Already a subscriber? Log in
Yet, for all his righteous talk of black self-empowerment, Scott-Heron steered clear of party politics and the wilder aspects of Afro-centric militancy. His songs, with their witty verbal thrusts and parries, showed an elegant control of language and a hymnal, incantatory quality that shone bright on his magnificent last album, ‘I’m New Here’, released in 2010 a year before he died. Scott-Heron’s croaky, nicotine-thick voice and death-haunted lyrics showed that rap had not, after all, become the degraded soundtrack to Hennessy brandy adverts and Nike trainers. At the age of 60, he remained a master of the word — ‘lyrically active’, as they say in Jamaica — and church oratory-style improvisation.
His life, as he relates it in this posthumous memoir, The Last Holiday, has the savour of an old blues ballad. In 1960, following his grandmother’s death, Scott-Heron went to live in the Bronx, where jazz proved to be a revelation. Excited, he began to improvise Coltrane and Parker riffs on the school’s Steinway piano but, bizarrely, was given a lead role in the end-of-term production of The Mikado (neither Gilbert nor Sullivan had ‘a fan club in the ghetto’, Scott-Heron notes dryly). Meanwhile his father, a Jamaican-born professional sportsman, was offered a contract to play football with Celtic in Glasgow. Scotland was not so alien a destination for his father. ‘He was, after all, already a citizen of the Commonwealth.’
After attending Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, Scott-Heron hit the New York streets as a hustler and would-be author, publishing a noirish novel, The Vulture, in 1969. The novel is haunted by Martin Luther King’s assassination the previous year. Lyndon Johnson-era America, to Scott-Heron, seemed to be a murky underworld where criminals were in cahoots with politicians, and where segregationists could run for the White House on the ‘anti-nigra’ ticket. The Last Holiday offers, among other things, a James Ellroy-like cast of Ku Klux Klan mayors, redneck presidential aides and Fed-grey surveillance operatives, whose amorality contrasts with Martin Luther King’s moral sobriety.
The book’s first half, where Scott-Heron recounts his Tennessee childhood, is fascinating. Like all the best jazzmen, Gil had leaned to keep rhythm in church, and was taught to play hymns on the piano by a local Baptist. Later, Scott-Heron’s first album, Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, would hint at a melancholic, minor-key sound that mirrored the Revivalist religiosity of black America and the belief that ‘jazz is America musically’.
Parts of The Last Holiday, unfortunately, read like a preliminary sketch to be coloured in later: Scott-Heron did not live to make the textual alterations he may have wanted. Yet, for all its occasional flaws, this is a marvellous documentary of black America and life lived in the raw.
Because you read about biography
Latest
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in