Gil Scott-Heron/Brian Jackson
Winter In America

LA RECENSIONE

Under-the-skin sensations. Like glimpsed reflections captured for a moment and returned by a semi-conscious wandering. And pale embers in the dark, speaking of winter, the winter of our discontent, of course, but also the warmth of a sound that gently heats. As if only one match remained that ashes and gusts of wind cannot extinguish.

It must be a piano paired with an electric organ, the rhythm is soul jazz, something luminescent, a kind of almost gospel-like gathering. Even though, if you look closely, we are at the crossroads of all black music. Above all, a harsh voice. An authority that comes from far away.

It comes from an old piano, a gift from the grandmother, one of those who, sew you “the gown of human poetry.” It comes from the sixties: Martin Luther King, the Black Panthers, Mohammed Ali, the first blazing rap of the Last Poets. And it comes, obviously, also from what was once our home.

To understand, just listen to track two. A long start of pure jazz, think Miles, then again the gospel, and, finally, a sort of transcendental moment when, between prayer and absence, something is said first to infinity, then a boiling whirlpool of piano, finally a word whispered in half-voice and that word is Africa.

And anyway, it's not just track two, it's the whole album... Intimate, confidential, melancholic, gathered, with rare and magnificent moments of very subtle groove and almost watercolor-like, the flutes of brave Brian that smell of spring... Moving from almost ancestral moments, the gospel we mentioned, to a very sweet and almost familiar warmth, from the most combative talking blues to the most moving simplicity...

Not to mention that face, beautiful then, but beautiful even until yesterday, as if kneading the clay of reality and dreams, that thing called poetry, served in the end only to mold a tragic face like an ancient mask.

Regarding the chronicles, the dependencies you denounced and in which you also fell, it doesn't matter Gil. Is there perhaps anyone up to their own words?