1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 311. Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson – Winter In America (1974)
I think I was probably in the right kind of mood for hearing this album, which is fortunate. It’s very laid back and stripped-back jazz or jazz-funk fusion with Jackson, and sometimes Scott-Heron, playing mainly electric piano as the spine of the track (although The Bottle has a very nice flute backing from Jackson).
Lyrically, the tracks speak to the experience of, specifically, the African-American, less specifically to the experience of early Seventies USA, and beyond that, to the universal human experience. They touch on social matters such as alcoholism in The Bottle (“living in the bottle”) or broken homes (Your Daddy Still Loves You) but also on seeking and finding a place to belong (Rivers Of My Fathers), and on love (Very Precious Time, Song For Bobby Smith).
For me, the stand-out track is probably H2Ogate Blues (H2O = Water, get it?). Here, Scott-Heron returns to his roots as a beat poet, delivering a spoken word piece (that feels like a prototype for rap) over, not really blues as such, maybe a blues-jazz fusion. But it’s not only delicious poetry, showing how the scansion and rhythm of words can be musical in and of itself, it’s also worryingly relevant today. “The government you have elected is inoperative” Scott-Heron states at the start in imitation of a recorded answerphone message.
Although much of it is specific to Nixon, Watergate, and wars in Asia, there’s much that is just as relevant:
“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?
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?
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”
The track ends with the repetition of “Four more years of *this*?”
How things have changed in the past fifty years, eh?
It's looking like Europe in '38
Did they move to stop Hitler before it was too late?
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?
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”
The track ends with the repetition of “Four more years of *this*?”
How things have changed in the past fifty years, eh?
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