Brian Jackson on his upcoming Cork Jazz Festival gigs, and Gil Scott-Heron
Brian Jackson plays at Cork Opera House and Triskel Christchurch for the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival.
Brian Jackson was there when it all started. In the early 1970s, he and his friend, singer and jazz poet Gil Scott-Heron, blazed a trail with a streak of pioneering albums that helped lay the foundations of hip-hop and are today regarded as classic works of soul and jazz-funk. Quietly spoken and off-the-radar in his home near the French Pyrenees, the Brooklyn-born keyboardist and producer has as rich a legacy as any late 20th-century musician.
“It’s amazing. I just never really am able to fathom how that works – I really can’t,” he says of the enduring influence of records such as Pieces Of A Man, which opens with Scott-Heron’s polemical piece, 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised'. “I guess people wouldn’t be so into it if it didn’t have some type of meaning now.”
Jackson will celebrate his achievements and pay tribute to the late Scott-Heron, who passed away in 2011 aged 62, at the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival – alongside a separate commemoration of iconic jazz composer Alice Coltrane at Triskel Arts Centre. He is aware of Cork’s rich history as a centre of jazz, soul, and funk music and is looking forward to making the trip from France, his home since he and his wife left America this summer (to escape many things but, in particular, the gun violence).
“One of my jobs, I consider, is to maintain our legacy and to expand our legacy,” Jackson (72) says of the We Almost Lost Detroit concert he will give at Cork Opera House on Wednesday October 23.
“Hard as it is for me to believe, there are still people who don’t know about Gil Scott-Heron and who don’t know about us and our music, even though they might have heard it. What I try to do now is give a little context. There are a lot people who enjoy hearing how all this music came together and what was going on around those times. And how we came up with these ideas and what we were thinking. In the tradition of the grio [an oral tradition of music and storytelling from Africa], I try to bring context to the message.”
Jackson and Scott-Heron met in the late 1960s at Lincoln University, a historically African-American college in Pennsylvania. There was an immediate creative spark, and in 1971, they released their landmark debut, Pieces of a Man, featuring the soon-to-be famous 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised'.
In the moment Pieces of a Man went largely under the radar – though some reviewers were quick to recognise its genius. In 1974 the NME heralded it as “the sound of the black revolution”. In the decades since, its reputation has continued to grow – in 2004, The Guardian praised the album for its “pioneering mix of politics, protest and proto-rap poetry”.
Pieces of a Man is a snapshot of a nation on the brink. America was in turmoil as civil rights demonstrations were followed by marches against the Vietnam War. It was a febrile era – one that Jackson and Scott-Heron reflected through their music and provocative lyrics, such as ‘Black babies in the womb are shackled and bound/ chained by the caveman who keeps beauty down’ (from 'The Prisoner', the final track on Pieces of a Man).
“We would go to universities that were predominately white. And then we would go to a club or university that was predominately black. We were equally accepted by anyone,” Jackson says.
By the early 1970s, many people felt they were being gaslit by politicians and media, he continues. With opposition growing against Vietnam, the United States was in upheaval. That reality was not reflected in the nighty news bulletins or by politicians and their talking points. But you could hear it in the music Jackson and Scott-Heron made together – in their urgent, idealistic songs that condemned the present and argued that better days were possible.
“What was happening is there were people who saw what was going on and a lot of the time were made to feel they were out of their minds. And here was a group of young men who are about the same age who were saying the same thing. It helped to reassure people – ‘okay, yeah… we’re actually seeing what we see’. We were there for them. We were there for the comfort of them perhaps knowing they were not alone. There were more of us.”
Jackson and Scott-Heron were ultimately optimists – hippies working in a different genre.
“We were all kinds of naive and wide-eyed. It was like the hippy music of the late 1960s and 1970s. Everything was peace and love. Everything was done on a handshake. We’d rather not have handled the business side of the music. And therefore didn’t do it very well. There was all of that. The first album I did, I was 18. I didn’t turn 21 until Winter In America [their second album together, released in 1974]. It took a while to mature. By that time a lot of negative things had happened.”
By “negative things”, he means the gradual splintering of his partnership with Scott-Heron. They stopped writing music together in the late 1970s. Later, Jackson discovered that his name had been removed from the publishing company they founded together, Brouhaha Music, meaning all the royalties were going to Scott-Heron alone. He had been written out of his own story.
“It was pretty messy. There were a lot of handshakes. A lot of things not said, not covered and assumed and all of that,” says Jackson. “There were a lot of people who took advantage of that and moved in on it. It was obvious to anyone who was a record company person that any group that is as united as we were was going to cause problems. There was a lot of effort put in to making sure we were separated. That eventually happened by a number of means. That definitely caused a shift in… the power we had as a duo.”
He tries to be philosophical about the end of the partnership while acknowledging the pain it caused him.
“I was pissed. I was definitely angry – resentful. I had a lot of, ‘why does this have to happen to me?’,” says Jackson. “The funny thing is when I recount these stories to people in the business...you start to realise this is more the norm than the exception.
"At some point, when people asked what happened, I started to say, ‘the usual’. And today, it’s still happening. I try to tell it now as a cautionary tale to some of the younger artists. They’re probably not going to listen and the same thing is going to happen. It’s difficult – the music business is difficult to negotiate. There are very few people who get out of it unscathed.”
They went their separate ways. Jackson took up a day job as a project manager for the IT division of the City of New York. Gil Scott-Heron fell into addiction and ended up in prison at Rikers Island prison on the East River on drug possession charges. A 2010 New Yorker profile was a depressive portrait of the artist as an old man living in near-squalor.
“One day, I turned around, and he had his crack pipe to his lips, and after that, he didn’t bother to leave the room anymore,” wrote the author of his visits to Scott-Heron’s apartment in Harlem. “Sometimes, he would fall asleep in the middle of an interview, and I would excuse myself.”
There were many dark days, and Jackson wished he and Scott-Heron had stayed close and that he could have been there for him.
“I look back and I think, man… There were definitely times when I lamented not being in the business and in the situation that I had been. But then when I look back on Gil… I don’t know what happened. Obviously the wrong type of attention came to him. It was difficult for him. I’m grateful that I had a different experience. But I’m very sad for my friend.”
For all the hurt, their legacy lives on. In that same New Yorker piece, Chuck D, of influential hip-hop group Public Enemy, heralded Scott-Heron as the godfather of rap. “In combining music with the word, from the voice on down, you follow the template he laid out,” said Chuck D. “His rapping is rhythmic... it’s punchy, and all those qualities are still used today.”
The spirit of the music Jackson and Scott-Heron made together was also evoked by megastar rapper Kendrick Lamar, whose 2015 LP To Pimp a Butterfly is steeped in the poetry, jazz and funk that were a signature of Jackson/Scott-Heron collaborations. Lamar went so far as to sampled their song 'Peace Go With You, Brother (As-Salaam-Alaikum)' from Winter in America on his 2011 track 'Poe Mans Dreams (His Vice)'.
“I am certainly a fan of Kendrick Lamar,” says Jackson. “I think he’s a great poet. I appreciate what he’s doing.”
Jackson’s Cork Opera House show will be a tribute to the power of the protest song and reminder that, before Gil Scott-Heron’s tragic decline, he was a musical genius and poetic visionary.
“It’s going to be a celebration,” he says. “A celebration of the music of Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson and, in a wider context, a celebration of the music of that era and protest music and its evolution.”
- Brian Jackson presents We Almost Lost Detroit: The Music of Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson at Cork Opera House, Wednesday October 23.
- He will also join harpist Alina Bzhezhinska and saxophonist Tony Kofi for a tribute to Alice Coltrane titled Celebrating Alice Coltrane at Triskel Arts Centre for two shows, October 24 and October 25
