356: Winter in America, by Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson

Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson (USA)
Winter in America (1974)
9 tracks, 45 minutes
YouTube ∙ iTunes

After covering Gil Scott-Heron’s debut studio album Pieces of a Man in August, I knew I couldn’t leave it at that. It was difficult to choose between this one and his 1981 album Reflections – the latter includes the brilliant tracks ‘Is That Jazz?’, ‘“B” Movie’, ‘Gun’ and the cover of Bill Withers’ ‘Grandma’s Hands’. I went with Winter in America in the end because it’s a great example of the collaboration between Scott-Heron and flautist/pianist Brian Jackson. Although the music is still the funk and soul that fits Scott-Heron’s voice so well, Jackson also brings a big jazz influence – you can hear Miles heavy in Jackson’s arrangements, as well as Coltrane and other Afrocentric jazz players, which accurately reflects similar themes in Scott-Heron’s poetry on this album. The music on Winter in America is perfectly attuned to the poetry and lyricism being laid down; it’s great in its own right but is never overstated, instead allowing the words to take centre stage. When dealing with such a genius wordsmith as Gil Scott-Heron, that is exactly the correct approach.

I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to see Scott-Heron live, headlining the WOMAD festival in 2010, less than a year before he died. He was obviously ill at the time, but his performance was out of this world. His voice was croaky and weak (as can be heard on his last album We’re New Here) but his words and his energy were as strong as ever. If my memory serves me correctly – and the more I think about it, the less I’m sure, but it’s the memory I have and I hold it dear anyway – the highlight of the night was a medley of ‘The Bottle’ and ‘The Other Side’ that he played pretty much solo on vocals and keys. It was a sight to behold. The words were so dear and personal and passionate, full of grief and pain and regret and sung as if it was being dredged up from the very depths of his soul. It was stunning and left us all gaping in awe. Hearing ‘The Bottle’ in the context of this album is maybe not as harrowing as that performance but it’s still a masterpiece of insight, addressing the problems of alcoholism and drug addiction both within his own life and from the outside as a member of the community bearing the brunt of the effects. It’s a song that requires a huge amount of introspection that is handled with dignity and clarity without losing any of its raw emotional power.

Winter in America also shows a slightly softer side to Scott-Heron than some of his other albums, with a few really sweet songs such as ‘A Very Precious Time’, ‘Song for Bobby Smith’ and ‘Your Daddy Loves You’ showing his sentimental side, especially clear when his soulful voice is backed only by a jazzy electric piano. My favourite track off the album, though, is ‘H²Ogate Blues’. It’s an extended spoken word poem complete with a sparse but groovy blues accompaniment and a vocal audience of the band themselves. Although Scott-Heron speaks his part, it syncs up so perfectly with the blues changes in a really satisfying way, somehow even when he falters and goes back to the beginning of a line. It also does a really good job of making a bitter political subject funny without losing any of its impact. It’s about the biggest scandal of the day (“If H²O is still water and G-A-T-E is still gate, what we’re getting ready to deal on is the Watergate Blues”), but it’s still quite depressing how much the themes cut across 45 years and an Atlantic Ocean, even if some of the more specific references are lost on those of us who weren’t around at the time.

Gil Scott-Heron had many personal flaws, but as an artist he was flawless. Every word he spoke or sang was the best possible one for the situation, articulating each of his thoughts in the most impactful and entertaining ways. If history is just, he will be remembered not just as a wonderful poet and singer, but as one of the greatest thinkers of his generation. Much like a West African griot, the things he said are a history in and of themselves, telling the story of the lives and politics of Black people in the US all through his lifetime. His works are treasures and need to be regarded as such – especially seeing as how relevant they still are today.

307: Back to Black, by Amy Winehouse

Amy Winehouse (United Kingdom)
Back to Black (2006)
11 tracks, 35 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Nowadays, it’s easy to remember Amy Winehouse as a caricature of herself. Fame was not kind to her and her experiences with hard drugs and alcohol turned her into a tragic figure of ridicule, ruined her ability to make music live or on record with any consistency, destroyed her health and eventually led to her all-too-young death at 27. For many, this ending was not a surprise.

What a disservice that legacy is to such an amazing talent. Listening to Back to Black for the first time in years, it really brings home just how special Amy Winehouse was – this is how she deserves to be remembered.

When she started to get noticed with her debut album Frank in 2003, she was a revelation. Here was a teenage jazz singer making music in the tradition of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, but doing so in a way that was submerged in every way in the modern, inner-city London of her upbringing. Her voice was simply astounding, and absolutely oozed talent. Every note was struck with the utmost class and the sheer fun of it all was palpable in every syllable. The blend of jazz, soul and hip-hop beats was an unusual combination to get popular attention, but her fame slowly spread, and she became known as one to watch for the future.

Then, three years later, Back to Black came out and everything exploded. Suddenly Amy Winehouse was the biggest singer in the world. The jazz of Frank was scaled back in favour of the soul and R’n’B sound, but it suited her just as well. Although only three years had passed, her sound was much more mature, while her lyrics were just as naïve. The combination is a super effective one, and, as before, it is that voice that turns it from good music to magic. She delivers every single line with the exact weight and inflection to give it maximum impact, no matter what emotion she conveys. She can pour her heart out to the point where she sounds near tears, to singing with laughter in her voice; she is sultry, jeering, arrogant, sweet, pleading, satisfied, all of them perfectly painted with the subtlest of changes in her voice. There are so many top-notch songs on the album too, it’s packed with them – ‘Rehab’, ‘You Know I’m No Good’, ‘Back to Black’, ‘Me and Mr Jones’, ‘Tears Dry on Their Own’, and the deluxe edition also included brilliant covers of the Zutons’ ‘Valerie’ and Toots and the Maytals’ ‘Monkey Man’. Simply fantastic.

The album was a worldwide hit. She got number ones in 17 countries. It was in the Top 200 album in the UK yearly charts for 11 years, and is the 13th best-selling album in the UK ever. And just listen to it – it’s clearly deserved. Back to Black not only secured Amy Winehouse’s position in music history, but also launched the careers of many artists – the pop music of today would not sound the same if it was not for Amy Winehouse.

This is how she deserves to be remembered. A masterful singer, a revolutionary artist and a supreme talent. A young woman with so much potential, gone too soon. Listen to Back to Black, listen to Frank and remember Amy Winehouse for the amazing art she produced, not the tabloid-fuelled demonisation of her illness.

295: The Rough Guide to Ray Charles: The Atlantic Years, by Ray Charles

Ray Charles (USA)
The Rough Guide to Ray Charles: The Atlantic Years (2017)
23 tracks, 69 minutes
Spotify playlist

During his time signed for Atlantic Records – from 1952 to 1959 – Ray Charles blossomed from a promising jazz and blues singer and pianist to a hero of R’n’B and arguably the inventor of soul music.

As with so many releases in the Rough Guide series (as we’ve covered here and here), this is just a stellar collection. Full marks to compiler (and top-tier music journalist) Nigel Williamson for putting it together, but one has to imagine that this was one of the easier Rough Guides to put together – by focussing on Charles’ eight-year stint at Atlantic, there’s not too much you can do to go astray. It was an incredibly exciting and fertile time for Charles’ music.

In fact, considering his long career, this compilation still manages to feature almost all of his biggest hits. The only two that would be missing would be ‘Hit the Road, Jack’ and ‘Unchain My Heart’, which were both made slightly later, for different labels. That this is a Rough Guide and not a ‘best of’ actually works in its favour, featuring tracks that would not usually get a look in otherwise. Although it only looks at a relatively short period, we get to hear how Charles explored his musical influences, maturing them into his own style and ultimately starting whole movements. We hear him experimenting with his sound, too: in small-band mode with tracks such as ‘What’d I Say?’, ‘Mess Around’ and ‘I Got a Woman’; with a big band for ‘Hallelujah I Love Her So’ and ‘Let the Good Times Roll’; and eventually playing with a full-scale string and wind orchestra like ‘Georgia on My Mind’ and ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’. Nor are these ensembles used ‘just because’; instead, they serve only to heighten whatever emotion is being put across, from the rocking and rollicking piano-based small band stuff to the sentimental orchestral repertoire.

This compilation is so enjoyable and encompasses such a range of styles and approaches despite covering only a few years of Charles’ career that it is hard to argue the assertation that these ‘Atlantic Years’ were also Charles’ musical golden years. If you’re looking for an all-purpose, one-disc set of Ray Charles, you could do a lot worse than this album.

264: Released, by Nina Simone

Nina Simone (USA)
Released (1996)
21 tracks, 70 minutes
Spotify playlist

It’s hard to really call this compilation a ‘greatest hits’ disc, if even just for the fact that it doesn’t contain some of her greatest hits. Its lack of ‘Feeling Good’, ‘Sinnerman’, ‘Mississippi Goddam’, ‘To Be Young, Gifted and Black’, and the original studio versions of ‘I Ain’t Got No (I Got Life)’ and ‘I Loves You Porgy’ basically disqualify it from such a label. Which just goes to show the profundity of Nina Simone’s performing and composing genius that this collection of not-even-greatest hits is so deeply soul-touching on many different levels.

Released is quite a focussed compilation, with 16 out of the 21 tracks being taken from three album between 1967 and 1968, Nina Simone Sings the Blues, Silk & Soul and ’Nuff Said!, and it works as proof to just how fruitful that period of Simone’s career was. As well as passing through a number of different styles in these tracks – primarily blues, soul and showtunes with elements of gospel, jazz and folk too – they also show the width of her emotional range. Just in the space of these 21 tracks in this collection, Simone comes across as feisty, funny, deadly angry, bitter, soft, seductive, bereft, joyful, pensive and heavily political. She takes you across the spectrum of human emotion and every one of them is delivered in an entirely sincere manner.

For me, there’s none that captures this more than the song ‘Why (The King of Love is Dead)’. It’s a lament for Martin Luther King, powerful, despairing and agonised yet celebratory of this great man. This recording was made live, during a performance at Westbury Music Fair on 7th April 1968 – just three days after Dr King was assassinated. The song was written by bassist Gene Taylor and then taught to the band in just one day, and it’s one of the rawest, saddest songs I know. Truly heart-wrenching. It’s such a simple piece too, a slow, gospel blues with all the instruments just quietly doing their thing, no flashiness, but it is so intense. Whenever I hear it, I have to stop – this is not background music – and it makes me teary every single time without fail. I can only imagine how it must have felt to be there on the day. I am sure that the audience must have been in floods. Although Simone would play it at future shows, the group never gave it a studio recording, because it simply didn’t need one. This performance was its perfect rendition, and must surely be close to a perfect song.

⁂

Can we also just take a small moment to acknowledge what a mean piano player Nina Simone was?! People focus on her voice, and rightfully so, but what she created with her fingers contained as much mastery as her vocal cords. She was classically-trained but was just as comfortable playing dirty, barrelhouse blues or righteous gospel too, and each in such an effortless manner to make it seem completely natural, as if the music was radiating from her, and manifesting in the vibration of the piano strings. The one that stood out particularly in this listen through was ‘Nobody’s Fault But Mine’, her rendition of Blind Willie Johnson’s holy blues. It’s just Simone on voice and piano, and those keys are so forthright. This is the blues, and she ain’t here to mess around. Her fingers introduce the subtlest little ornaments to the piano’s accompaniment and her classical background seems to inform the shape it takes, but at the same time it is 100% blues. Listening to this particular recording, I am sure it must have been a huge influence on Diamanda Galás; her playing has exactly the same darkly beautiful but no-nonsense feel.

Even though Released is a compilation album, I listen to it like I read a favourite book: maybe I’ll dip in occasionally, picking out the best bits and feeling their various feels, but listening to it all the way through provides its own joy, and I find something else to fall in love with on every go around. What an amazing musician Nina Simone was. And this isn’t even her greatest hits…

236: Pieces of a Man, by Gil Scott-Heron

Gil Scott-Heron (USA)
Pieces of a Man (1971)
11 tracks, 48 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

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…