Gil Scott-Heron
Diese Musik in meiner Werbung BIOGRAPHYScott-Heron moved with his family to New York City when he was thirteen. While steeping himself in jazz and its traditions, he wrote poetry and completed a novel, "The Vulture", by the time that he was nineteen. He attended prestigious Lincoln University in Oxford, Pennsylvania, where he met Brian Jackson, a student of complementary songwriting talents. They began collaborating with two other students, Eddie Knowles and Charlie Saunders, both of whom played multiple percussion instruments. Scott-Heron wrote, in these years, his second novel, "The Nigger Factory".
Yet it was Scott-Heron’s book of poems, "Small Talk at 125th" and "Lenox", that provided the impetus for him to become a performer. The book became the basis of first live recitations and then his debut album (of the same name; he was not yet twenty-one when he went to the recording studio with Jackson, Knowles, and Saunders to make that LP for Flying Dutchman).
Scott-Heron’s most exciting performance of this time, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised", which appeared on his first record, was reprised on his next effort, Pieces of a Man, which was also done for Flying Dutchman. Free Will, a third Scott-Heron–Jackson collaboration, followed in 1972. It made for a trilogy of works—a collection of agitated yet seamless unions of word, rhythm, and melody—done in two years, and all of which pointed the way for the revolution in music that would be recorded. Scott-Heron’s lead augured hip-hop and rap and, most recently (and widespread), his messages’ crossover to the page: the spoken-word/poetry-slam movement. As an early Seventies pioneer musical activist, and in his poetics and jazz sense, he had only the legendary, short-lived Last Poets as an equal.
Later recorded works by Scott-Heron comprised tracks that were more targeted to specific social and political situations: "Winter in America" (1973) featured "The Bottle", and "From South Africa to South Carolina" (1975) had "Johannesburg", which was his most timely, even prescient hit. He then recorded, for another album, "Bicentennial Blues", which was also quite timely; he followed with more albums in the Eighties and Nineties. One of his subtlest uses of thematic material wedded to musical content, "Is That Jazz?" outlined jazz history but as it has reflected the evolution of black consciousness.
As well, the musicianship on Scott-Heron’s later albums showed a greater fluidity in its use of jazz: Employing the Midnight Band, which he debuted on "The First Minute of a New Day" (1974), raised the level of play in his work.
The musical elements that were identifiable in Scott-Heron’s work from the start—rhythm and blues, soul, funk, and all types of jazz—are actually harder to isolate than they might appear. There are borrowings from all musical traditions in his work, but they never appear for the purpose of allusion. They serve what he has to say. Even the use of dissonance, which was much in vogue by free-jazz players in the Seventies, never seeks to alienate the listener in order to display solidarity with experimentalism. The message that Scott-Heron sends has always been more important than the bottle used to float it. And yet, no matter how urgent the message, about all of Scott-Heron’s work there has been a lyrical calm; he has never abandoned his sense of the beauty that music delivers.
From the beginning, Scott-Heron has had a great ear for the subtleties of rhetoric and logic as well as rhyme. He has understood from his youth how, if language is a tool that the ruling class uses to oppress, it can equally be used by the oppressed to liberate themselves. Given how the methods and forms that Scott-Heron pioneered have mutated, it’s arguable that his contribution to literature is greater than it is to music.