Pieces of a Man (1971)
11 tracks, 48 minutes
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Oh yeah. I’ve been waiting for this guy to turn up. Gil Scott-Heron is surely one of the coolest human beings ever to tread briefly in our own humble dimension before continuing onward into infinity.
Before this album, Gil Scott-Heron was making his name as a writer and performance poet on the New York City scene. Pieces of a Man was Scott-Heron’s first studio album, and its cast tells you that this isn’t just your standard-fare New York poet cutting a few sides. There was something special here. Backing him on this record are famed jazz musicians Ron Carter on bass and Hubert Laws on flute and sax, as well as Bernard Purdie on drums and his soon-to-be long-time collaborator Brian Jackson on piano. The music is, all the way through, just as smooth as you could ask for. I’ve never particularly been a fan of soul, and the sonics going on here are soul through and through (although that’s not to say it doesn’t get funky when it needs to), but they never fail to lift me up and place me on some warm cloud, such is the perfection of the style.
But that’s the music. It’s great and would make a good album on its own. But when you listen to Gil Scott-Heron, you’re there for the knowledge. He was nothing short of an epic wordsmith, a deep thinker, an acid wit and a possessor of a simply brilliant mind. Most of the tracks on this album move away from the spoken word poetry of his earlier work, focusing more on songs in that soul style that his voice is so well suited for* . But that doesn’t mean his lyrics here are any less poetic, any less deep.
All the way through, the songs of Pieces of a Man lay bare in the most beautiful (or even sometimes, beautifully ugly) language the anger and the pain of a sharply intelligent and politically engaged black man in Nixon’s America. A song like ‘Home is Where the Hatred Is’ just drips with emotion – it is as despairing as it is angry and that radiates out from it like heat. He also does turn his pen to the good bits of life, such as in the song ‘I Think I’ll Call It a Morning’ and his paean to the restorative qualities of jazz in ‘Lady Day and John Coltrane’ – in these, Scott-Heron takes the joy and the beauty in whatever place he can find it, and the songs serve that same purpose in terms of the album as a whole.
But we’ve not mentioned the big one, the opening track and the piece that Scott-Heron is still most well remembered for, and for good reason. He wrote ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’ sometime before he was 21. So young, but a masterpiece. It’s the only spoken word track on the album, and it’s an amazing work of poetry that shows him to be wise well beyond his years. It’s that anger again, but in the coolest way: he keeps it bubbling just under the surface, but some of those lines hit directly to the heart. I’d be genuinely amazed if this piece has not incited at least one person to pick up a brick in the name of a brighter tomorrow. Despite it being littered with very specific cultural references, the meaning of the poem speaks loud and clear from the first till the last, and resonates just as strongly in 2019 as it ever did. It is a work of pure genius that has already lived well on into the future, and I’m sure it will last much longer into the ages. ‘The revolution will be no re-run, brother; the revolution will be live.’ Good shit.
There will be more Gil Scott-Heron on this blog before the end of the year. An out genius whose talent managed to overcome his own tragedy and speak boldly, intimately and directly to millions. We’re lucky to have strolled in his garden awhile.
* Perhaps his voice suits soul singing so well because the technique he uses is just the slightest bit short of singing. It allowed him to bring the real human emotion of speech into his voice in a manner he’d honed as a poet. Sort of like sung oratory than just songs. But that’s just my idle musings…
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