Brian Jackson, Gil Scott-Heron - Winter in America
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Music CD Cover
Artist: Brian Jackson, Gil Scott-HeronEdition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 1998-04-07
Music Label: Tvt
Soundtracks:
- Peace Go With You, Brother
- Rivers Of My Fathers
- A Very Presious Time
- Back Home
- The Bottle
- Song For Bobby Smith
- Your Daddy Loves You
- H20gate Blues
- Pease Go With You, Brother
- Winter In America
- Song For Bobby Smith
- Your Daddy Loves You
- The Bottle/Guan Guanco
Free Music Notes for Winter in America
Free Music Review: "Recognition don't come cheap anymore..."
Hit: 5 Stars
This is a bleak, cynical, scared cry for help, a document of one of the strangest and most deeply unsettling periods in American history. Released in 1974, after Vietnam, Watergate, economic decay, and agonizing racial tensions had effectively strangled the optimism of the 60s, Winter In America is a bleakly poetic masterpiece. Heron's lyrics reveal the fears, nightmares, and tentative hopes of a wounded decade with bottomless poignancy, while Brian Jackson's minimalist soul-jazz backing is as ethereal as it is tense. The result is brilliantly conceived, flawlessly executed, endlessly evocative album.
One of Winter In America's most impressive aspects is that despite its timely themes, it has aged incredibly well. Heron's musings are, for the most part, universal. And even when they refer to specific incidents, the man's emotion still resonates. Meanwhile, Jackson's soulful explorations sound just lain wonderful, no matter what decade you were born in.
In other words, this album is stuffed with great songs. "Peace Go With You Brother" (which is briefly reprised at the end) is a mournful cry for black unity, while "Song For Bobby Smith" and "Your Daddy Loves You" are timeless odes to innocence and the healing power of love (and they're not even remotely sappy!). "A Very Precious Time" is a gorgeous, almost otherworldly tale of nostalgia, while "Rivers Of My Fathers" is a dreamy soul-jazz epic. "Back Home" is slightly more upbeat, and reinforced by a swirling rush of melody. "The Bottle" is a stirring anti-alcoholism anthem, set to a bare-bones jazz funk melody. "H20 Gate Blues" is perhaps the album's angriest and most spine-tingling moment: over a raw, minimal backing, Heron bemoans the fate of post-Nixon America, hurling poisoned darts at corrupt politicians, greedy business men, and apathetic citizens with equal parts black hearted humor, poetic virtuosity, and sheer outrage.
This, my friends, is one of the great unheralded albums of the 70s. You really oughtta get it.
Winter in America Poster
In the early 1970s Gil Scott-Heron's tough-talking jazz-rock came across like a slap in the face, fiercely filling the Establishment in on issues ranging from substance abuse to the poverty and desperation raging through the black community. Winter in America was his breakthrough, with pianist Brian Jackson's dense arrangements matching the words blow for blow on the uncompromising title track (actually a bonus cut), the stinging "H20gate Blues," and the grooving anti-alcohol warning of "The Bottle"--"Don't you think it's a crime," Scott-Heron riffs, "the way time after time, people hit the bottle?" Some of Jackson's music may now sound a bit dated, but the years have done little to dull what writer Nathan George called Scott-Heron's "uncomfortable truths." --Michael RubyJazz Music CDs
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