neighborhood of Chelsea.

Though Scott-Heron's experiences in Tennessee must have been difficult, they proved to be the seed of his writing career, as his first volume of poetry was written around that time. His education in the New York City school system also proved beneficial, introducing the youth to the work of Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes as well as LeRoi Jones. After publishing a novel called The Vulture in 1968, Scott-Heron applied to Pennsylvania's Lincoln University. Though he spent less than one year there, it was enough time to meet Brian Jackson, a similarly minded musician who would later become a crucial collaborator and integral part of Scott-Heron's band. Given a bit of exposure -- mostly in magazines like Essence, which called The Vulture "a strong start for a writer with important things to say" -- Scott-Heron met up with Bob Thiele and was encouraged to begin a music career, reading selections from his book of poetry Small Talk at 125th & Lennox while Thiele recorded a collective of jazz and funk musicians, including bassist Ron Carter, drummer Bernard "Pretty" Purdie, Hubert Laws on flute and alto saxophone, and percussionists Eddie Knowles and Charlie Saunders; Scott-Heron also recruited Jackson to play on the record as pianist. Most important on the album was "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," an aggressive polemic against the major media and white America's ignorance of increasingly deteriorating conditions in the inner cities. Scott-Heron's second LP, 1971's Pieces of a Man, expanded his range, featuring songs such as the title track and "Lady Day and John Coltrane," which offered a more straight-ahead approach to song structure (if not content).

The following year's Free Will was his last for Flying Dutchman, however; after a dispute with the label, Scott-Heron recorded Winter in America for Strata East, then moved to Arista Records in 1975. As the first artist signed to Clive Davis' new label, much was riding on Scott-Heron to deliver first-rate material with a chance at the charts. Thanks to Arista's more focused push on the charts, Scott-Heron's "Johannesburg" reached number 29 on the R&B charts in 1975. Important to Scott-Heron's success on his first two albums for Arista (First Minute of a New Day and From South Africa to South Carolina) was the influence of keyboardist and collaborator Jackson, co-billed on both LPs and the de facto leader of Scott-Heron's Midnight Band.

Jackson left by 1978, though, leaving the musical direction of Scott-Heron's career in the capable hands of producer Malcolm Cecil, a veteran producer who had midwifed the funkier direction of the Isley Brothers and Stevie Wonder earlier in the decade. The first single recorded with Cecil, "The Bottle," became Scott-Heron's biggest hit yet, peaking at number 15 on the R&B charts, though he still made no waves on the pop charts. Producer Nile Rodgers of Chic also helped on production during the 1980s, when Scott-Heron's political attack grew even more fervent with a new target, President Ronald Reagan. (Several singles, including the R&B hits "B Movie" and "Re-Ron," were specifically directed at the President's conservative policies.) By 1985, however, Scott-Heron was dropped by Arista, just after the release of The Best of Gil Scott-Heron. Though he continued to tour around the world, Scott-Heron chose to discontinue recording. He did return, however, in 1993 with a contract for TVT Records and the album Spirits. For well over a decade, Scott-Heron was mostly inactive, held back by a series of drug possession charges. He began performing semi-regularly in 2007, and one year later, announced that he was HIV-positive. He recorded an album, I'm New Here, released on XL in 2010. In February of 2011, Scott-Heron and Jamie xx (Jamie Smith of xx) issued a remixed version of the album, entitled We're New Here, also issued on XL. Later that year, Scott-Heron died in a New York hospital, just after returning from a set of live dates in Europe. 

http://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2011/05/gil-scott-heron-1949-2011-great-poet.html 

Saturday, May 28, 2011

Gil Scott-Heron, 1949-2011: Revolutionary Poet, Novelist, Singer, Songwriter, Musician, Activist

Gil Scott-Heron

1949-2011

All,

Another African-American GIANT has left this vale of tears we arrogantly call "civilized society" and I sincerely wish there was another word other than the woefully overused, abused, and exploited cliche "genius" to describe just how truly original, dynamic, profound, innovative, and extraordinary Gil Scott-Heron's art was at his best. His enduring work as writer, poet, and musician was and is FAR BEYOND in form and depth of content what 99% of rappers in history could even conceive of let alone actually express (the only notable exceptions to this obvious fact worth mentioning are Chuck D of Public Enemy, Q-Tip from A Tribe Called Quest, Rakim, Mos Def, De La Soul, and KRS-One who themselves would openly admit they were nowhere near as advanced as Gil was!). Hip Hop and the so-called "spoken word" community in this country WISHES that a poet as creative and yes revolutionary as Scott-Heron could have been its actual "forefather." It's certainly the hip hop community's massive loss that Gil's work always went in openly radical directions that were inspired and deeply informed first, last, and always by the legendary cultural/artistic examples and contributions established by Langston Hughes, Bob Kaufman, Aime Cesaire, Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Gwendolynn Brooks, Sterling A. Brown, Melvin B. Tolson, Jean Toomer, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, Chester Himes, John Coltrane, Malcolm X, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. DuBois, Robert Hayden, Eddie Jefferson, Zora Neale Hurston, King Pleasure, Betty Carter, Marvin Gaye, and Etheridge Knight, among other giants from the fertile African American literary/musical traditions. More than mere homage Gil always vigorously sought and found new ways to carry forward these incredible traditions in a popular art context rooted deeply in both black vernacular and modernist traditions and forms. Listen especially to Gil's dynamic signature work from the 1970-1985 period to find out just how consistently creative, deeply perceptive, politically conscious, and truly visionary his poetic and musical work was. That is and will always remain his inspiring legacy to 20th century art and culture for both his people and the world. RIP Gil--and love always...

Kofi

Gil Scott-Heron (born April 1, 1949 -- May 27, 2011) was an American poet, musician, and author known primarily for his late 1960s and early 1970s work as a spoken word soul performer and his collaborative work with musician Brian Jackson. His collaborative efforts with Jackson featured a musical fusion of jazz, blues and soul music, as well as lyrical content concerning social and political issues of the time, delivered in both rapping and melismatic vocal styles by Scott-Heron. The music of these albums, most notably Pieces of a Man and Winter in America in the early 1970s, influenced and helped engender later African-American music genres such as hip hop and neo soul. Scott-Heron's recording work is often associated with black militant activism and has received much critical acclaim for one of his most well-known compositions "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised". On his influence, a music writer later noted that "Scott-Heron's unique proto-rap style influenced a generation of hip-hop artists".

Winter in America is a studio album by American soul musician and poet Gil Scott-Heron and musician Brian Jackson, released in May 1974 on Strata-East Records. Recording sessions for the album took place on three recording dates in September and October of 1973 at D&B Sound Studio in Silver Springs, Maryland. The album served as the third collaboration effort by Scott-Heron and Jackson following the latter's contributions on Pieces of a Man and Free Will. As the first record produced by the two musicians, it was also the first of their work together to have Jackson receive co-billing for a release. The album features introspective and socially-conscious lyrical content by Scott-Heron and mellow instrumentation and soundscape stylistically rooted in jazz and the blues, which produced a fusion of bluesy jazz-based vocals and Jackson's free jazz arrangements. The album is also one of the earliest known studio releases to contain proto-rap elements such as a stripped-down production style and spoken word-vocalization.

http://www.westword.com/music/qanda-with-gil-scott-heron-5713147

Q&A with Gil Scott-Heron
by Tom Murphy
May 1, 2009
Denver Westword

GIL SCOTT-HERON

In advance of his two shows this weekend (Saturday, May 2nd at The Oriental and Sunday, May 3rd, 2009 at The Fox Theatre), we were able to have a few words with jazz/proto-hip-hop legend Gil Scott-Heron about his influences and his work.

Westword: Your music is known for being socially conscious. When and what sparked that awareness inside you?

Gil Scott-Heron: Don't you just hate socially unconscious people? We run into them every once in a while but we try not to hang out with them. I think everybody has it, some people choke it off and don't use it. I think we all start off with it. We are a social sort of animal, as far as I'm concerned. My songs are just about people. Generally they're folks I know or have heard about.

WW: Did Langston Hughes having gone to Lincoln University influence your decision to go there after high school?

GSH: Langston Hughes, Thurgood Marshall, Kwame Nkruhmah, Melvin Tolson--quite a few people. Langston Hughes going there was definitely an influence. I thought his writing was something special and I became aware of him at a very young age. But Thurgood Marshall was one of the great men of the twentieth century.

WW: Did you ever get to meet Mr. Hughes?

GSH: I wrote my senior paper on Langston Hughes and I went down to interview him. He was working at The Amsterdam News and the New York Post. He wrote a column each week. He was very gracious and humble. We talked about his work and how he had come to master so many different art forms. That, also, was very influential because I like to write many different things myself: poetry as well as longer pieces and music. He'd done the same. He wrote songs, he wrote that weekly column and I used read his work in The Chicago Defender when I was a boy in Tennessee. It was nice to come across him still working and still just as powerful and as humorous as he was in print.

WW: Your albums always seem to have poetic titles. What lead you to title the albums "Pieces of a Man" and "Winter in America?"

GSH: Pieces of a Man was done when we were with Flying Dutchman Records, that was one of the songs that Bob Thiele was particularly fond of. Bob had produced John Coltrane. He liked the song, and he liked to name the albums that came out on his label behind something that was represented inside. Small Talk at 125th and Lennox was the name of our first book of poetry and the name of one of the poems we did on our first album. Pieces of a Man and Free Will, the other two albums we did for him, were from songs we included inside. Winter In America was what the inside of the album was about. There was no song called "Winter in America" at the time. Miss Peggy Harris, the woman who did the collage inside the album, said there ought to be a song called "Winter in America." I eventually wrote it and put it on an album called The First Minute of a New Day. In general we did not name things after a song, we tried to sum up what we were talking about on the albums.

WW: How did you get hooked up with Bob Thiele for Pieces of a Man?

GSH: I went to see him after I did my first book of poetry. I introduced myself as a songwriter. He had just started his own label and he had Leon Thomas, Oliver Nelson, Gato Barbieri and some other people that I thought might find some of the songs I wrote interesting. We got a three record deal with him eventually.

WW: Your songs often deal with heavy subjects but I also hear a playfulness and wry sense of humor there as well. I realize that may be your personality coming through but is there something else at work there?

GSH: I think that's part of life. If you're always living one way or another, you're not living a full life. You talk about all sorts of things that challenge you in your life and they have an influence on you. There are things that are, as you call it, "heavy," or complex but we deal with the simplest aspects of them so everyone can understand what we're talking about.

WW: One of your most powerful songs is "The Bottle." I have often wondered if that song was autobiographical in any way?

GSH: Actually, there was a liquor store that I could see from the back of the house when I lived in Washington. The folks used to be there every morning at 6:30 or 7:00 and be there when they opened the door. I went out there to find out who they were. There were a lot of different people. There was an ex-schoolteacher, an ex-air traffic controller, there was a doctor--there were different people with different experiences. Different things lead them to be out there in the morning like that. But none of them set out to be an alcoholic when they were born, something happened in their life that turned them that way. I like to drink a glass of cognac once in a while but that's about it for me.

WW: You've been working on an autobiography?

GSH: It covers certain pieces of my life but it's really about the campaign Stevie Wonder initiated to get Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday turned into a national holiday. That's the slice of my life that I discuss because I think that when things of historical significance happen, there need to be firsthand accounts of it. Since I was on the tour with him, I saw the various things he had in mind to bring that about and I got a good look at it. There are autobiographical pieces in there but it's not cover to cover about me.

WW: You were a published novelist before releasing an album and yet you've said you were in bands before you were a poet. Is the creative process of writing poetry and writing music different for you?

GSH: They're absolutely different. Some ideas show up by themselves and others show up with tones and melodies that you can only express with a few chords or a few pieces of harmony. Everything that shows up, shows up differently. I published a novel, I quit school to write it. I was a college sophomore. I'd always wanted to write so when I came across an idea I thought might fill the bill as a novel I took off and went to work on it.

WW: Your first novel was The Vulture?

GSH: It was and it came out at the same time as Small Talk at 125th and Lennox.

WW: Your second novel was called The Nigger Factory? I saw an interview where you talked about how it maybe had to do with the university and schooling system in America.

GSH: It was a piece of fiction. It was about a small uprising on a college campus, trying to get some basic rights. Because of the conflict between the students and the administration, things kept getting blown out of proportion. The title itself came from looking at three or four situations like that: one was Columbia University, one was Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee and one was Kent State in Ohio. Where students were trying to find themselves in one direction were getting pulled in another by folks who can't remember being young.

WW: Will you be performing new songs and poems on this tour and can we expect to see a new album in the near future?

GSH: Absolutely. If you've never heard them before, they're all new. I doubt anyone has heard all twenty-five of the albums. But we're constantly working on new things and different arrangements on old things, trying to make the show as interesting as possible for everyone involved. We're trying to finish up a new album this week that will hopefully be out at the end of the summer.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/arts/music/gil-scott-heron-voice-of-black-culture-dies-at-62.html

 

Gil Scott-Heron, Voice of Black Culture, Dies at 62 
by BEN SISARIO 
May 28, 2011
New York Times

Gil Scott-Heron, the poet and recording artist whose syncopated spoken style and mordant critiques of politics, racism and mass media in pieces like “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” made him a notable voice of black protest culture in the 1970s and an important early influence on hip-hop, died on Friday at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 62 and had been a longtime resident of Harlem. 

His death was announced in a Twitter message on Friday night by his British publisher, Jamie Byng, and confirmed early Saturday by an American representative of his record label, XL. The cause was not immediately known, although The Associated Press reported that he had become ill after returning from a trip to Europe. 

Mr. Scott-Heron often bristled at the suggestion that his work had prefigured rap. “I don’t know if I can take the blame for it,” he said in an interview last year with the music Web site The Daily Swarm. He preferred to call himself a “bluesologist,” drawing on the traditions of blues, jazz and Harlem renaissance poetics. 

Yet, along with the work of the Last Poets, a group of black nationalist performance poets who emerged alongside him in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Mr. Scott-Heron established much of the attitude and the stylistic vocabulary that would characterize the socially conscious work of early rap groups like Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions. And he has remained part of the DNA of hip-hop by being sampled by stars like Kanye West. 

“You can go into Ginsberg and the Beat poets and Dylan, but Gil Scott-Heron is the manifestation of the modern word,” Chuck D, the leader of Public Enemy, told The New Yorker in 2010. “He and the Last Poets set the stage for everyone else.”
  
Mr. Scott-Heron’s career began with a literary rather than a musical bent. He was born in Chicago on April 1, 1949, and reared in Tennessee and New York. His mother was a librarian and an English teacher; his estranged father was a Jamaican soccer player. 

In his early teens, Mr. Scott-Heron wrote detective stories, and his work as a writer won him a scholarship to the Fieldston School in the Bronx, where he was one of 5 black students in a class of 100. Following in the footsteps of Langston Hughes, he went to the historically black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and he wrote his first novel at 19, a murder mystery called “The Vulture.” A book of verse, “Small Talk at 125th and Lenox,” and a second novel, “The Nigger Factory,” soon followed. 

Working with a college friend, Brian Jackson, Mr. Scott-Heron turned to music in search of a wider audience. His first album, “Small Talk at 125th and Lenox,” was released in 1970 on Flying Dutchman, a small label, and included a live recitation of “Revolution” accompanied by conga and bongo drums. Another version of that piece, recorded with a full band including the jazz bassist Ron Carter, was released on Mr. Scott-Heron’s second album, “Pieces of a Man,” in 1971. 

“Revolution” established Mr. Scott-Heron as a rising star of the black cultural left, and its cool, biting ridicule of a nation anesthetized by mass media has resonated with the socially disaffected of various stripes — campus activists, media theorists, coffeehouse poets — for four decades. With sharp, sardonic wit and a barrage of pop-culture references, he derided society’s dominating forces as well as the gullibly dominated: 

The revolution will not be brought to you by the Schaefer Award Theater and will not star Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia.

The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, brother. 

During the 1970s, Mr. Scott-Heron was seen as a prodigy with significant potential, although he never achieved more than cult popularity. He recorded 13 albums from 1970 to 1982, and was one of the first acts that the music executive Clive Davis signed after starting Arista Records in 1974. In 1979, Mr. Scott-Heron performed at Musicians United for Safe Energy’s “No Nukes” benefit concerts at Madison Square Garden, and in 1985, he appeared on the all-star anti-apartheid album “Sun City.” 

But by the mid-1980s, Mr. Scott-Heron had begun to fade, and his recording output slowed to a trickle. In later years, he struggled publicly with addiction. Since 2001, Mr. Scott-Heron had been convicted twice for cocaine possession, and he served a sentence at Rikers Island in New York for parole violation. 

Commentators sometimes used Mr. Scott-Heron’s plight as an example of the harshness of New York’s drug laws. Yet his friends were also horrified by his descent. In interviews Mr. Scott-Heron often dodged questions about drugs, but the writer of the New Yorker profile reported witnessing Mr. Scott-Heron’s crack smoking and being so troubled by his own ravaged physical appearance that he avoided mirrors. “Ten to 15 minutes of this, I don’t have pain,” Mr. Scott-Heron said in the article, as he lighted a glass crack pipe. 

That image seemed to contrast tragically with Mr. Scott-Heron’s legacy as someone who had once so trenchantly mocked the psychology of addiction. “You keep sayin’ kick it, quit it, kick it quit it!” he said in his 1971 song “Home Is Where the Hatred Is.” “God, did you ever try to turn your sick soul inside out so that the world could watch you die?” 

Information on his survivors was not immediately available. 

Despite Mr. Scott-Heron’s public problems, he remained an admired figure in music, and he made occasional concert appearances and was sought after as a collaborator. Last year, XL released “I’m New Here,” his first album of new material in 16 years, which was produced by Richard Russell, a British record producer who met Mr. Scott-Heron at Rikers Island in 2006 after writing him a letter.

Reviews for the album inevitably called Mr. Scott-Heron the “godfather of rap,” but he made it clear he had different tastes.

“It’s something that’s aimed at the kids,” he once said. “I have kids, so I listen to it. But I would not say it’s aimed at me. I listen to the jazz station.”

https://www.deseretnews.com/article/700139640/Spoken-word-musician-Gil-Scott-Heron-dies-in-NYC.html

Spoken-word musician Gil Scott-Heron dies in NYC

by Cristian Salazar

Associated Press

May 28, 2011

The Associated Press 

FILE - In the Sept. 1984 file photo, musician Gil Scott-Heron poses. Scott-Heron, who helped lay the groundwork for rap by fusing minimalistic percussion, political expression and spoken-word poetry on songs such as "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" but saw his brilliance undermined by a years-long drug addiction, died Friday, May, 27, 2011 at age 62. (AP Photo, File) 

NEW YORK — Musician Gil Scott-Heron, who helped lay the groundwork for rap by fusing minimalistic percussion, political expression and spoken-word poetry on songs such as "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" but saw his brilliance undermined by a years-long drug addiction, died Friday at age 62.

A friend, Doris C. Nolan, who answered the telephone listed for his Manhattan recording company, said he died in the afternoon at St. Luke's Hospital after becoming sick upon returning from a trip to Europe.

"We're all sort of shattered," she said.

Scott-Heron was known for work that reflected the fury of black America in the post-civil rights era and also spoke to the social and political disparities in the country. His songs often had incendiary titles — "Home is Where the Hatred Is," or "Whitey on the Moon," and through spoken word and song, he tapped the frustration of the masses.

Yet much of his life was also defined by his battle with crack cocaine, which also led to time in jail. In a 2008 interview with New York magazine, he said he had been living with HIV for years, but he still continued to perform and put out music; his last album, which came out this year, was a collaboration with artist Jamie xx, "We're Still Here," a reworking of Scott-Heron's acclaimed "I'm New Here," which was released in 2010.

He was also still smoking crack, as detailed in a New Yorker article last year.

"Ten to fifteen minutes of this, I don't have pain," he said. "I could have had an operation a few years ago, but there was an 8 percent chance of paralysis. I tried the painkillers, but after a couple of weeks I felt like a piece of furniture. It makes you feel like you don't want to do anything. This I can quit anytime I'm ready."

Scott-Heron's influence on rap was such that he sometimes was referred to as the Godfather of Rap, a title he rejected.

"If there was any individual initiative that I was responsible for it might have been that there was music in certain poems of mine, with complete progression and repeating 'hooks,' which made them more like songs than just recitations with percussion," he wrote in the introduction to his 1990 collection of poems, "Now and Then."

He referred to his signature mix of percussion, politics and performed poetry as bluesology or Third World music. But then he said it was simply "black music or black American music."

"Because black Americans are now a tremendously diverse essence of all the places we've come from and the music and rhythms we brought with us," he wrote.

Nevertheless, his influence on generations of rappers has been demonstrated through sampling of his recordings by artists, including Kanye West, who closes out the last track of his latest album with a long excerpt of Scott-Heron's "Who Will Survive in America."

Scott-Heron recorded the song that would make him famous, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," which critiqued mass media, for the album "125th and Lenox" in Harlem in the 1970s. He followed up that recording with more than a dozen albums, initially collaborating with musician Brian Jackson. His most recent album was "I'm New Here," which he began recording in 2007 and was released in 2010.

Throughout his musical career, he took on political issues of his time, including apartheid in South Africa and nuclear arms. He had been shaped by the politics of the 1960s and black literature, especially the Harlem Renaissance.

Scott-Heron was born in Chicago on April 1, 1949. He was raised in Jackson, Tenn., and in New York before attending college at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.

Before turning to music, he was a novelist, at age 19, with the publication of "The Vulture," a murder mystery.

He also was the author of "The Nigger Factory," a social satire.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/gil-scott-heron-forefather-of-hip-hop-dead-at-62-20110528
 

Gil Scott-Heron, Forefather of Hip Hop, Dead at 62
 
Scott-Heron was best known for 1970's 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised'
 
by Andy Greene
May 28, 2011
Rolling Stone

Gil Scott-Heron in Harlem, New York, 2010.
Anthony Barboza/Getty Images

Revolutionary poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron, best known for his 1970 work "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," died March 27th at a New York City hospital. The exact cause of death is currently unknown, though he had been battling a severe drug addiction and other health problems for years. He was 62. 

Many hip-hop artists cite Scott-Heron as one of the forefathers of the genre, but Scott-Heron refused to take any credit. "I just think they made a mistake," he told The New Yorker last year. He also feels that people misinterpreted "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" – a biting, spoken-work screed against the mass media and consumerist culture. "That was satire," he told The Telegraph in February of 2010. "People would try and argue that it was this militant message, but just how militant can you really be when you're saying, 'The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner'? My songs were always about the tone of voice rather than the words. A good comic will deliver a line deadpan – they let the audience laugh." 

Scott-Heron was born in Chicago, but he moved to New York City as a teenager and received a scholarship to the prestigious Fieldston School in the Bronx after his teachers took note of his writing. Before he was even 20, Scott-Heron published a murder mystery novel called The Vulture. At Lincoln University he met his future musical partner Brian Jackson. In 1970 they released Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, which included a stripped-down version of "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." 

The work failed to reach a mass audience, but was widely praised for its vivid depiction of urban decay and racism in American culture. Clive Davis signed Scott-Heron to Arista in 1974 and began releasing his records at a frantic piece, averaging more than one a year between 1970 and 1982. In 1979 he performed alongside Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne and many others at the MUSE benefits at Madison Square Garden, and in 1985 he sang the protest anthem "Sun City" with Bob Dylan, Steve Van Zandt, RUN DMC, Lou Reed and Miles Davis. 

In the mid-1980s he was dropped by Arista as drugs started to take over his life. He continued to perform, but only released a single record between 1982 and 2010. Many hip-hop artists sampled Scott-Heron's work in recent years, though he didn't consider that an achievement. "I don't want to tell you how embarrassing that can be," he told the New Yorker last year. "Long as it don't talk about 'yo mama' and stuff, I usually let it go. It's not all bad when you get sampled—hell, you make money. They give you some money to shut you up. I guess to shut you up they should have left you alone." 

In that same piece, writer Alec Wilkinson found Scott-Heron living in a cave-like Harlem apartment. He openly smoked crack in front of the writer, and occasionally fell asleep in the middle of an interview. Despite his severe addictions, Scott-Heron still performed and occasionally recorded new music. In 2010 he teamed up with producer Richard Russell for the blues and spoken-work LP I'm New Here. He had just returned from a European tour when he fell ill and checked into New York's St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center. 

Tributes have been pouring onto Twitter ever since news of Scott-Heron's death hit Friday night. "RIP Gil Scott-Heron," Eminem tweeted. "He influenced all of hip-hop." Public Enemy's Chuck D, who has long pointed to Scott-Heron as one his biggest influences, wrote this: "RIP GSH..and we do what we do and how we do because of you. And to those that don't know tip your hat with a hand over your heart & recognize."

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/05/27/us/AP-US-Obit-Gil-Scott-Heron.html?_r=1&hp


Gil Scott-Heron, Spoken-Word Musician, Dies at 62
by THE ASSOCIATED PRESS 
May 27, 2011

NEW YORK (AP) — Long before Public Enemy urged the need to "Fight the Power" or N.W.A. offered a crude rebuke of the police, Gil-Scott Heron was articulating the rage and the disillusionment of the black masses through song and spoken word.

Scott-Heron, widely considered one of the godfathers of rap with his piercing social and political prose laid against the backdrop of minimalist percussion, flute and other instrumentation, died on Friday at age 62. His was a life full of groundbreaking, revolutionary music and personal turmoil that included a battle with crack cocaine and stints behind bars in his later years.

Musician and singer Michael Franti, who also is known for work that has examined racial and social injustices, perhaps summed up the dichotomy of Scott-Heron in a statement Saturday that described him as "a genius and a junkie."

"The first time I met him in San Francisco in 1991 while working as a doorman at the Kennel Klub, my heart was broken to see a hero of mine barely able to make it to the stage, but when he got there he was clear as crystal while singing and dropping knowledge bombs in his between song banter," said Franti, who described himself as a longtime friend. "His view of the world was so sad and yet so inspiring."

Scott-Heron was known for work that reflected the fury of black America in the post-civil rights era and spoke to the social and political disparities in the country. His songs often had incendiary titles — "Home is Where the Hatred Is" or "Whitey on the Moon" — and through spoken word and song he tapped the frustration of the masses.

He came to prominence in the 1970s as black America was grappling with the violent losses of some of its most promising leaders and what seemed to many to be the broken promises of the civil rights movement.

"It's winter in America, and all of the healers have been killed or been betrayed," lamented Scott-Heron in the song "Winter in America."

Scott-Heron recorded the song that would make him famous, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," which critiqued mass media, for the album "125th and Lenox" in Harlem in the 1970s. He followed up that recording with more than a dozen albums, collaborating mostly with musician Brian Jackson.

Though he was never a mainstream artist, he was an influential voice — so much so that his music was considered to be a precursor of rap and he influenced generations of hip-hop artists that would follow. When asked, however, he typically downplayed his integral role in the foundation of the genre.

"If there was any individual initiative that I was responsible for it might have been that there was music in certain poems of mine, with complete progression and repeating 'hooks,' which made them more like songs than just recitations with percussion," he wrote in the introduction to his 1990 collection of poems, "Now and Then."

In later years, he would become known more for his battle with drugs such as crack cocaine than his music. His addiction led to stints in jail and a general decline: In a 2008 interview with New York magazine, he said he had been living with HIV for years, but he still continued to perform and put out music; his last album, which came out this year, was a collaboration with artist Jamie xx, "We're Still Here," a reworking of Scott-Heron's acclaimed "I'm New Here," which was released in 2010.

He also was still smoking crack, as detailed in a New Yorker article last year.

"Ten to fifteen minutes of this, I don't have pain," he said. "I could have had an operation a few years ago, but there was an 8 percent chance of paralysis. I tried the painkillers, but after a couple of weeks I felt like a piece of furniture. It makes you feel like you don't want to do anything. This I can quit anytime I'm ready."

He referred to his signature mix of percussion, politics and performed poetry as bluesology or Third World music. But then he said it was simply "black music or black American music."

"Because black Americans are now a tremendously diverse essence of all the places we've come from and the music and rhythms we brought with us," he wrote.

Even those who may have never heard of Scott-Heron's name nevertheless knew his music. His influence on generations of rappers has been demonstrated through sampling of his recordings by artists, from Common to Mos Def to Tupac Shakur. Kanye West closes out the last track of his latest album with a long excerpt of Scott-Heron's "Who Will Survive in America."

Throughout his musical career, he took on political issues of his time, including apartheid in South Africa and nuclear arms. He had been shaped by the politics of the 1960s and black literature, especially the Harlem Renaissance.

Scott-Heron was born in Chicago on April 1, 1949. He was raised in Jackson, Tenn., and in New York before attending college at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Before turning to music, he was a novelist, at age 19, with the publication of "The Vulture," a murder mystery.

He also was the author of "The Nigger Factory," a social satire.

His final works continued his biting social commentary. "I'm New Here" included songs with titles such as "Me and the Devil" and "New York Is Killing Me."

In a 2010 interview with Fader magazine, Scott-Heron admitted he "could have been a better person. That's why you keep working on it."

"If we meet somebody who has never made a mistake, let's help them start a religion. Until then, we're just going to meet other humans and help to make each other better."

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/may/28/gil-scott-heron-obituary

Gil Scott-Heron obituary

Poet, jazz musician and rap pioneer who used mordant lyrics to express his views on politics and culture

by Mike Power

29 May 11

The Guardian  (UK)  

Gil Scott-Heron performing in Central Park, New York, in June 2010. Photograph: Startraks Photo/Rex Features 

In 1970, the American poet and jazz musician Gil Scott-Heron, who has died aged 62 after returning from a trip to Europe, recorded a track that has come to be seen as a crucial forerunner of rap. To many it made him the "godfather" of the medium, though he was keener to view his song-like poetry as just another strand in the diverse world of black music.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised came on his debut LP, Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, a collection of proselytising spoken-word pieces set to a sparse, funky tableau of percussion. It served as a militant manifesto urging black pride, and a blueprint for his life's work: in the album's sleeve notes, Scott-Heron described himself as "a Black man dedicated to expression; expression of the joy and pride of Blackness". He derided white America's complacency over inner-city inequality with mordant wit and social observation:

The revolution will not be right back after a message 'bout a white tornado, white lightning or white people.

You will not have to worry about a dove in your bedroom, a tiger in your tank or the giant in your toilet bowl. The revolution will not go better with Coke.

The revolution will not fight germs that may cause bad breath.

The revolution will put you in the driver's seat.

Throughout his 40-year career, Scott-Heron delivered a militant commentary not only on the African-American experience, but on wider social injustice and political hypocrisy. Born in Chicago, Illinois, he had a difficult, itinerant childhood. His father, Gilbert Heron, was a Jamaican-born soccer player who joined Celtic FC – as the Glasgow team's first black player – during Gil's infancy, and his mother, Bobbie Scott, was a librarian and keen singer. After their divorce, Scott-Heron moved to Lincoln, Tennessee, to live with his grandmother, Lily Scott, a civil rights activist and musician whose influence on him was indelible.

He recalled her in the track On Coming from a Broken Home on his 2010 comeback album I'm New Here as "absolutely not your mail-order, room-service, typecast black grandmother". She bought him his first piano from a local undertaker's and introduced him to the work of the Harlem Renaissance novelist and jazz poet Langston Hughes, whose influence would resonate throughout his entire career.

In the nearby Tigrett junior high school in 1962, Scott-Heron faced daily racial abuse as one of only three black children chosen to desegregate the institution. These experiences coincided with the completion of his first volume of unpublished poetry, when he was 12.

He then left Lincoln and moved to New York to live with his mother. Initially they stayed in the Bronx, where he witnessed the lot of African Americans in deprived housing projects. Later they lived in the more predominantly Hispanic neighbourhood of Chelsea. During his New York school years, Scott-Heron encountered the work of another leading black writer, LeRoi Jones, now known as Amiri Baraka.

While he was at DeWitt Clinton high school in the Bronx, Scott-Heron's precocious writing talent was recognised by an English teacher, and he was recommended for a place at the prestigious Fieldston school. From there he won a place to Lincoln University, Pennsylvania, where Hughes had also studied, and met the flute player Brian Jackson, who was to be a significant musical collaborator. During his second year at university, in 1968, Scott-Heron dropped out in order to write his first novel, a murder mystery titled The Vulture, set in the ghetto. When it was published, two years later, he decided to capitalise on the associated radio publicity by recording an LP.

The jazz producer Bob Thiele, who had worked with artists ranging from Louis Armstrong to John Coltrane, persuaded Scott-Heron to record a club performance of some of his poetry with backing by himself on piano and guitar. The line-up was completed by David Barnes on vocals and percussion, and Eddie Knowles and Charlie Saunders on congas, and Small Talk at 125th and Lenox was released on the Flying Dutchman label. Pieces of a Man (1971) showed Scott-Heron's talents off to a fuller extent, with songs such as the title track, a fuller version of The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, and Lady Day and John Coltrane, a soaring paean to the ability of soul and jazz to liberate the listener from the travails of everyday life.

The following year, his university-set novel, The Nigger Factory, was published and his final Flying Dutchman disc, Free Will, was released. Following a dispute with the label, Scott-Heron recorded Winter in America (1974) for Strata East, then moved to Clive Davis's Arista Records; he was the first artist signed by the newly formed company.

Arista steered Scott-Heron to chart success with the disco-tinged, yet brazenly polemic, anti-apartheid anthem Johannesburg, which reached No 29 in the R&B charts in 1975. The Midnight Band, led by Jackson on keyboards, was central to the success of Scott-Heron's first two albums for Arista – The First Minute of a New Day and From South Africa to South Carolina – the same year.

Jackson left the band as the producer Malcolm Cecil arrived. Cecil had helped the Isley Brothers and Stevie Wonder chart funkier waters earlier in the decade, and under his direction Scott-Heron achieved his biggest hit to date, Angel Dust (1978), which reached No 15 in the R&B charts. With its lyrical examination of addiction it became an ironic counterpoint to the cocaine abuse that dogged Scott-Heron's later years.

During the 1980s, producer Nile Rodgers of the disco group Chic also helped on production as the Reagan era provided Scott-Heron with new targets to attack. B Movie (1981), a thunderous, nine-minute critique of Reaganomics, stands out as the most representative track of this period. As he put it:

I remember what I said about Reagan... meant it. Acted like an actor... Hollyweird. Acted like a liberal. Acted like General Franco when he acted like governor of California, then he acted like a Republican. Then he acted like somebody was going to vote for him for president. And now we act like 26% of the registered voters is actually a mandate.

Scott-Heron made a practical impact on American public life in 1980, after Wonder released Hotter Than July, on which the track Happy Birthday demanded the commemoration of the birthday of civil rights leader Martin Luther King with a national holiday. Scott-Heron went on tour with Wonder, and in Washington they campaigned to support the black congressional caucus's proposal. Wonder and Scott-Heron fronted a petition signed by 6 million people, and in November 1983 Reagan signed the bill creating a federal holiday in January, the first falling in 1986. Scott-Heron told the US radio station NPR in 2008 that the holiday served as a "time for people to reflect on how far we have come, and how far we still have to go, in terms of being just people. Hopefully it will be a time for people to reflect on the folks that have done things to get us to where we are and where we're going."

He also eulogised the work of Fannie Lou Hamer, a black civil rights leader and voting activist, in his song 95 South (All of the Places We've Been), on the album Bridges (1977). However, though his work was often overtly political, he told the New Yorker magazine in 2010 that he sought to express more than simple sloganeering: "Your life has to consist of more than 'black people should unite'. You hope they do, but not 24 hours a day. If you aren't having no fun, die, because you're running a worthless programme, far as I'm concerned."

A sense of joyous, rhythmic exuberance comes through on tracks such as Racetrack in France (also from Bridges), where, moving away from his standard commentary, he describes a French audience erupting into a hand-clapping frenzy as his band performed.

Lightness of musical touch and tone were brilliantly fused in his 1980 single, Legend in His Own Mind, in which he mocks a nameless lothario over a shuffling beat and a loping jazz piano riff that somehow contrives to sound at once sardonic and gentle. The rhyming couplets, though, demolish his delusional victim over a descending slap bass sequence:

Well you hate to see him coming when you're grooving at your favourite bar

He's the death of the party and a self-proclaimed superstar

Got a permanent Jones to assure you he's been everywhere

A show-stopping, name-dropping answer to the ladies' prayers.

The Bottle (1974) resurfaced as an underground classic in the years following the British acid-house "summer of love" of 1988. Its incendiary rhythmic flow and compassionate lyrical exploration of the links between material poverty and the corresponding human response – a drive towards narcotic or alcoholic abandon – suited the spirit of those times perfectly and recruited a new generation of fans. Scott-Heron himself fell victim to the alcohol and substance abuse he had so long decried, and in 1985 he was dropped by Arista.

To the surprise of many, he returned to recording in 1994 with the album Spirits, on the TVT label. By then, hip-hop and rap had become the voice of young black America, and attention was again focused on his early role in the genre. In the Spirits track Message to the Messengers, Scott-Heron sent out a warning to young, nihilistic gangsta rappers and implored reflection and restraint: "Protect your community, and spread that respect around," he urged, and rejected their use of "four-letter words" and "four-syllable words" as evidence of shallow intellects. Meanwhile, he found fame of a more surreal, unexpected variety when he provided the voiceover for adverts for the British fizzy orange drink Tango, declaiming in stentorian tones: "You know when you've been Tangoed."

The republication of his novels by Payback Press, an imprint of the radical Scottish publishing house Canongate, added to a new sense of momentum. However, it was not to last, and his frequent live performances became tarnished by less-than-perfect renditions of his classic works.

Nonetheless, he could bring a packed Jazz Cafe in Camden Town, London, to a profound, meditative silence in the late 1990s as he performed songs such as Winter in America, and all his gigs sold out weeks in advance. His regular performances on Glastonbury's jazz stage through the 90s were also good-natured, well-attended events as a new generation rediscovered the roots of so much of the best music of that decade.

But in 1999 his partner Monique de Latour obtained a restraining order against him for assault, and in November 2001 he was arrested for possession of 1.2g of cocaine, sentenced to 18-24 months and ordered to attend rehab following that year's European tour. When he failed to appear in court after the tour finished, he was arrested and sent to prison. He was released in October 2002. He spent much of that fractured decade in and out of jail on drugs charges, and released no new work, favouring instead live performance and writing. His struggle with addiction continued, and in July 2006 he was again jailed after he broke the terms of a plea bargain deal on drug charges by leaving a rehab clinic.

He returned to the studio in 2007, and three years later released I'm New Here, produced by Richard Russell, on the British independent label XL Recordings, to wide critical acclaim. On it, he turned his lyrical contemplation inwards, commenting in confessional and haunting terms on his own loneliness, his upbringing, and repentant admissions of his own frailty: "If you gotta pay for things you done wrong, then I gotta big bill coming!"

Tracks such as Where Did the Night Go and New York Is Killing Me set his touchingly weathered baritone over minimalistic beats and production, completing the redemptive reinstatement of one of America's most rebellious and influential voices.

In 1978 Scott-Heron married the actor Brenda Sykes, with whom he had a daughter, Gia. He also had another daughter, Che, and a son, Rumal.

• Gil Scott-Heron, poet, musician and author, born 1 April 1949; died 27 May 2011

Topics

• Gil Scott-Heron

• Rap
• Hip-hop
• Glastonbury festival
• Poetry
• Crime fiction
• obituaries 

http://www.newblackmaninexile.net/2011/05/devil-and-gil-scott-heron.html

The Devil and Gil Scott-Heron

The Devil and Gil-Scott Heron

by Mark Anthony Neal | @NewBlackMan | NewBlackMan (in Exile)

As the story goes, Robert Johnson, one of the most influential guitarists of the twentieth-century, met the “Devil” at a crossroads in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Accordingly Johnson sold his soul to that “Devil” in order to play the guitar with a power and precision that many deemed otherworldly. The “Devil,” in this instance, was likely the Yoruba Orisha of the crossroads, alternately known as “Legba,” “Elegba,” “Eshu Elegbara” and Papa Labas in the fiction of Ishmael Reed. That power and precision that Johnson wielded so effectively, might be better referred to as truth, not so neatly packaged in the Blues tradition—a tradition that notably transcends the musical genre that shares its name.

As Angela Davis notes in her book Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, “the blues were part of a cultural continuum that disputed the binary constructions associated with Christianity…they blatantly defied the Christian imperative to relegate sexual conduct to the realm of sin. Many blues singers therefore were assumed to have made a pact with the Devil.” (123) Within African-American vernacular, the figure of Legba is often referred to as the “Signifying Monkey” and perhaps most well known by the Oscar Brown recording with that title and Henry Louis Gates’s groundbreaking study The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1988).

Though the figures who possess the power of the crossroads are often thought to solely reside in Black oral traditions—the proverbial poets, preachers and rappers—others such as Blackface actor Bert Williams and Johnson have been written into the tradition. But for all the respect and pride derived from the brilliance of such artists, in the end they remain always already outside of the communities for which the truth most matters. Davis observes that the “blues person has been an outsider on three accounts. Belittled and misconstrued by the dominant culture that has been incapable of deciphering the secrets of her art…ignored and denounced in African-American middle-class circles and repudiated by the most authoritative institution in her own community, the church.” (125)

In his legendary essay “Nobody Love A Genius Child: Jean Michel Basquiat, Flyboy in the Buttermilk,” Greg Tate puts an even finer point on the status this cultural outsider: “Inscribed in his (always a him) function is the condition of being born a social outcast and pariah. The highest price exacted from the Griot for knowing where the bodies are buried is the denial of a burial plot in the communal graveyard…With that wisdom typical of African cosmologies, these messengers are guaranteed freedom of speech in exchange for a marginality that extends to the grave.”

A year before his death Gil Scott Heron released, I’m New Here his first studio recording in fifteen years. Fittingly, the lead single was a cover of Robert Johnson’s “Me and the Devil,” and while the choice of material may not have wholly been Scott-Heron’s, the song—as the spiritual embodiment of its composer—for damn sure chose Gil Scott Heron. And this is not to suggest that Scott Heron—who often referred to himself as a “Blues-ologist”—was unaware of Johnson; He like Johnson, had spent a lifetime at the mythical crossroads that have defined much of Black vernacular culture. I’m New Here was a dark and brooding reminder of the costs associated with the power that the crossroads engenders. Burn away all the bells and whistles, bleeps and blurs, and Scott-Heron is standing at that same intersection of Highways 61 and 49 in Clarksdale, Mississippi with Robert Johnson, Billie Holiday, Henry Dumas, Linda Jones, Son House and so many others. 

Shame on every writer who reported Gil Scott-Heron’s death with the blurb, “Godfather of Rap,” writers who have—per Angela Davis’ observations—totally missed the point of the man’s career. It was a term that Gil Scott-Heron was not ambivalent about: “There seems to be a need within our community to have what the griot provided supplied in terms of chronology; a way to identify and classify events in black culture that were both historically influential and still relevant (Now and Then: The Poems of Gil Scott Hereon, xiv). This is less Scott-Heron distancing himself from Hip-hop (though he would do so from time to time), but more a recognition that what he did, sat at the feet of traditions that came before him. He writes, “there were poets before me who had great influence on the language and the way it was performed and recorded: Oscar Brown, Jr., Melvin Van Peebles, and Amiri Baraka were all published and well respected for their poetry, plays, songs and range of other artistic achievements when the only thing I was taping were my ankles before basketball practice.” (xiv)

“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” is easily the best known of Gil Scott-Heron’s compositions. Written and recorded just as the most militant energy of the Civil Rights and Black Power era seemed to be waning, the song was a sharp and prescient view of the commodities of struggle and resistance—the place where revolutionary acts give way to market forces and prime time ratings. In 1971, Scott-Heron couldn’t have imagined 24 hour news programming like CNN, let alone Al Jazeera, though “Revolution” proves as relevant now, as it might have even been when he wrote it. To be sure, Gil Scott-Heron did pay a price for his truth-telling and his willingness to make politically relevant music accessible to all that would have it. Accessible is the telling term here, as Scott-Heron admitted that “because there were political elements in a few numbers, handy political labels were slapped across the body of our work, labels that maintain their innuendo of disapproval to this day.” (xv)

Perhaps we’ll never fully know if the drug-addiction and other dependencies that so often derailed Scott-Heron’s vision was part of some COINTELPRO inspired conspiracy to deny our most gifted and passionate, access to the thing that matters the most—their right minds (surely cheaper and neater than assassination). When Albert King sang “I Almost Lost My Mind” he wasn’t just whistlin’ in the dark about the warm body that had just left his bed—somewhere folk like Huey P. Newton, Etheridge Knight, Esther Phillips, Sly Stone, Flavor Flav, and a host of others, including Scott-Heron, fully understood what he lamented. Yet can’t help to think though, that Gil Scott-Heron knew that he was not here to be simply loved; that there were hard truths that he had to tell us and his addictions would always guarantee that we would keep him at an arm’s distance. Those times he went silent, it was as much about those addictions and it was his unwillingness to bullshit us for the sake of selling records. If he couldn’t tell us the truth, he wouldn’t tell us anything, returning regularly to those crossroads via the needle or the pipe.

It is important to remember that Gil Scott-Heron was also a prodigy—was coloring outside the lines in ways that were significant, but not all that remarkable, for a generation of young Black folk who understood the importance of challenging boundaries from the moment they took their first breaths. Some might call that freedom. There was the grandmother, Lily Scott who made sure the young boy read books and read the weekly edition of The Chicago Defender—the closet thing to a Black national newspaper for Black Americans in the mid-20th Century—where Scott-Heron first read the columns of Langton Hughes. Before he married beats (and melodies) and rhymes, a 19-year-old Gil Scott-Heron had written his first novel.

Thankfully Scott-Heron took to heart Haki Madhubuti’s (the Don L. Lee) adage that revolutionary language really didn’t matter if it couldn’t reach folk on the dance-floor; Scott-Heron took it a step further, recognizing, as the Last Poets and Watt Prophets did, that some of the cats never left the street corners. (At that same moment, Nikki Giovanni also understood there were also souls to be saved in the pews, hence her Gospel inspired Truth is on the Way). Those earliest Gil Scott-Heron recordings, like Small Talk at 125 Street, Pieces of a Man, Free Will and Winter in America, released on independent labels like Bob Thiele’s Flying Dutchman and Strata-East, seemed like sonic counterparts to the $.05 cent poetry broadsides that poet and publisher Dudley Randall used to sell on the streets of Chicago in the 1960s.

The revolution might not have been televised then, but if you listen closely to songs like “No Knock,” (in response former Attorney General John Mitchell’s plan to have law enforcement enter homes without knocking first, though he could have been talking about the Patriot Act), “Home is Where the Hatred Is” (on drug addiction) and “Whitey on the Moon” (which still elicits giggles in me) the revolution was clearly being recorded and pressed. The difficulty in those days, was actually making sure that distribution of Scott-Heron’s music could match demand for it.

Gil Scott-Heron got unlikely support from Clive Davis—yes the same Clive Davis who would later create boutique labels for L.A. Reid and Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds, Sean “PuffyDiddyDaddy” Combs, and serve as svengali for Whitney Houston and Alicia Keys. Davis, who funded the now infamous “Harvard Report” on Black music while at Columbia Records, where he oversaw the careers of Miles Davis, Bob Dylan and Sly and the Family Stone, had been deposed from the label and was starting a new label, Arista. Davis needed acts, and in particular, acts that already had an established base, and Scott-Heron fit the bill.

It was an odd marriage indeed—notable that Davis never really signed another political artist of Scott-Heron’s stature—but it also allowed  Scott-Heron to experience the most prolific period of his career, with defining albums like First Minute of a New Day (1975), From South Africa to South Carolina (which featured the anti-apartheid anthem “Johannesburg”), Bridges (1977), and Reflections (1981), which featured his 12-minute scouring of then just elected President Ronald Reagan on “B-Movie” (released months after Reagan’s 1981 shooting and after Scott-Heron had completed a national tour opening for Stevie Wonder).

For all of our memories of Scott-Heron’s political impact, his music covered a full gamut of experiences. A track like “Lady Day and Coltrane” paid tribute to Black musical traditions, while songs like “A Very Precious Time” and “Your Daddy Loves You” found Scott-Heron thinking about issues of intimacy. Well before proto-Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer would be recovered by scholar and critics, Scott-Heron set Toomer’s Cane to music. Even as young activists make the connection between Black life and environmental racism, Scott-Heron offered his take on the plaintive “We Almost Lost Detroit.” 

“We Almost Lost Detroit” was later sampled by Kanye West for Common’s “The People,” speaking to the ways that Scott-Heron remained relevant some thirty years after his popularity peaked. Much has been made about West’s “duet” with Scott-Heron on “Lost in the World” (drawn from Scott-Heron’s “Comment # 1) and Scott-Heron’s use of West’s “Flashing Lights” on the recent “On Coming from a Broken Home.” The latter song was drawn from Scott-Heron’s tribute to his grandmother Lily Scott, who died in 1999. In a society in which fatherlessness continues to be deemed as simply pathology, Scott-Heron defiantly asserted “I come from what they called a broken home/but if they had ever really called at our house/they would have known how wrong they were…My life has been guided by women/but because of them I am a man.” 

On Friday May 27, 2011, Gil Scott-Heron went home to reunite with his grandmother; His job was done.

***

Mark Anthony Neal is the author of five books including Looking for Leroy. He is co-editor (with Murray Forman) of That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (2nd Edition) which will be published this summer.  Neal teaches African-American Studies at Duke University.

Posted 30th May 2011 by CADCE

Labels: Crossroads Gil Scott Heron Legba Robert Johnson The Blues

https://www.villagevoice.com/2011/05/31/gil-scott-heron-r-i-p/

Music

Gil Scott-Heron, R.I.P.

by Greg Tate

May 31, 2011

Village Voice

Gil Scott-Heron died on Friday.  He was 62.  

Mischa Richte

You know why Gil never had much love for that ill-conceived Godfather of Rap tag. If you’re already your own genre, you don’t need the weak currency offered by another. If you’re a one-off, why would you want to bask in the reflected glory of knock-offs? If you’re already Odin, being proclaimed the decrepit sire of Thor and Loki just ain’t gonna rock your world.

Gil knew he wasn’t bigger than hip-hop—he knew he was just better. Like Jimi was better than heavy metal, Coltrane better than bebop, Malcolm better than the Nation of Islam, Marley better than the King James Bible. Better as in deeper—emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, politically, ancestrally, hell, probably even genetically. Mama was a Harlem opera singer; papa was a Jamaican footballer (rendering rolling stone redundant); grandmama played the blues records in Tennessee. So grit shit and mother wit Gil had in abundance, and like any Aries Man worth his saltiness he capped it off with flavor, finesse and a funky gypsy attitude.

He was also better in the sense that any major brujo who can stand alone always impresses more than those who need an army in front of them to look bad, jump bad, and mostly have other people to do the killing. George Clinton once said Sly Stone’s interviews were better than most cats’ albums; Gil clearing his throat coughed up more gravitas than many gruff MCs’ tuffest 16 bars. Being a bona fide griot and Orisha-ascendant will do that; being a truth-teller, soothsayer, word-magician, and acerbic musical op-ed columnist will do that. Gil is who and what Rakim was really talking about when he rhymed, “This is a lifetime mission: vision a prison.” Shouldering the task of carrying Langston Hughes, Billie Holiday, Paul Robeson and The Black Arts Movement’s legacies into the 1970s world of African-American popular song will do that too. The Revolution came and went so fast on April 4, 1968, that even most Black people missed it. (Over 100 American cities up in flames the night after King’s murder—what else do you think that was? The Day After The Revolution has been everything that’s shaped America’s racial profile ever since, from COINTELPRO to Soul Train, crack to krunk, bling to Barack.)

Gil, a student of radical history and politics, knew that if you were charged with the duties of oracle, troubadour, poet, gadfly, muckraker, and grassroots shit-talker, your job was to ride the times (and the Times) like Big rode beats, to provoke the state and the streets, to progress your own radical headspace. Many cats of Gil’s generation became burnt-out anachronisms from trying to wage ’60s battles on ’70s battlegrounds; some are still at it today. Gil knew The Struggle was a work-in-progress—a scorecard event of win-some-lose-some, lick your wounds, live to fight another day. Keep your eyes on the prize—a more Democratic union—but also on the ever-changing same. Keep it progressive but keep it moving too. Not so difficult if you’re the type of self-medicating brother who gets lonely if he doesn’t hear the yap of hellhounds on his trail.

Gil described himself best as a “Bluesologist,” a Hegelian-cum-African student of the science of “how things feel.” Thus the vast emotional range in Gil’s writings—why the existential consequences of getting high and the resultant pathos could move that stuttering vibrato to emphatic song same as the prospect of South African liberation could. We call Gil a prophet, but most prophets don’t prophesy their own 40-year slow-death with the precision, poignancy and nuance he did on “Home Is Where The Hatred Is,” “The Bottle” and “Angel Dust.” Gil was better than most rappers because he leaned as hard on his vulnerability as other muhfuhkuhs lean on their glocks, AK’s and dogged-out bitches, real or rhetorically imagined. His potency as a balladeer is vastly underrated compared to the shine shown his protest vehicles. If you yearn to hear your nutsack glorified, there are reams of lyrics ready to handily fulfill your manly needs. But the dude who needs a song allaying fears that his failure at marriage will cost him his children can only turn to “Your Daddy Loves You.” I don’t know what Gil’s relationship to he and Brenda Sykes’ only daughter Gia Scott-Heron was in his twilight-zone years, I just know that song owns the fraught distraught father-to-daughter communiqué category in the blues canon.

Even his most topical protest songs are too packed with feeling and flippancy to become yesterday’s news, though—mostly because Gil’s way with a witticism keeps even his Nixon assault vehicle “H20Gate Blues” current. Gil’s genius for soundbites likewise sustains his relevance.

We’d all rather believe the revolution won’t be televised than hear what he really envisioned beneath the bravado—that we may be too consumed with hypercapitalist consumption to care. And damn if we don’t keep almost losing Detroit, and damn if even post-Apartheid we are all still very much wondering “What’s the word?” from Johannesburg. And in this moment of The Arab Spring we may “hate it when the blood starts flowing” but still “love to see resistance showing.” “No-Knock” and “Whitey on The Moon” remain cogent masterpieces of satire, observation and metaphor. “Winter In America” is hands-down Gil at his most grandiloquent and “literary” as a lyricist, standing with Sly’s There’s A Riot Going On (and the memoirs of Panthers Elaine Brown and David Hilliard) as the most bleak, blunt and beatific EKG readings of their post-revolutionary generation’s post-traumatic stress disorders. “All of the healers have been killed or betrayed… and ain’t nobody fighting because nobody knows what to save.”

In death and in repose I now see Gil, Arthur Lee of Love, and the somehow still-standing Sly Stone as a triumvirate—a wise man/wiseguy trio of ultra-cool ultra-hip ultra-caring prognosticators of late-20th-century America’s bent towards self-destruction and renewal. Cats who’d figured it all out by puberty and were maybe too clever and intoxicated on their own Rimbaudean airs to ever give up the call of the wild. Three high-flying visionary bad boys of funk-n-roll whose early flash and promise crash-landed on various temptations and whose last decades found them caught in cycles of ruin and momentary rejuvenation, bobbing or vanishing beneath their own sea of troubles.

Just as with Arthur, James Brown, and Sly, we always hoped against hope that Gil was one of those brothers who’d go on forever beating the odds, forever proving Death wrong, showing that he was too ornery and too slippery for the Reaper’s clutches. Even after all those absurd years on the dope-run, and under the jail, even despite all of Gil’s own best efforts to hurry along the endgame process. Not that I don’t think Gil spending most of the last decade in prison wasn’t a miscarriage of justice and an overly punitive crime against humanity. Or that “Free Gil,” like “Free James,” was a cry not heard often enough from an unmerciful grassroots body politic that had spent the ’90s rightfully decrying crack as the plague of Black Civilization. Or that when Gil took the Central [Park stage last summer he sounded less like the half-dead wraith and scarred wreck of his haunted last (rites) album I’m New Here and more like his lively, laconic, modal blues piano-pounding jazz and salsa-bending younger self. No acceptance of HIV-positive status as a death sentence found here. Pieces of a man’s life in full, indeed.

Hendrix biographer David Henderson (a poet-wizard himself) once pointed out that the difference between Jimi and Bob Dylan and Keith Richards was that when Dylan and Richards were on the verge, whole hippie networks of folk got invested in their survival. But no one stood up when Jimi stumbled, all alone like a complete unknown rolling stone. Gil’s fall at the not-so-ripe age of 62 reminds me that one thing my community does worst is intervene in the flaming out of our brightest and most fragile stars, so psychically on edge are most of us ourselves. Gil’s song “Home Is Where The Hatred Is” seems in retrospect not only our most anguished paean to addiction, but the writer’s coldest indictment of the lip service his radical community paid to love in The Beautiful Struggle. “Home was once a vacuum/ that’s filled now with my silent screams/ and it might not be such a bad idea if I never went home again.” Mos Def reached out, gave back, magnificently soon as Gil got out the joint three years ago, bringing a rail-thin, spectral, dangling-in-the-wind shadow of Gil’s former selves to the stage at Carnegie Hall for the last time, if not the first.

But end of the day, here we go again, just another dead Black genius we lacked the will or the mercy or the mechanisms to save from himself. End of the day, It all just make you wanna holler, quote liberally from The Book of Gaye and Scott-Heron, say “Look how they do my life.” Make you wanna holler, throw up your hands, grab your rosary beads, do everything not to watch the disheveled poet desiccating over there in the corner—the one croaking out your name as you shuffle around him hoping not to be recognized that one late-’80s morn on the 157 IRT platform, where, even while cracked out and slumped against the wall, Gil was determined to verbally high-five you brother-to-brother.

We all kept saying “Why don’t he just ‘kick it quit it/ kick it quit it,'” but Gil, more cunning, wounded and defensive than any junkie born, kept pushing back harder, daring any of us to try and rationally answer his challenge to the collective’s impotencies and inadequacies: “You keep saying kick it, quit it/ God, but did you ever try?/ To turn your sick soul inside out/ So that the world, so that the the world /can watch you die? ” What the funk else can we say in all finality now, but, uh, “Peace go with you too, Br’er Gil.”

https://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/gilscottheron 

Gil Scott-Heron

• Biography
• Articles
• News

“I consider myself neither poet, composer, nor musician. These are merely tools used by sensitive men to carve out a piece of beauty or truth they hope may lead to peace and salvation.”

He has been opening eyes, minds and souls for over thirty years. A highly influential and widely admired singer, proto-rapper, jazz pianist, poet, novelist and socio- political commentator, Gil Scott-Heron remains a unique figure in global music. With over fifteen albums to his name, his politically charged output has won him an international following. His work illuminates a philosophy of life that holds human affection as well as political and artistic responsibility as the underlying factors that inspire his writing.

Gil Scott-Heron was born in Chicago in 1949. Both parents divorced whilst Gil was still a child and he was dispatched off to his grandmother in Lincoln, Tennessee. His grandmother helped Gil musically, however, early racial tensions at school, led him to relocate again to the Bronx during his adolescent years to live with his mother and he later moved again to the Spanish neighborhood of Chelsea.

As a student, he admired the poetry of Langston Hughes and followed his footsteps by enrolling in Lincoln University. It was at college he met Brian Jackson, who was later to be a long time musical collaborator. By age 20, he completed the novel ‘The Vulture’ and the book of poetry, ‘Small Talk At 125th & Lenox.’ He released his debut album, “New Black Poet: Small Talk at 125th and Lennox,” in 1970, the album contained the powerful “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” a damning attack on the media and the state of the union from how he saw it. This was just the beginning.

The follow up album, 1971's “Pieces of a Man,” showed a growing musical maturity, featuring 'Lady Day and John Coltrane' and the, less political, “I Think I'll Call It Morning,” “Pieces of a Man,” and what would be his nemesis of “Home is where the Hatred Is,” this was released under Bob Thiele's, Flying Dutchman Records. The musicians on this record were Brian Jackson on piano, Ron carter, bass, Bernard Purdie, drums, and Hubert Laws on flute and sax. Gil signed a one album deal for Strata East, in 1974 with Brian Jackson, and released the album “Winter In America,” which contained the original version of “The Bottle.” This was an underground and cult hit then worked its way into the R&B charts.

He was signed to the Arista label in 1975, where he received success with the South African diatribe, “Johannesburg,” a song that reached number 29 on the R & B charts that year. His first two albums at the new label were “First Minute of a New Day” (containing 'Winter In America', again, and 'Ain't No Such Thing As Superman') and the album “From South Africa to South Carolina” (containing 'Johannesburg').

1976 saw the release of the double album “It's Your World,” which contained the live version of the track 'The Bottle' and was recorded live at Paul's Mall in Boston, Massachusetts in July of that year.

Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson reached a musical zenith in 1977 with the album “Bridges.” This is definitely one of those ‘had to be there’ albums, and for this writer it certainly was. It opens with “Hello Sunday! Hello Road!” then flowing into the smooth “Song of the Wind,” and goes on to include the anti nuke song “We almost lost Detroit,” “Delta Man,” and ends with the beautiful ballad “95 South” (all the places we’ve been). They were really in top form here, and the record is considered by us die hard Gil fans as his best. Though he had other “hits” and more popular songs on other albums, “Bridges,” is his best conceptual offering.

By 1978, Brian Jackson had his final association with Gil, Malcolm Cecil then taking over the musical direction, following the release of the album “Secrets.” That same year, Gil released an album of poetry and music, entitled 

“The Mind of Gil Scott Heron,” for Arista Records.

Gil Scott-Heron continued to record and release albums in the early ‘80’s as “Real Eyes,” (1980) “Reflections.”(1981) and “Moving Target.” (1982) Arista did a “Best of Gil Scott-Heron,” in 1984. By 1985, Gil had left the Arista label and he began touring.

I was lucky to catch him in Denver in ’89 with the Amnesia Express, and had a chance to talk with him backstage. I found him to be very articulate, polite, and appreciative of my knowledge of his work. His performance that night was mesmerizing and poignant. There is no grey area with Gil. A retrospective double album was released in 1990 entitled “Tales of Gil Scott-Heron and His Amnesia Express.” In 1993, Gil signed to the TVT Records label and released the album, “Spirits.”

If Gil had chosen to go the clean cut well dressed route of a jazz or soul singer, I believe he would have succeeded on his voice, delivery and feeling. But we all know that didn’t happen.

There is the other side of his music. In researching for this profile on Gil, I found an excellent article by writer Mtume ya Salaam, which coincides with my perspective on the gentle side of Gil Scott-Heron.

Gil Scott-Heron is probably best-known for his stridently political material, songs like “Johannesburg,” “The Bottle,” and of course, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” but my favorite Gil Scott Heron songs are the ballads. Invariably pensive and reflective yet always filled with hope, Gil’s ballads range in tone from the political (“Winter In America”) to the nostalgic (“A Very Precious Time”) to the outright optimistic (“A Lovely Day”).

Gil wrote so many great ballads that it’s impossible for me to pick a favorite, but at the moment, the one I’m feeling the most is “Beginnings (The First Minute of A Brand New Day).” “Beginnings” is a lament, I admit that, but the soaring vocals and the raw honesty of the lyrics raise my spirits. The lyrics to “A Very Precious Time” read like a requiem to innocence, but it isn’t a simple nostalgia trip, that isn’t Brother Gil’s style. In the bridge, Gil defines his wistful look back as a means to remain in the present, to remain cognizant of the reasons we struggle on, even when we would much rather give in.

“A Lovely Day” and “I Think I’ll Call It Morning” are peas in a pod: twin dedications to joy, happiness and freedom. It isn’t often that a revolutionary is willing or able to give in to unvarnished optimism. So, listen to these two tracks and decide for yourself: if a conflicted and complicated musical revolutionary like Brother Gil can write and sing earnest paeans to sunshine and flowers, what kind of mood do you want to be in today? What kind of mood do you want to be in tomorrow? What kind of mood do you want to be in next year?

It’s not easy being Gil Scott-Heron, an icon everyone respects as well as a junkie everyone feels sorry for. How do you contain the contradiction of being an insightful, revolutionary artist and a habitual addict? If any one artist represents the post-civil rights journey of African Americans, it’s Gil Scott-Heron.

I still play Gil’s music, but I no longer play it with unadulterated joy today, Gil’s music always calls to mind contradictions and the difficult struggle of coping with, and sometimes even overcoming, those human failings we all have, those failings which Gil has in spades.

Gil has a deep catalogue, deep as in beaucoup beautiful songs and deep as in profound music. Turn the lights out, sit quietly in the dark and review your life; if you’re over 35, a few of these songs are damn near guaranteed to churn up shit inside you that will make even the hardest of the hard blink back a tear or two.

In the midst of all of his contradictions and shortcomings, one thing Gil never did was lie about it in his music. All he is (as they say, the good, the bad… etc.) is in there, poetically so, beautifully so, sing-along so. Who else would be honest enough to say, home is where the hatred is… A junkie on his way back home.

Ultimately, Gill is uplifting not because he is perfect, but rather because he is honest about his flaws, and in being so honest, he encourages us to be honest about our own contradictions.

Let’s just resolve: regardless of how painful it be, let’s make a pact that we will at the very least be honest with ourselves about who we actually are. —Kalamu ya Salaam

Gil Scott Heron passed on May 27, 2011. Rest in Peace !!

Source: James Nadal

"H2O Gate Blues" (1974) 
Lyrics and Music by Gil Scott-Heron:

Heh, heh, don't wanna be involved in this one, huh?
This here is gonna be a blues number.
But first I wanna do a little bit of background on the Blues
And say what it is.

Like, there are 6 cardinal colors
And colors have always come to signify more than that particular shade.

Like: "red-neck" or "got the blues."
That's where you apply something to a color, to express what you're trying to say.

So, there are 6 cardinal colors: Yellow, Red, Orange, Green, Blue, and Purple.
And there are 3,000 shades.
And if you take these 3,000 and divide them by 6, you come up with 500.

Meaning that there are at least 500 shades of The Blues.
For example, there is...

The "I ain't got me no money, blues".
There is the "I ain't got me no woman, blues".
There is the "I ain't got me no money AND I ain't got me no woman".
which is the double blues.

And for years it was thought that Black people was the only ones who could get the blues.
So the Blues hadn't come into no international type of fame. (...had a corner on the market.)

But lately we had..

The Frank Rizzo with the "Lie Detector Blues".

We had the United States government talkin bout the "Energy Crisis Blues".

And we gonna dedicate this next poem here to Spearhead X.
The Ex-Second in Command in terms of this Country. (He GOT the blues.)

And the poem is called the "H2O G-A-T-E Blues".
And if H2O is still water
And G-A-T-E is still gate
What we gettin ready to deal on is the
"Watergate Blues"... (Yeah~ YEAH~ haha~)
*scattered applause*
(Rated X!)

Lemme see if I can dial this number....

Click! Whirr ... Click!

"I'm sorry, the government you have elected is inoperative ...
Click! Inoperative!"

Just how blind will America be?
The world is on the edge of its seat
Defeat on the horizon. very surprisin'
That we all could see the plot and still could not...
-- let me do that part again.

Just how blind will America be? (Ain't no tellin')
The world is on the edge of its seat
Defeat on the horizon. very surprisin'
That we all could see the plot
And claimed that we could not.(Alright~)

Just how blind, America?
Just as Vietnam exploded in the rice
snap, crackle, and pop (Uh Oh!)
Could not stop people determined to be free.
Just how blind will America be?(Yes Sir!)

The shock of a Vietnam defeat
Sent Republican donkeys scurrying down on Wall Street
And when the roll was called it was:
Pepsi-Cola and Phillips 66
Boeing, Dow & Lockheed
Ask them what we're fighting for and they never mention the economics of war.
Ecological Warfare!
Above all else destroy the land!
If we can't break the Asian will
We'll bomb the dykes and starve the man!

America!
The international Jekyll and Hyde
The land of a thousand disguises
Sneaks up on you but rarely surprises (Yeah!)
Plundering the Asian countryside
in the name of Fu Man Thieu.

Afraid of shoeless, undernourished Cambodians
While we strike big wheat bargains with Russia
Our nuclear enemy
Just how blind, America?

But tell me, who was around where Hale Boggs died?
And what was the cause of LBJ's untimely demise?
And what really happened to J. Edgar Hoover?
The king is proud of Patrick Gray
While America's faith is drowning
beneath that cesspool-Watergate. (Yeeeah!)

How long will the citizens sit and wait?
It's looking like Europe in '38
Did they move to stop Hitler before it was too late? (no...)
How long. America before the consequences of
Keeping the school systems segregated
Allowing the press to be intimidated
Watching the price of everything soar
And hearing complaints 'cause the rich want more? (Alright!)
It seems that MacBeth, and not his lady, went mad
We've let him eliminate the whole middle class
The dollar's the only thing we can't inflate
While the poor go on without a new minimum wage
What really happened to J Edgar Hoover?
The king is proud of Patrick Gray
And there are those who say America's faith is drowning
Beneath that cesspool-Watergate.

How much more evidence do the citizens need
That the election was sabotaged by trickery and greed?
And, if this is so, and who we got didn't win
Let's do the whole goddamn election over again! (YEAH! YEAH! YEAH!)

The obvious key to the whole charade
Would be to run down all of the games they played:
Remember Dita Beard and ITT, the slaughter of Attica,
The C.I.A. in Chile knowing nothing about Allende at this time
In the past. As I recollect, Augusta Georgia
The nomination of Supreme Court Jesters to head off the tapes
William Calley's Executive Interference
in the image of John Wayne.
Kent State, Jackson State, Southern Louisiana.
Hundreds of unauthorized bombing raids.
The chaining and gagging of Bobby Seale -
Somebody tell these Maryland Governors to be for real!

We recall all of these events just to prove (Yeah!)
The Waterbuggers in the Watergate wasn't no news!
The thing that seems to justify all of our fears
Is that all of this went down in the last five years.
But tell me, what really happened to J. Edgar Hoover?
The king is proud of Patrick Gray
While America's faith is drowning
Beneath that cesspool-Watergate.

We leave America to ponder the image
Of justice from its new wave of leaders
Frank Rizzo, the high school graduate
Mayor of Philadelphia, whose ignorance
Is surpassed only by those who voted for him. (Hahahaha)
Richard Daley, imperial Napoleonic Mayor of Chicago.
who took over from Al Capone and
Continues to implement the same tactics.
George Wallace. Lester Maddox
Strom Thurmond, Ronald Reagan-
An almost endless list that won't be missed when at last
America is purged (Yeah! Alright~)

And the silent White House with the James Brothers
once in command.
But see the sauerkraut Mafia men
deserting the sinking White House ship and
Their main mindless, meglomaniac Ahab.

McCord has blown. Mitchell has blown no tap on my telephone,
McCord has blown. Mitchell has blown no tap on my telephone
Halderman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell and Dean
It follows a pattern if you dig what I mean.
Halderman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell and Dean
It follows a pattern if you dig what I mean.

And what are we left with now?
Bumper stickers that say Free the Watergate 500.
Spy movies of the same name with a cast of thousands.
And that ominous phrase: that if Nixon knew, Agnew knew!(check it out!)
But Agnew knew enough to stay out of jail
What really happened to J. Edgar Hoover?
The king is proud of Patrick Gray
And there are those who swear they've seen King Richard (who? who?)
King Richard
(who?)
King Richard
(who?)
King Richard
(who?)
King Richard
(who?)
King Richard
King Richard
King Richard
King Richard- (Yeah!)
Beneath that cesspool-Watergate.

Four more years,
Four more years,
Four more years,
Four more years of THAT?

"JOHANNESBURG" (1975) 
Lyrics and Music by Gil Scott-Heron

What's the word?
Tell me brother, have you heard
From Johannesburg?
What's the word?
Sister/woman have you heard
From Johannesburg?
They tell me that our brothers over there
Are defyin' the Man.
We don't know for sure because the news we get
Is unreliable, man.
Well I hate it when the blood starts flowin',
But I'm glad to see resistance growin'.
Somebody tell me what's the word?
Tell me brother, have you heard
From Johannesburg?
They tell me that our brothers over there
Refuse to work in the mines.
They may not get the news but they need to know
We're on their side.
Now sometimes distance brings misunderstanding,
But deep in my heart I'm demanding:
Somebody tell me what's the word?
Sister/woman have you heard
'Bout Johannesburg?
I know that their strugglin' over there
Ain't gonna free me,
But we all need to be strugglin'
If we're gonna be free.
Don't you wanna be free?

Gil Scott-Heron - "B-Movie"

From the album "Reflections", 1981

"B-Movie"

(Spoken word prose poem/lyrics and music by Gil Scott Heron)

Well, the first thing I want to say is: 

Mandate my ass!

Because it seems as though we've been convinced that 26% of the registered voters, not even 26% of the American people, but 26% of the registered voters form a mandate or a landslide. 21% voted for Skippy and 3, 4% voted for somebody else who might have been running.

But, oh yeah, I remember. In this year that we have now declared the year from Shogun to Reagan, I remember what I said about Reagan, I meant it. Acted like an actor. Hollyweird. Acted like a liberal. Acted like General Franco when he acted like governor of California, then he acted like a Republican. Then he acted like somebody was going to vote for him for president. And now we act like 26% of the registered voters is actually a mandate. We're all actors in this I suppose.

What has happened is that in the last 20 years, America has changed from a producer to a consumer. And all consumers know that when the producer names the tune, the consumer has got to dance. That's the way it is. We used to be a producer - very inflexible at that, and now we are consumers and, finding it difficult to understand. Natural resources and minerals will change your world. The Arabs used to be in the 3rd World. They have bought the 2nd World and put a firm down payment on the 1st one. Controlling your resources we'll control your world. This country has been surprised by the way the world looks now. They don't know if they want to be Matt Dillon or Bob Dylan. They don't know if they want to be diplomats or continue the same policy - of nuclear nightmare diplomacy. John Foster Dulles ain't nothing but the name of an airport now.

The idea concerns the fact that this country wants nostalgia. They want to go back as far as they can - even if it's only as far as last week. Not to face now or tomorrow, but to face backwards. And yesterday was the day of our cinema heroes riding to the rescue at the last possible moment. The day of the man in the white hat or the man on the white horse - or the man who always came to save America at the last moment - someone always came to save America at the last moment - especially in "B" movies. And when America found itself having a hard time facing the future, they looked for people like John Wayne. But since John Wayne was no longer available, they settled for Ronald Reagan and it has placed us in a situation that we can only look at -like a "B" movie.

Come with us back to those inglorious days when heroes weren't zeros. Before fair was square. When the cavalry came straight away and all-American men were like Hemingway to the days of the wondrous "B" movie. The producer underwritten by all the millionaires necessary will be Casper "The Defensive" Weinberger - no more animated choice is available. The director will be Attila the Haig, running around frantically declaring himself in control and in charge. The ultimate realization of the inmates taking over at the asylum. The screenplay will be adapted from the book called "Voodoo Economics" by George "Papa Doc" Bush. Music by the "Village People" the very military "Macho Man."

"Company!!!"

"Macho, macho man!"

"Two-three-four."

"He likes to be .. well, you get the point."

"Huuut! Your left! Your left! Your left, right, left, right, left, right!"

A theme song for saber-rallying and selling wars door-to-door. Remember, we're looking for the closest thing we can find to John Wayne. Clichés abound like kangaroos - courtesy of some spaced out Marlin Perkins, a Reagan contemporary. Clichés like, "itchy trigger finger" and "tall in the saddle" and "riding off or on into the sunset." Clichés like, "Get off of my planet by sundown!" More so than clichés like, "he died with his boots on." Marine tough the man is. Bogart tough the man is. Cagney tough the man is. Hollywood tough the man is. Cheap steak tough. And Bonzo's substantial. The ultimate in synthetic selling: A Madison Avenue masterpiece - a miracle - a cotton-candy politician 

Presto! Macho!

"Macho, macho man!"

Put your orders in America. And quick as Kodak your leaders duplicate with the accent being on the dupes - cause all of a sudden we have fallen prey to selective amnesia - remembering what we want to remember and forgetting what we choose to forget. All of a sudden, the man who called for a blood bath on our college campuses is supposed to be Dudley "God-damn" Do-Right?

"You go give them liberals hell Ronnie." That was the mandate to the new Captain Bligh on the new ship of fools. It was doubtlessly based on his chameleon performance of the past: as a Liberal Democrat. As the head of the Studio Actor's Guild, when other celluloid saviors were cringing in terror from McCarthy, Ron stood tall. It goes all the way back from Hollywood to hillbilly. From Liberal to libelous, from "Bonzo" to Birch idol, born again. Civil rights, women's rights, gay rights: it's all wrong. Call in the cavalry to disrupt this perception of freedom gone wild. God damn it, first one wants freedom, then the whole damn world wants freedom.

Nostalgia, that's what we want: the good ol' days, when we gave'em hell. When the buck stopped somewhere and you could still buy something with it. To a time when movies were in black and white, and so was everything else. Even if we go back to the campaign trail, before six-gun Ron shot off his face and developed hoof-in-mouth. Before the free press went down before full-court press, and were reluctant to review the menu because they knew the only thing available was...Crow.

Lon Chaney, our man of a thousand faces: no match for Ron. Doug Henning does the make-up; special effects from Grecian Formula 16 and Crazy Glue; transportation furnished by the David Rockefeller of Remote Control Company. Their slogan is, "Why wait for 1984? You can panic now...and avoid the rush."

So much for the good news.

As Wall Street goes, so goes the nation. And here's a look at the closing numbers: racism's up, human rights are down, peace is shaky, war items are hot. The House claims all ties. Jobs are down, money is scarce, and common sense is at an all-time low on heavy trading. Movies were looking better than ever, and now no one is looking, because we're starring in a "B" movie. And we would rather have had...John Wayne. We would rather have had...John Wayne.

"You don't need to be in no hurry.

You ain't never really got to worry.

And you don't need to check on how you feel.

Just keep repeating that none of this is real.

And if you're sensing, that something's wrong,

Well just remember, that it won't be too long

Before the director cuts the scene. yea."

"This ain't really your life,

Ain't really your life,

Ain't really ain't nothing but a movie."

[Refrain repeated approximately 25 times]

"This ain't really your life,

Ain't really your life,

Ain't really ain't nothing but a movie."

THE MUSIC OF GIL SCOTT-HERON: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH GIL SCOTT-HERON:

Gil Scott Heron-- "Black Wax”  (1982)

Live performance footage by Gil and the Midnight Band

A documentary film by Robert Mugge

All words and music by Gil Scott-Heron

 

The poet, vocalist, and songwriter Gil Scott-Heron is both the descendant of the African griots and the forefather of rap. In the early '70s, he boldly proclaimed that "the revolution will not be televised," and in the '80s he warned us of the "New World Order" with his prophetic and satirical single, "B Movie." The gifted filmmaker Robert Mugge filmed the controversial artist in performance at the now-defunct Wax Museum in Washington, D.C., in 1982. Mugge alternates between the electrifying soul/jazz/funk grooves of Scott- Heron's Midnight Band and his witty and deep monologues about racial politics with a wax figure of Uncle Sam and his dead-on commentaries on urban life in the nation's capital. Included on this DVD is the bonus selection "Is That Jazz," Heron's swinging shout-out to the jazz legends and a rebuke of those who try to limit it. Nobody tells it like it is like Gil Scott-Heron, and nobody ever will. --Eugene Holley Jr.

DVD Release Date: December 22, 1998 

Run Time: 79 minutes

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/aug/26/gil-scott-heron-the-revolution-will-not-be-televised 

Gil Scott-Heron: the revolution lives on 

Political activist, rap pioneer and poet Gil Scott-Heron shaped the sound of today – from Talib Kweli and Kanye West to Kendrick Lamar. His friends and famous fans on why he still matters

When Gil Scott-Heron died in May 2011, Public Enemy’s Chuck D hailed him as “the manifestation of the modern word”. At his funeral, Kanye West performed Lost in the World/Who Will Survive in America, which sampled his spoken word . During the attempt to overthrow Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, Scott-Heron’s most famous track, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, was playing in Tahrir Square. 

“Gil was a legend to me as a kid,” says rapper Talib Kweli, one of several artists appearing at The Revolution Will Be Live, a concert tribute to Gil Scott-Heron in Liverpool. “Kanye West, Jay Z, Ice Cube … mention Gil Scott-Heron and they will go on about how he’s influenced them. Put it this way: without Gil Scott-Heron there would be no Kanye talking about New Slaves.”

From Kweli and Kanye to Kendrick Lamar, Scott-Heron’s catalogue has long been a vital source of inspiration for hip-hop artists. But his influence is far broader than just music. He has been a guiding light as a singer and proto-rapper, novelist and poet, teacher and civil-rights activist.

Gil Scott-Heron, my brave and brilliant friend

At the concert, Kweli will be joined by actor and broadcaster Craig Charles, reggae band Aswad, Liverpool pop-soul group the Christians, who had a hit in 1993 with a cover of Scott-Heron’s 1974 popular single The Bottle, his protege Abdul Malik Al Nasir, his son Rumal Rackley and guest of honour Ndaba Mandela, grandson of Nelson. It will be a day of celebration, if not an opportunity to explore the conflicted individual behind the growing myth.

Scott-Heron was a high-achieving polymath, so there is plenty to laud: he was a novelist by 20, while his 1970 album of politicised, rhythmic spoken word, Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, preceded rap by a decade. Without his pioneering contributions, Al Nasir believes hip-hop wouldn’t have evolved beyond good-time party music.

“It would have just been Rapper’s Delight,” he says.

Throughout the 1970s and early 80s, Scott-Heron used his songs to rail against the Vietnam war, the perils of alcohol and narcotics, the Watergate scandal and racial injustice, although these pieces – created with principal collaborator Brian Jackson – were generally harmonious fusions of soul, jazz, blues and funk, rather than diatribes. Pieces of a Man (1971) and Winter in America (1974) are regarded as the forerunners of both conscious soul (such as Raphael Saadiq and D’Angelo) and conscious rap: Lamar and J Cole are, as Kweli states, “two of the biggest artists in America – Gil is all over popular music right now.”

Scott-Heron’s political activities – tackling the dangers of nuclear power via the No Nukes shows at Madison Square Garden in 1979, campaigning in 1981 with Stevie Wonder to make Martin Luther King’s birthday a national holiday and his involvement with the Artists United Against Apartheid movement – are well documented. But by the mid-80s, he had succumbed to drug addiction, seemingly drawn into the spiral of self-abuse he had spent the previous decade damning. In his final years, he was jailed for possession of crack and cocaine and was diagnosed HIV positive. And yet when he released his first album for 14 years – I’m New Here, in 2010, which turned out to be his last – it was as a returning champion, not a victim.

Nevertheless, there is a sense of Scott-Heron as tragic underachiever – someone who never reaped the same commercial rewards as Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield and Sly Stone, yet whose records were also hard-hitting – and as multivalent innovator. Since his death, he has been variously cited as “the black Dylan” and “the godfather of rap”.

In 2010, Charles interviewed Scott-Heron for BBC Radio 6 Music. “He was really grouchy and wasn’t keen on looking back,” remembers the DJ. “Every time I’d ask a question about his past, he’d fly off the handle. He came across as angry and frustrated,” recalls Charles. “But he’s still one of the most intelligent poets ever. His records are seminal for anyone who knows their political funk and soul. And his final album was brilliant, even if it was dark – even frightening – in places. He was always a trailblazer.” (Indeed, Jamie xx released a remix of that final album, We’re New Here, was a year later).

“I don’t think his influence can be overstated,” says Charles. “For black America, he was their greatest folk hero. He just couldn’t beat his addictions.” But Al Nasir says it is misguided to regard Scott-Heron’s later years as a descent into poverty and addiction.

“He wasn’t impoverished – don’t get it twisted,” he says, testily. “He could have had seven figures in the bank, but that wouldn’t stop him living in a single room in Harlem. Why? Because he was a humble man. He didn’t like the trappings of wealth. He was generous and kind. One of the values inculcated in him by his grandmother was: if you can help someone, why wouldn’t you?”

In 1984, a chance encounter between Scott-Heron and Al Nasir, then a self-described “illiterate street kid” in Liverpool, led to him taking the 18-year-old under his wing. Today, Al Nasir boasts a master’s degree and is sensitive about press intrusions into his mentor’s personal life. “If you want to talk about [crack], you’re talking to the wrong guy,” he warns. “I don’t get involved in trying to take down the man who raised me up. If he’d sat in judgment over me when I was 18, I’d probably be dead now.”

Kweli is also sympathetic to Scott-Heron’s dark side. “Gil had famously bad habits, and of course there were things that made me sad, but disappointed? No. Who am I to be disappointed by someone’s personal demons? If anything, I think he was courageous to bare his soul the way he did.”
Naturally, everyone involved in The Revolution Will Be Live is a paid-up member of the Scott-Heron fanclub. To Garry Christian, he was “a poet who spoke about what was wrong with society”, his music continually relevant, “especially now, when cops are killing black people”. Ndaba Mandela, who is giving a lecture on slavery the weekend of the concert in Liverpool, is grateful for his pursuit of equality. “It won’t grow automatically,” he says of Scott-Heron’s legacy, which he likens to that of his grandfather. “Even the old man, eventually, if we don’t continue his work, people will forget.”

Promoter Richard McGinnis sees the event, ultimately, as “a bookend to Malik’s story. It’s his way of thanking Gil for putting him through university,” he says. “For seeing the good in him when he was destitute.”

What does Al Nasir consider to be an appropriate memorial? “Gil wouldn’t want to be canonised. He had a similar perspective to Mandela – he didn’t want statues. He was a complex character, a troubled soul. He wasn’t perfect. But what he did have was sincerity, and heart. He wanted to raise consciousness and make the world a better place.”

• The Revolution Will Be Live is on 27 August at the Liverpool International Music festival.

The Revolution Will Not Be TelevisedThis was originally a spoken-word piece from 1970 and rerecorded with a band in 71. You could draw a straight line all the way from this thrilling piece of invective to Public
Home Is Where the Hatred Is
Sampled by Kanye West on My Way Home , this grim depiction of ghetto misery and narcotic misadventures assumed a new resonance in the light of Scott-Heron’s own drug addiction.
Lady Day and John Coltrane
A 1971 homage to two inspirational jazz figures, its lyric about seeking solace in the work of greats could have been penned about Scott-Heron himself.
Winter in AmericaNot originally featured on the 1974 album of the same name, this was typical Gil: an apocalyptic vision of the US, accessibly presented, flutes and all.
H²Ogate BluesA lengthy dissection of the corrupt Nixon administration and the America of Watergate and Vietnam, set to insidious proto-rap.
The Bottle
Although dark comment on alcohol abuse from 1974, this was a melodic and funky affair.
Johannesburg
A prime example of Scott-Heron’s expansive vision, this jubilant 1975 single tackled the issue of apartheid in South Africa.
Angel Dust
Recorded with Malcolm Cecil, one half of Stevie Wonder’s classic-era production team, this 1978 track was about as mellifluously mesmerising about a killer drug as you could get.
B-Movie
This 1981 track – with its now-famous opening “The first thing I want to say is, ‘Mandate my ass’” – was a diatribe against the election of a former B-movie actor to the White House.
Me and the Devil
The only single lifted from his 13th and final album, I’m New Here (2010), this was a riveting, rasping electronic adaptation of Robert Johnson’s Me and the Devil Blues (1937).

https://pitchfork.com/features/article/8755-gil-scott-heron/

Gil Scott-Heron: More Than a Revolution

A full picture of the late poet, novelist, singer, satirist, and father of four.

• by Andrew Nosnitsky

Longform

• Jazz
• Rock

January 18, 2012

When Gil Scott-Heron passed away last May, the flurry of obits, essays, and think pieces that followed principally presented him in two specific lights-- as the man behind the much-quoted (and misquoted) catchphrase "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" and a presage of hip-hop. He was 62 years old when he died and had recorded 15 studio albums and written two novels; his postumous memoir, The Last Holiday, was released this week. Gil was a poet, a novelist, a singer, a songwriter, a pianist, a satirist, a father of four. In revisiting his catalog and talking to the people closest to him, it doesn't take long to see past the catchphrase and recognize him as a much more complex artist and human.

Well before his journey as an entertainer began, Gil's biography was a fascinating one. He was born in Chicago; his mother, Bobbie Scott-Heron, sung with the New York Oratorio Society and his father was a Jamaica-born professional soccer player. His parents separated when Gil was two and moved him to Tenneesse, where he was raised by his grandmother. There, he was one of the first black children to be integrated into the state's school system.
By 12 he moved north to live with his mother in New York, where he would befriend classmate and budding hoop legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as a teen. (They remained friends for the decades that followed, with Kareem serving as best man in Gil's wedding to actress Brenda Sykes. When Gil passed, Kareem penned a brief but heartfelt eulogy on his blog entitled "Goodbye Gil Scott-Heron".) After graduating high school, Gil attended the HBCU Lincoln-- alma mater to luminaries such as Langston Hughes-- but dropped out to finish his first novel, The Vulture, which established him as a talent with both politically charged impulses and a knack for writing in the then-hip voice of the streets.

---

Larry McDonald, percussionist: There are two Americans I could listen to talk forever: Gil and Richard Pryor. The way they used "black English"-- they could curse and swear and say the most outrageous things, and it didn't seem obscene because it was totally in context.

Lurma Rackley, girlfriend and mother of Gil's son Rumal: Coming on the heels of the civil rights movement, everybody was open to the realities that each person had to do something and be involved. All across the country and the world people were paying attention to the huge shifts that were going on-- the end of segregation, the efforts to end Apartheid, the focus on nuclear energy, the whole Nixon debacle. There were powerful political happenings and he was so brilliant about tapping into them in a way that people could understand. He was tapped into the energy of the time and he made extraordinary commentary on the major issues of his time. The commentary is still valid today.

---

For all the power in his message, Gil frequently struggled with the reductionist assumption that he was just a political firebrand.

"I don't know if I was as angry as much as I was misunderstood.
A lot of the things we did contained a lot of humor that went over people's heads."

McDonald: One day he said to me, "Man, I don't like how they have me as this black spokesman. When they do that, they're setting you up so they can shoot you down. I've got too many skeletons in my closet. I don't even want to be bothered by that." So I said, "Why do you go down this road?" He said, "I saw some shit that needed to be spoken on and nobody was speaking on it. So I just said it."
Gary Price, housemate: Everybody talks about "The Bottle" and "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" and "Angel Dust", but some of the more emotional pieces like "Song for Bobby Smith" were my favorites. That song has no social or political things going on at all-- it's just a beautiful song.
Rackley: He had a soft side, too, and a lot of people were attracted to him. He talked about his grandmother a lot and her connection to the earth and to doing what's right. I think that infected his approach to the world in a positive way. He also had a pretty deep belief in the spirit world, he even named one of his albums Spirits. He felt that his ancestors who had gone on before him were still available emotionally and spiritually.
Gil, BBC's "Hard Talk", 2000: I don't know if I was as angry as I was misunderstood. I think that a lot of the things we did contained a lot of humor that went over people's heads. We were clearly coming from a small southern town in Tennessee and we didn't estimate what effect we'd have on national and international governments. We were trying to represent our community and speak about the things there. If people don't understand the humor then it's angry, but if people see the juxtaposition of the ideas then they understand where we're coming from. Langston Hughes and Paul Lawrence Dunbar and people of that nature always felt that humor was the best way to see a point of view.

---

Much of Gil's catalog is dripping with sarcasm and subtly deadpanned double speak, even in his most harrowing moments. He also had an obvious love for slapstick verbal puns and could bend language in all different directions almost as a natural tic. (This sort of wordplay might be one of his more blatant predictions of hip-hop.)

---

Rackley: People who saw his shows would get a taste of that because he would start off with a monologue and it was always so funny. Like when he goes into the "H20gate Blues" and he talks about the different shades of the blues-- the "I ain't got me no money blues," the "I ain't got me no woman blues," and the "I ain't got me no money and I ain't got me no woman blues, which is the double blues." He was able to find humor in almost everything.
Gil, Mediawave Festival, 2010: I think everybody has six senses, and the sixth one is your sense of humor. And that's my most valuable one. I can imagine myself without the other five, but I can't imagine myself without my sense of humor.

---

These popular misconceptions might have to do with his biggest hit. For all of its impact, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" had the side effect of narrowing the memory of Gil's work. That tiny string of words wasn't a mission statement, just one small fragment of his message. And a tongue-in-cheek one, as well. The poem was heavy with bluster but weighted with wordplay. In it, Gil critiqued crass sloganeering, mocking everything from Agnew to Ajax campaigns. The bitter irony, of course, is that it became a slogan itself. "He was commercialized by the [current] generation," says Leon Collins, who lived with Gil in D.C. throughout the 60s and 70s. "That's been co-opted and exploited a billion different ways." As time passed Gil himself seemed mostly indifferent to these developments, though quick to clarify his original intent.

"[The revolution] is not all about fighting and going to war-- it's about going to war with a problem and deciding how you can affect that problem."

Gil, Mediawave Festival, 2010: I was saying the revolution takes place in your mind. Once you change your mind and decide that there's something wrong that you want to affect, that's when the revolution takes place. First you have to look at things and decide what you can do. That's when you become revolutionary-- when you see that something's wrong and [you] have to do something about it. It's not all about fighting, it's not all about going to war-- it's about going to war with a problem and deciding how you can affect that problem.

"Revolution" was first recorded as the opening cut on Gil's 1970 debut LP, Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. But before that it appeared in the pages of his self-released book of the same name. This was the collection that Gil slipped legendary jazz producer Bob Thiele when he and Brian Jackson were looking for songwriting opportunities. Thiele passed at the time, though, telling Gil, "If you make any money [with poetry], maybe we can get some money together and do an album of music."
Small Talk was recorded live on stage with two percussionists. Gil sung and played piano on the record's three fully formed songs and the rest of record was made up of straightforward and mostly intense spoken word in the vein of contemporaries like the Last Poets. (A 1971 Billboard review half-dismissed "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" as "a solid soundalike" of the Harlem collective.) Much of the album orbits a similar tone, but in the same space Gil tends to pull back from anything resembling rage to instead offer a panoramic view of the urban landscape. The songs that follow are all sung in Gil's now-trademark fragile intonation and mostly lean personal rather than political. It's a starkly honest affair with Gil both digging deep inside his own story and drawing out the stories of those around him. His eye for detail is unmatched, as on the title track, where he plays silent observer to conversations at the titular intersection, from dope deals to complaints: "I don't know if the riots is wrong/ But whitey been kicking my ass for too long." There's an underlying hum of concern for the larger societal issues of the day, but Gil tends to focus more specifically on how humans internalize and overcome these struggles.

"A good poet feels what his community feels.
Like if you stub your toe, the rest of your body hurts."

Gil, Jet, 1979: There is a long history of black artists who have not separated their art from their lives. They use their art and their talent as an extension of the community, to reflect the mood, the sensitivity, the circumstances.
Gil, Mediawave Festival, 2010: All of those poems don't just represent me, they represent the people I know and see. Some of them were angry, some of them were upset, some of them were parents, some of them were in love with their children, some of them were trying to get jobs, some of them were working with their jobs, some of them had problems with their women. "Pieces of a Man" is about a son seeing his father who just lost his job. I never saw that [personally], but I saw a friend of mine whose father went a little berserk when he lost his job. "Your Daddy Loves You" is not about anger and hellraising, it's about the fact that sometimes men have so many things on their mind they forget to say, "I love you." You have to show the normalcy of your community to show the humanity of your community. A good poet feels what his community feels. Like if you stub your toe, the rest of your body hurts.

---

Small Talk made enough money to satisfy Thiele, and for its follow-up Gil returned to the studio to cut Pieces of a Man with a stacked lineup that included heavyweight jazz sessioners Ron Carter, Hubert Laws, and Bernard Purdie as well famed arranger Johnny Pate.
It also served as a full-scale coming-out party for Gil the Singer. While his spoken voice was a powerful vehicle for both the language and political bluster of his time, there's a stark fragility to Gil's singing. Echoing near-contemporaneous Chicagoan influences like Lou Rawls, Oscar Brown Jr., and Terry Callier, Gil delivered his lyrics in a carefully tempered and often melismatic baritone. This is most apparent on 1974's Winter in America, his sparsest collection. Most tracks are backed by little more than hauntingly tinkled solo piano, either acoustic or electric; the record makes a strong case for Gil's voice as the single greatest accompaniment to the Fender Rhodes. As he aged, his instrument turned raspier and even more frail in a way that only magnified his intensity.
Pieces once again opens with "The Revolution", but this time blown out to funk proportions. This would become a common approach for Gil-- his catalog covers a striking amount of ground musically, with songs and styles that would expand and contract over time.

McDonald: He had two main bands. I was part of the Amnesia Express, which he put together when the Midnight Band broke up. We were playing the same songs that the Midnight Band played, but we had a different kind of energy. It was amazing to see how instead of shutting us down, he'd let us play and adopt [our ideas]. When we performed "Angel Dust", it could take up to 40 minutes. It became a performance piece. "Home Is Where the Hatred Is" became "The Other Side", which is a three-part thing on the Spirits album. I was playing "The Other Side" for a couple of years and then one day I went up to my brother and he had a 45 of "The Bottle" and he flipped it over and halfway through the song I said, "Wait a minute, that sounds familiar." It was "Home Is Where the Hatred Is." I had never heard [the studio version of] that song before we started playing it! And we was killing it! He gave us freedom to play.
Price: Everybody talks about Gil, and Gil was half of it. But Brian [Jackson, Gil's principle collaborator in the first decade of his career] was also the music. Gil was very limited in terms of his musical ability; he could play three chords on the piano. Brian always gets put in the shadows. Had it not been for a lot of Brian's music, I don't know if Gil's work would've been as far reaching-- he reached the jazz community, the R&B community, and then in later years he was a hip-hop influence.

---

While the hip-hop world, particularly those artists residing on its "conscious rap" shores, embraced Gil Scott-Heron that relationship was not without certain misconceptions, either. It's difficult to find any press from the past 20 years that doesn't explicitly frame Gil as a progenitor to hip-hop. It's equally difficult to find many conversations where he then doesn't explicitly rebuke those comparisons, though usually in good humor.

---

Gil, BBC's "Hard Talk", 2000: I generally try to put credit where credit is due. For those viewers that go around boom-box bashing-- I am not the one that's responsible. [laughs] For others, I think we came along at a time where there was a transition going on in terms of poetry and music and we were one of the first groups to combine the two... and for that reason I think a lot of people picked up and decided we were the ones who had originated it.

---

There were parallels to be sure, but to exaggerate them to influence is to overlook the differences of influence. Hip-hop's roots stemmed more directly from radio jocks and reggae toasters, while Gil drew his primary influence from the pages of Harlem Renaissance literature. Gil self-identified as a poet first and foremost (or pianist or "bluesologist"); rapping was simply one of his vehicles. He was a godfather of a bastard child by circumstance. Of course, the parallels helped sustain Gil's later career as many of young listeners (this writer included) came to his music through hip-hop sample sources and incessant name drops, but it's strange and maybe a little disrespectful that someone who was so powerful in his own time is now defined primarily by what came after. Presumably, this is the curse of being ahead of the curve, but this was just one of the many curves he rode along in his career.
Some were more tumultuous than others. 1971's "Home Is Where the Hatred Is", a tale of a struggling heroin addict who describes withdrawal as "turn[ing] your sick soul inside out so that the world can watch you die." The track eerily predicted his own problems with cocaine later in life. Esther Phillips, a recovering heroin addict herself, would later cover the song. In a 1997 interview with Vibe, Gil recalled the songstress' initial response to the record: "She said I knew too much about junkies not to be one." At the time she was wrong, but in the last three decades of his life he would succumb to those very demons. His struggles with substance abuse during this time are well documented, maybe even over-documented-- notably, he smoked crack in front of a New Yorker reporter in 2010.
He didn't record much in this time, effectively retiring after Moving Target in 1982, producing only 1994's inconsistent Spirits and 2010's considerably more consistent Richard Russell-assisted second comeback I'm New Here in the years since. He toured with some regularity during his studio lapses, usually to mixed reviews.

Photo by Mischa Richter

McDonald: In the later years when he wasn't showing up [to shows], I think he thought that by [then] somebody should've come along to pick up [where he left off]. He had carried it all through the 70s and 80s. I guess he just wanted to hang out and do what he wanted to do, but he couldn't get away with it. He was too major. When I joined him he had like 20 albums out! You couldn't really expect someone to operate at that level of excellence for the next 20 or 30 years. He'd burn out. Whatever happened to him or whatever he became, he gave up the office. He didn't want to be bothered talking about all the stuff that was happening today. I figured people needed to leave him alone more than they did. But that was hard because he was so charismatic. It's not that I didn't see his faults; it was just worth it more for me to hang with him and not harass him about that stuff because I was always learning from him.
Leon Collins, housemate: When I look at entertainers in general, most of them are vulnerable, sensitive, compassionate. When trauma impacts them they're emotionally damaged and a lot of them have broken hearts. They self-medicate. That's the history of all music, black music in particular. Michael Jackson's another sensitive soul who was traumatized. I look at Gil as a cultural activist warrior who spoke truth to power and paid a price for it. The demons that chased Gil, he earned them. They were real but I don't think he asked for them.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/feb/07/gil-scott-heron-comeback-interview

Gil Scott-Heron

The Observer

Gil Scott-Heron: the godfather of rap comes back

In the 70s and 80s, Gil Scott-Heron's music was a mesmerising mix of wry poetry and politics and he became known as 'the godfather of rap' and 'the black Bob Dylan'. But then he got into drugs and, not so long ago, it looked like he was finished. Now the great outsider is back, he's made a new album and he's here on tour. He tells Sean O'Hagan his extraordinary story 

by Sean O'Hagan

February 6, 2010

The Guardian  (UK)

One of the most moving songs on Gil Scott-Heron's long-awaited new album, I'm New Here, is called "Where Did the Night Go". Over the most minimal electronic pulse, his familiar deep drawl, now more ragged and reflective than ever, intones the lines:

"Long ago, the clock washed midnight away, bringing the dawn,

Oh God, I must be dreaming,
Time to get up again, time to start up again,
Pulling on my socks again
Where did the night go?"

For those of us who have kept an ever-hopeful eye on Gil Scott-Heron's faltering musical and personal journey over the past three decades, the song has an added resonance. Where, I wondered on first hearing it, did the years go? Where, to be more precise, did Gil Scott-Heron go in the long silence that began in 1982 after the release of his last album for Arista Records, Moving Target, and was broken only briefly by the appearance of Spirits, in 1994.

"People keep saying I disappeared," the singer tells me, laughing heartily, when I speak to him. "Well, that's a gift I didn't know I had. You ever see someone disappear? That makes me a superhero, right?"

The humour, though, conceals a great deal of heartbreak and an epic struggle with addiction, both of which are referred to obliquely on his raggedly brilliant version of Robert Johnson's "Me and the Devil" on the new album. "Early this mornin', when you knocked upon my door", he sings, "And I said, "Hello, Satan, I believe it's time to go."

Though Gil Scott-Heron insists he did not disappear, that he kept playing club gigs in America and did the occasional tour, that he was writing, if not recording, the news that kept on filtering back from his long winter in America was always bleak. It seemed at times as if the most astute musical social commentator of the 70s and 80s had metamorphosed into a character from one of his own sad songs of suffering and struggle. On the sombre and still-startling "Home Is Where The Hatred Is", recorded in 1971, he described a junkie trapped in a blighted inner-city ghetto who lived inside "white powder dreams". Thirty-odd years later, he seemed to be living those lyrics.

Gil Scott-Heron's creative trajectory has, in many ways, run counter to that of the traditional troubled artist insofar as he fell into hard drug use at a time in his life when most of his peers had either sorted out their addictions or succumbed to them. What we can say for certain is that sometime in the mid-to-late 80s, the man the critics were by then calling "the godfather of rap" and "the black Bob Dylan" developed a cocaine habit that, if his ex-partner, Monique de Latour, is to believed, spiralled out of control into full-blown addiction to crack.

By then, like Sly Stone before him, Scott-Heron had a reputation for showing up hours late for concerts or not showing up at all. It seemed scarcely believable that the lithe, loose-limbed performer who sang "The Bottle" – about the alcoholics he observed queuing at a local liquor store every morning – and "Angel Dust" – about the mind-destroying drug of the same name that brought down the great James Brown – had fallen so low.

"I've had bad times in my life when I'd rather be somewhere else doing something else, for sure," he tells me when I ask about his troubles. "But you get to my age, that shit happens. You get in trouble; you maybe lose some folks – a parent or a friend. Maybe your marriage breaks up, you lose your wife, lose touch with your kid. But what life does not have those things in it?"

Again, the resilience, the bluff optimism disguises the true extent of those troubles. In 2001, he was sentenced to one-to-three years in prison for possession of cocaine and two crack pipes. He could have avoided the sentence had he undergone a rehabilitation programme, but he didn't even turn up for the relevant court hearing. "You've had all these opportunities to help yourself," the judge declared, "and you just don't seem to care." As subsequent events would show, that did seem to be the case.

In October 2003, on the way to a show in Chicago, he was arrested again at New York's La Guardia airport and charged with possession of a controlled substance. In 2006, he was sentenced to two-to-four years for violating the terms of his parole by leaving a drug rehabilitation centre. The great pioneer of socially conscious soul and rap, looking gaunt and old before his time, was taken to Rikers Island to serve another jail sentence. His life was in shreds, his musical career seemed over, but it was there, against the odds, that his rehabilitation as a recording artist began.

The story of how Gil Scott-Heron's new album came to be made is a long and convoluted one. It is, among other things, a testament to the abiding power of great music outside the mainstream to spread like a virus across cultures, across decades. It begins back in 1987 in a rented house in Edinburgh when a young student is mesmerised by his friend's collection of soul and funk music from the halcyon days of the early 70s – albums by the likes of Curtis Mayfield, Sly and the Family Stone, the JBs, the Meters, Bill Withers and, most mesmerising of all, Gil Scott-Heron. The first Gil Scott-Heron song the young student heard was called "H20 Gate Blues", one of the singer's great spoken-word monologues that would later earn him the soubriquet the godfather of rap. It was ostensibly about President Nixon and the Watergate phone-tapping scandal, but it was also about wider issues of power, corruption and injustice and the great divide that is race in America.

"I was just taken aback by the voice, the words, the poetry," remembers Jamie Byng who, 22 years on, is the director of Canongate Books and still a fervent soul fan. "I had been raised on rock but this was just breathtaking. The seasoned voice, the wryness of the delivery, the level of irony and satire in the lyrics, the whole thing just blew me away. Discovering those songs was an epiphanic moment for me."

Those songs range from the reflective – "Winter In America", "Lady Day & John Coltrane", "I Think I'll Call It Morning" – through the socially aware – "Home Is Where the Hatred Is", "Pieces of a Man", "The Bottle" – to the wry and satirical – "H20 Gate Blues", "Whitey on the Moon" and "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised", whose title has now entered the pop cultural lexicon.

So taken was Byng by those songs that, having bought and rebranded Canongate, he tracked down his hero and, in 1996, republished his two long-out-of-print novels, The Vulture and The Nigger Factory. An unlikely friendship was forged that lasts to this day. "There's nothing I wouldn't do for Jamie," Scott-Heron, who is the godfather of one of Byng's sons, told me last week, before adding, "That's why I agreed to this interview, bro'. You come with good references."

Back in 2006, those good references also paved the way for British music business maverick Richard Russell to meet Gil Scott-Heron. Russell, too, was a long-time fan. He had worked as a hip-hop DJ before forming XL Recordings, home to Radiohead, the White Stripes and Vampire Weekend. It was Jamie Byng that Russell first called with his proposal to produce a new record by Gil Scott-Heron, and Jamie Byng who facilitated their first meeting in Rikers Island in June 2006.

In his diary of the making of the album, Russell recorded his impressions of that prison visit:

"Rikers tries to intimidate you when you visit… The various body searches and waiting around in various holding areas feel designed to discourage people from visiting… By the time you get to see the person you've come to visit, all your possessions have been stored in various lockers, and contact with the outside world seems like a memory… The contrast of Gil's spirit – intact and inspiring – with the bleakness of the surroundings was inspirational. It's hard to appreciate something as fundamental as freedom when you have it. Gil was peaceful, while surrounded by misery and tension. It confirmed my hunch that he still has a lot to give to people." I'm New Here confirms that hunch.

The first surprise is the album's ironic title and the fact that the title song itself was not written by Gil Scott-Heron but by Bill Callahan of the American indie group Smog. Like the covers that producer Rick Rubin chose for the late Johnny Cash on his valedictory American Recordings series of albums, "I'm New Here" sounds like a song tailor-made for Gil Scott-Heron, the great survivor: "No matter how far wrong you've gone," he sings, "you can always turn around." My instinct, on first hearing it, was to cross my fingers tightly.

Gil Scott-Heron was born in Chicago in 1949. His mother, Bobbie Scott-Heron, was a librarian and an accomplished singer, his father, Giles Heron, from Jamaica, was an athlete who would later earn the nickname the "Black Arrow" when, in the 1950s, he became the first black man to play for Celtic FC. "I'm used to white British guys getting in touch with me," says Gil, laughing. "There's this guy, Gerry, who keeps me informed about the Celtics. He brings me a new shirt every time he's in New York."

As a child, Scott-Heron lived with his maternal grandmother, Lillie Scott, in Jackson, Tennessee, before moving to New York, aged 13, when she died. The first song on I'm New Here is the ironically titled, "On Coming from a Broken Home", which is an ode to Lillie. "Womenfolk raised me," he attests, "and I was full-grown before knew I came from a broken home."

As a teenager, his writing skills earned him a scholarship to the Fieldston School in New York and, from there, he went on to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, chosen, he later said, because it was where his hero, Langston Hughes, had studied. It was there he met Brian Jackson, his musical collaborator on many of the great songs that would follow.

"I was playing keyboards back then and I was having awful trouble with the sheet music for 'God Bless the Child'", he remembers, laughing some more. "Brian could play that stuff like it was easy. We hooked up in the music room, then he showed me some music of his own and I started writing lyrics for it. That's how it began really. I made three records and wrote two books but I never thought of any of it as a career. Far as I was concerned, I was still a student. Still am, in some ways."

Together throughout the 1970s, Scott-Heron and Jackson made music that reflected the turbulence, uncertainty and increasing pessimism of the times, merging the soul and jazz traditions and drawing on an oral poetry tradition that reached back to the blues and forward to hip-hop. The music sounded by turns angry, defiant and regretful while Scott-Heron's lyrics possessed a satirical edge that set them apart from the militant soul of contemporaries such as Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield.

"I still can't think of too many performers who have the intellectual range in their songwriting that takes in satire and social commentary apart from the early Bob Dylan and maybe the young Randy Newman," says Jamie Byng. "But there's also a great empathy there. Gil writes about the state of the world, but also about community, family, and the plight of the individual. And, he has never compromised. That's maybe a big part of the reason why his music never really crossed over. What he was saying was too raw, too truthful."

In more ways than one, then, Gil Scott Heron was, and remains, the great outsider, exalted by his devoted faithful, overlooked by the mainstream. His influence, though, is pervasive, though few and far between are the rappers that can make their lyrical gift, or its delivery, seem so effortless. "I work hard at it," he says, "just like I worked hard at getting my masters degree. It's not just something I sit down and do. You have to learn and keep learning."

I'm New Here would seem to bear that out. It is a new kind of Gil Scott-Heron record insofar as it relocates his old and now seasoned voice at the very heart of contemporary electronic music culture – one track features overdubs by film-maker and producer Chris Cunningham, another a soundscape sculpted by the ubiquitous Damon Albarn. It is an album of dark and brooding songs intercut with spoken-word pieces that tend towards the reflective if not outright regretful. As always it is that lived-in voice, now cracked and parched from the hard times, that pulls you in.

"He sees himself as a live performer and a story teller," the album's producer Richard Russell told me last week. "Even in the studio, he brings this extraordinary energy with him, this natural, god-given ability to perform, to tell it like it is. The words just seem to flow though him. In that sense, it was an easy album to make even though we did it in fits and starts."

What, I ask, were the difficulties? "Well, you have to accept that Gil does not operate on any clock known to man. He may turn up late, he may not turn up at all some days, but when he does, it tends to be incredible. He's a genuine artist in a way that most performers aren't anymore. He has no conception of time, no regard for money. He seems utterly free from the normal everyday burdens people carry. In that way, too, it was an extraordinary and unique experience." (I found this out to my cost last November, when I spent four days in New York waiting for him to show up for a face-to-face interview. He blew out three prearranged appointments and a photo session. Then he switched off his phone altogether. )

I'm New Here, then, may well bring Gil Scott-Heron's music to a new audience who will hopefully seek out the songs that made his name. Whether or not it will bring a new stability or focus to the man's own troubled life remains to be seen. Whether he even wants that is another question. Right now, if our exchange was anything to go by, he seems pretty together, though his conversation does tend towards the lateral.

"If you believe half the stuff you read about me in the press or on the internet, then I'm a strung-out junkie, but I never touched a goddam needle in my life," he says at one point, laughing uproariously. "I'm afraid of needles, man. So, when I heard that, I'm thinking, 'Who the hell they talking about? Must be some other Gil. Sure as hell ain't this one.'"
When he finally stops laughing, he quotes Robert Louis Stevenson at me: "There is so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us, that it behoves all of us not to talk about the rest of us." Right on cue, the line starts crackling and I lose him for a moment. "Don't worry, bro," he shouts. "That's just me disappearing again."

I'm New Here is released on XL Recordings on 9 February. Canongate reissues The Vulture and the Nigger Factory on the same date. Gil Scott-Heron plays the Royal Festival Hall on 20 April as part of the Ether Festival.

Hear the new album online

Listen to an exclusive whole-album stream of Gil Scott-Heron's I'm New Here at theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2010/feb/02/gil-scott-heron-new-here

Topics:

• Gil Scott-Heron
• The Observer

• Rap
• features

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/04/04/gil-scott-heron-and-the-black-radical-tradition/

April 4, 2017

Gil-Scott Heron and the Black Radical Tradition

by Norman Richmond 

Counterpunch 

Gil Scott-Heron would have been 68 years old on April 1st.

I can still remember Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) coming up behind Scott-Heron and blindfolding him. Scott-Heron never flinched, even when he turned around and saw that it was Ture. That event took place in Washington D.C. at a Black Music Association convention in 1984.

Ture always praised Scott-Heron’s classic, “Johannesburg”; in fact, it was my honor to present Scott-Heron with a Biko-Rodney-Malcolm Award for refusing to perform in Apartheid South Africa. These awards were given out by the Toronto-based Biko Rodney-Malcolm Coalition which was named for South Africa’s Stephen Biko, Guyana’s Walter Rodney, and the United States Omowale El-Hajj Malik El Shabazz (Malcolm X). The presentation took place at the Bamboo Club in Toronto.

When Scott-Heron joined the ancestors on May 27, 2011 I was saddened and angered simultaneously. I didn’t appreciate how the corporate dailies in Toronto dealt with the passing of Scott-Heron. Despite the fact that there are many excellent black writers in this city, and that Scott-Heron has family still living in this city, most of the dailies carried wire stories. As Bob Brown of the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party, a close comrade of Ture wrote me in an email, “Thanks for remembering and respecting Gil; who even at the lowest points in his life, was much better and more noble than most of us.”

I was inside a Cyber Café in Toronto when I learned of the passing of Scott-Heron.  I was surfing the net and accidentally ran across the story on National Public Radio’s site. I immediately informed the late Wesley “Jaribu” Cason who I was with, “Look, Gil is dead”; they were the first words out of my mouth. I must admit that it came as no surprise that he had met his demise. Most of us knew it was just a matter of time before we would lose him. His battle with substance abuse and alcoholism had been on Front Street for many years. My mind flashed back to my first meeting with Scott-Heron in Toronto 1976 and then seeing him open up for Steve Wonder in Montréal in 1980.

I was privileged to see he and the Midnight Band perform at the El Macombo, and I interviewed him for the first time around the time of the 1976 Summer Olympics.That interview was conducted on Charles St. in front of a roomful of Scott-Heron’s crew.  Parts of the interview were broadcast that very night on (Bill) Payne’s Place on CHIN–AM Radio; he had been playing Scott-Heron’s music to death.

At our first meeting, we were interrupted by a visit from Kwame Ture. Many in the movement, however, knew him as Chaka Zulu at that time.  I can remember Scott-Heron’s entourage castigating Ture when he mentioned that he had just come from McDonald’s, having had a bite to eat. He attempted to justify his actions, saying it was a necessity due to time constraints. Scott-Heron’s people would not cut Ture any slack.

Scott-Heron’s music was bubbling at that time. The album, The First Minute of a New Day by Scott-Heron, Brian Jackson and the Midnight Band, had been released in January 1975 on Arista Records. The First Minute of a New Day was the follow up to Winter in America. The Midnight Band was an all-star ensemble featuring: Gil Scott-Heron on vocals, piano, electric piano, and guitar; Brian Jackson on synthesizer, keyboards, flute, and vocals; Bilal Sunni Ali on flute, harmonica, and saxophone; Danny Bowens on bass; Eddie Knowles on percussion and conga; Barnett Williams also on percussion; Victor Brown on percussion and vocals; Charlie Saunders on congas and drums; and Bob Adams and Victor Bowens on tambourines, vocals, and bells.

The promo material Arista Records put out highlighted the fact that Scott-Heron was the son of a Jamaican professional soccer player, Gil Heron, who had made his mark in Scotland. When I raised the question of his father, I was shocked by Scott-Heron who firmly told me, “The Scotts raised me.” I would learn later that, at the time of our interview, he had not yet met his father. Marcus Baram quoted this in his 2014, volume, “Gil Scott-Heron: Pieces of a Man”. Years after that, I would discover that Gil had reached twenty-six years of age before they would finally meet.  He sang about this on the Bridges album on the track, “Hello Sunday, Hello Road.” Nevertheless, on the night of Scott-Heron’s first Toronto appearance, I did meet several members of his family on his father’s side.

Gil Heron, the father of Gil Scott-Heron joined the ancestors at 86 on November 27, 2008 in Detroit. Heron, who was known as the Black Arrow and was a poet and a professional soccer player.  He was born in Kingston, Jamaica. In 1947 Ebony magazine  carried a story referring to Scott-Heron father as the “Babe Ruth of Soccer”. He was a professional soccer player in Scotland.

I would meet Gil’s older brother Roy Heron who, served with the Norwegian Merchant Navy during World War II and then joined the Canadian army, later moving to Canada, where he became active in black Canadian politics. The last time Scott-Heron performed in Toronto he introduced everyone backstage to “Uncle Roy.”

Stevie Wonder and Bob Marley developed a serious relationship in the 1970s.  In fact, Wonder and Bob Marley and The Wailers scheduled a joint tour; unfortunately, Marley became too ill to perform. Scott-Heron and his crew were picked to replace Marley and the Wailers.  I was assigned by the Toronto Star to interview Stevie Wonder. Little did I know that this exclusive interview would lead to my being fired by Canada’s largest newspaper! That, however, is a story for another time. When I arrived in Montréal for the interview and checked into my hotel room, I turned on the radio and discovered that Wonder and Scott-Heron’s concert was being promoted by Dick Griffey of Solar Records.

Richard “Dick” Griffey  (16 NOV 1938 – 24 SEP 2010) was an African record producer and promoter who had founded SOLAR Records, (an acronym for Sound of Los Angeles Records), which followed Motown and Philadelphia International Records during the 1970s and 1980s. As a concert promoter, Griffey arranged bookings for artists including James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Michael Jackson, The Jackson Five as well as Stevie Wonder.

Before the concert Scott-Heron would introduce me to his wife, the actress from the television series Room 222, as well as the film Cleopatra Jones, Brenda Sykes. I would find out years later that Sykes is a cousin of my Aunt Rose who is based in Arcadia, Louisiana the place of my birth. Sykes was introduced to Scott-Heron by basetball icon Kareem Abdul Jabbar who served as their best man when they were married in the Jazz giant Wayne Shorter’s home. One of the last times I saw Scott-Heron was when he laughed and said, “I guess you and I are cousins.”

Scott-Heron covered the waterfront: he dealt with race, class, gender, and the environment. “We Almost Lost Detroit” had nothing to do with a race riot.  It was about nuclear power. It was based on a 1975 book by John G. Fuller, which presented a history of Fermi 1, America’s first commercial breeder reactor, with an emphasis on the 1966 partial nuclear meltdown. In the song Scott-Heron raised the question, “…and what would Karen Silkwood say if she was still alive?” Silkwood was a Euro-American labor union activist and chemical technician at the Kerr-McGee plant near Crescent, Oklahoma. Her job was making plutonium pellets for nuclear reactor fuel rods. She died under mysterious circumstances, after investigating claims of irregularities and wrongdoing at the Kerr-McGee plant.

Chairman Mao maintained that there was no contradiction between being a patriot and an internationalist. I think this applies to Scott-Heron. Remember “Liberation Song (The Red, Black and Green)”? He could both sing about the death of Silkwood and call for liberation of South Africa.  Scott-Heron’s repertoire was as wide and deep as the audience that loved him. “He dealt with racism, capitalism, the environment, Pan-Africanism, substance abuse, nuclear power, women’s liberation and just plain ‘silly’ little love songs.” He is a major part of the Radical Black Tradition.

https://www.allaboutjazz.com/offering-the-music-of-gil-scott-heron-and-brian-jackson-charenee-wade-motema-music-review-by-james-nadal.php

Charenee Wade: Offering - The Music of Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson

by JAMES NADAL 
June 14, 2015
AllAboutJazz

 

As it often happens with many artists so in tune with the times that they are actually ahead of their time, the immense contribution of musical/cultural revolutionary Gil Scott-Heron continues to be revealed and acknowledged. Albeit, there has been a perpetual cult surrounding this enigmatic figure which defied any sort of categorization both in music and personality, but judging by the posthumous releases of his catalog and continuing tributes, his legacy has taken on the iconic qualities it deserves. His musical partner throughout his most productive phase, pianist Brian Jackson, provided the catalyst for much of Gil Scott-Heron's best work, and is recognized as an innovator in jazz and modern urban music.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: 

Charenee Wade is a singer, composer, arranger and educator, noted for her self-produced "Love Walked In," in 2011. Previous to this release, she honed her vocalizing skills as featured guest on releases by Tia Fuller, Eric Reed, and the Eyal Vilner Big Band, among others. Armed with unfathomable passion and assurance, Wade introduces Offering—The Music of Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson. Utilizing the lyrics and music of the gifted duo as a launching pad, she takes her innovative arrangements into another dimension, conveying the intended message with her singular and assertive vocal textures, evolving, while honoring the spirit of the original source. 

Gleaning from the songwriters' peak prolific period of the 1970's, Wade chose an interesting set list with the title track setting the conceptual tone of the record. "Song Of The Wind," shows the dynamic emotional range that Wade can cover, accompanied by vibraphonist Stefon Harris, the song becomes the transporter of the skies. The pace is slightly quickened with "A Toast to the People," with its timeless salutation to those who were lost in the struggle. There is the straight ahead version of "Home Is Where The Hatred Is," this being one of Scott-Heron's masterpieces, Wade cleverly takes it into a tailspin, building into almost frenetic phrasing with her horn like voice that portrays the song with all its dark poignancy and despair. "Ain't No Such Thing As Superman," is set up superbly by bassist Lonnie Plaxico, who authenticates the tempo with that inner city feel, allowing Wade to stretch and scat her way through the other side. "Western Sunrise," featuring Plaxico and guitarist Dave Stryker, is an enthusiastic number, greeting the coming of a new day. 

Gil Scott-Heron was also highly regarded as a New Black Poet, a title he both relished and rejected, he liked to call himself a messenger of his people, a modern throwback to the African griots. To fully capture his poetic essence, Malcolm-Jamal Warner on "Essex/Martin, Grant, Byrd & Till," and Christian McBrideon "Peace Go With You Brother," take on the lead roles representing the spoken word. These are critical participants in these songs, for the poetry, with its bare knuckle frankness, lies at the root of this music. Wade picks up on the peace missive, softening the tone, bringing it down to almost a plea, for there has to be a way out of the madness. 

If there was ever a perfect song for this record's closure "I Think I'll Call It Morning," is it. The Music of Gil-Scott Heron and Brian Jackson, though identified with political, cultural and racial references of revolution and change, also depicted an immense sense of optimism. This final song portrays just that, that no matter what happens, the sun will rise tomorrow, and with it another opportunity to make the changes and choices necessary for our collective peace of mind.

With this production, Charenee Wade has proven that she possesses courageous talent, and is a singer whose time has come. Choosing to interpret this material was not an easy route, but in the true spirit of a jazz improviser, she absolutely made these songs her own. She recorded much more than a tribute to two exemplary musician/songwriters, it is a resolution that the work continues, it is an Offering.

---

Track Listing: Offering; Song Of The Wind; A Toast To The People; Home Is Where The Hatred Is; Ain’t No Such thing As Superman; Essex/Martin, Grant, Byrd & Till; Western Sunrise; The Vulture (Your Soul And Mine); Peace Go With You Brother (Intro); Peace Go With You Brother; I Think I’ll Call It Morning.

Personnel: Charenee Wade: vocals, arrangements; Brandon McCune: piano; Dave Stryker: guitar; Lonnie Plaxico: bass; Alvester Garnett: drums; Stefon Harris: vibes; Lakecia Benjamin: alto sax (6); Malcolm-Jamal Warner: spoken word (6); Marcus Miller: bass clarinet (6); Christian McBride: spoken word (9).

Title: Offering - The Music of Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson | Year Released: 2015 | Record Label: Motema Music

Jamie Byng in conversation with Gil Scott-Heron

Canongate’s own Jamie Byng interview’s Gil Scott-Heron in 2010. This year would have marked Gil’s 68th birthday. His posthumously published, indelible memoir The Last Holiday is now a Canon publication.

Jamie Byng, publisher of Canongate Books, was a friend of Gil Scott-Heron for more than 20 years. During 2010 they recorded this interview in London where the rapper-poet talked about his life and work, interspersed with intimate performances of his music.

Related Gil Scott-Heron, The Last Holiday

THE MUSIC OF GIL SCOTT-HERON: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH GIL SCOTT-HERON:


Gil Scott Heron--GONE BUT NEVER FORGOTTEN:

Gil Scott-Heron - Pieces Of A Man [Remastered + Bonus … 

Gil Scott-Heron - The Bottle 

 

Gil Scott-Heron - Revolution Will Not Be Televised (Official 

 

 

Gil Scott-Heron - Johannesburg:

 

 

Gil Scott Heron "Winter In America" (1974) HIGH QUALITY

 

 

Gil Scott-Heron - Reflections (Full Album) 

 

Gil Scott -Heron - The mind of Gil Scott Heron (full album) 

Gil Scott Heron The Bottle 

 

Gil Scott-Heron - Home Is Where the Hatred Is (Official Audio) 

 

Gil Scott-Heron - Pieces of a Man (Full Album 1971) 

 

 

Gil Scott Heron - Washington D.C 

 

Gil Scott Heron- Angel Dust

 

Gil Scott Heron - We Almost Lost Detroit:

 

 

Gil Scott-Heron - B-Movie 

 

Gil Scott Heron - We almost Lost Detroit

 

Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson - Bridges [full album][HQ]

 

 

B Movie --Gil Scott Heron 

 

Gil Scott-Heron - Whitey On the Moon- (Official Audio)

 

Gil Scott-Heron-Winter in America--Full Album--1974 

 

Gil Scott Heron Black Wax complete concert: 

https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2013/12/gil-scott-heron-theres-a-war-going-on.html

Gil Scott-Heron - There's A War Going On:

 

Live Performance @ Woodstock 94 (Saugerties, NY),  8/14/1994

The Pace Report: "The Genius of Gil Scott-Heron Part 1" The Gil Scott-Heron Interview: