Small Talk At 125th & Lenox (Flying Dutchman 1970)
Even on arrival, GSH presents something of an anachronism - and yet being out of step is the source of his power, the sign of his integrity. Presenting his verse as casually overheard Harlem breeze-shooting, he welds a soft spoken freejazz intensity to the radical clarity of Greenwich Village Old Left folk-coffeeshop, American demotic poetry. But folk and the Old Left are dead, as are Ayler and Coltrane; and Harlem and poetry may be dying. Opt out disillusion, shaped by shutdown, rules: if politics is the Art of the Possible, the limits of this Possible - pushed way out in the mid 60s - are now contracting. King and the Kennedys are gone, Vietnam never ends, Nixon has been elected to roll Civil Rights back. Committed first and last to the classic rad-lib notion that rigorous thinking and precision journalism can seize the times and talk things better, Small Talk foregrounds the first two stages of Agitate, Educate and Organise. Poetry rather than pop, jazz rather than rock, for small rather than mass audiences, time now rather than recorded, displaced, repeatable. (MS)
Pieces Of A Man (Flying Dutchman 1971)
Small Talk fired volleys of radical invective into multiple, prototypical targets - institutionalised racism, hypocrisy on Capitol Hill, the divisive, Black-Not-Black aspirations of the Afro-American bourgeoisie. The word was right and exact - but its constituency was limited by the context (high-rap monologues over distant drums). Pieces unites GSH with Brian Jackson, and brings in Johnny 'Shaft In Africa' Tate to orchestrate backing tracks that meld soul, jazz and funk, to instantly ratchet Gil's outreach towards the Black American underclass - his rightful audience. "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" is edgy, urgent proto-funk - drawing you into the lyric and a disgusted assault on the Brothers who watch TV while the struggle rages in the streets below. Much of the rest of the album is downbeat - low, mid-tempo Blues framing some of Gil's most trenchant reflections. "Save The Children" insists on political and economic security for future generations, the title track details a personal history of pain and regret that is almost unbearably poignant and "The Prisoner" turns the opening track's direct address into the special pleading of a man crumbling from too many years of ghetto oppression - a harrowing, emotive plateau whose call for communal self-help and awareness remains undiminished. (NW)
Free Will (Flying Dutchman 1972)
High elected politicians had rendered paranoia not merely respectable, but quite literally necessary to understanding a day's headlines ("NIXON BUGS SELF" The New York Post). Reflective soul-jazz dominates the first half of Free Will, the mood flipping swiftly into all-acoustic percussion discussion, Gil rapping out against No Knock and other police crimes against the Black community. Hubert Laws provides this first half with suitably piping, paranoid flute; the set begins hyperactively urgent with "Free Will" itself, groove courtesy Prettie Purdie on drums - when the acoustic personnel take over, the force of the music is greater, but not much. This sense that we're still in the same world, that a music which can quite happily be called 'fusion' can inflect rage and suspicion quite as capably as the most focussed bongo fury, tells all that needs to be told - the Conspiracy Theory of History has never really been alien to any sector of Black cultural production. Fusion was also once a fiercely radical possibility and the point - in "Ain't No New Thing" - where Gil suggests that the next white rock band might as well include Lyndon Johnson for all it means to African Americans, is a sharp rejoinder to the view that musicians like Laws are sell-outs. (MS)
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