Stop the Week 26

‘Can you call on Lady Day? Can you call on John Coltrane?
’Cos they’ll, they’ll take your troubles away…’ (Gil Scott-Heron)

Sunday morning in this household, for no compelling reason, is always given over to jazz, but the sad, sad news of Gil Scott-Heron’s death on Friday night in a New York hospital sent me searching for some of the great man’s best music among the serried ranks of old cassette tapes.

Brother Gil

The news of his demise made the chance we were granted to see him last summer in Central Park even more poignant. It was at the tail-end of our once-in-a-lifetime holiday to New York, Ottawa and the Maine coast. We were back in New York, sharing my best friend’s tiny vacated basement apartment with the piles of records he’s trawled from countless visits to thrift shops and the like. It was our last Sunday and we spent the morning in the hallowed space of the Metropolitan Museum.

I kept a close eye on my watch, because I knew that Gil was playing in the park as part of the city’s Summer Fest. My oldest friend and I had already seen Baaba Maal during the first leg of our round trip and I’d missed out on McCoy Tyner, John Coltrane’s former pianist, while we were visiting another old friend in Newport, Rhode Island. So I was keen to get there early in case we were turned away from the concert venue on account of overcrowding.

As usual, I’d imagined the worst-case scenario (although there was a nervous moment when Tilley was asked for some I.D. – not because Gil had gone X-rated, but because of the local liquor laws). We got there far too early and took our fairly uncomfortable seats with a nice central view of the stage. So far the weather had been kind to us, but that afternoon we had a real New York summer afternoon to contend with. It was ‘silly hot’ and airless. We sat and watched the human traffic and we waited. We sat through some self-important support act that went on far too long, all three too busy fanning ourselves even to bother with polite applause.

The Daughter, poor lamb, was getting restless and hungry. She kept protesting that she was all right, but it can’t have been much fun going to one of your first music concerts with your parents. She knew of ‘The Bottle’, his dance-floor hit of the ‘70s, and she knew that we had both seen The Man in Sheffield. I told her, too, about the first, magical, time I’d seen him back in my ‘20s in Brighton: how he ambled on stage, this stick-thin tall black man dressed all in black, and sat down at an electric piano, and how his often hilarious patter would segue into a series of resonant message-songs like ‘We Almost Lost Detroit’ – but I don’t think it convinced her that she was about to see someone as exciting as Adele or Paloma Faith.

When he finally loped onto the stage, carrying a bottle of beer, still stick-thin but grey-haired and grey-bearded now and frankly not looking too well, he was late. He joked about this in his rich deeper-than-ever drawl and everyone forgave him at once, because he always had a way with words that made you feel like he was addressing you personally. Then, as he’d done 30 years before, he sat down alone at the piano and launched into a long, droll monologue that dissolved into the chillingly beautiful ‘Winter In America’.

The band joined him after a while and a little of that special intimacy was lost in the mix. The girls gave up the ghost and sidled off for some food back in our record depository. Common, the Chicago rapmeister, came on for a guest slot and a kind of valedictory for a man who has sometimes been dubbed the ‘Godfather of Rap’.

But, heaven help us, Gil was a lot more than just that. He was a novelist, poet, humorist, musician and above all perhaps a genuine humanitarian. If I’ve got it right, he once asked in a song ‘Whatever happened to the people who gave a damn?/ Or did that just apply to dying in the jungles of Viet Nam?’ Well, Gil gave a damn and, what’s more, he was prepared to do something about it. His death seems like another nail in the coffin of humanity.