The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Martin Luther McCoy and Brian Jackson Honor Gil Scott-Heron

In 1969 David Barnes brought Gil Scott-Heron into the Lincoln University music practice room to meet 18-year-old freshman Brian Jackson. Jackson was noodling around on an old upright piano, none of the three had any idea what the universe had in store for them. They came to Lincoln in Pennsylvania following in the footsteps of legends Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall. Barnes, a singer looking for an accompanist, introduced Scott-Heron, a poet and novice songwriter seeking a collaborator, to Jackson, a freshman pianist from Brooklyn working on his chops.

They’d form a band, Black and Blues. Later Scott-Heron and Jackson created an influential soundtrack to the burgeoning progressive political consciousness with their Midnight Band. Over the next decade the two became as close as brothers until they stopped working together and speaking to each other for essentially the rest of Scott-Heron’s life. The singer died in 2011 at the age of 62.

On October 19, Jackson joins vocalist composer Martin Luther "The Real" McCoy onstage at Miner Auditorium with saxophonist Howard Wiley and keyboardist Kev Choice in a tribute to the music of Gil Scott-Heron called "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," the title of Scott-Heron’s most popular work.

“I think the music that Gil and I did in the seventies, I didn't have a clear understanding of that effect,” Jackson told me this summer. He was speaking by phone from his new home in southwest France where his wife is from. “It took me a long time to come to terms with that,” Jackson said.

The music in question, nine albums Jackson arranged, co-wrote, co-produced, and performed on with Gil Scott-Heron from 1971–1980 has not just endured but grown in stature since the time they recorded it. Setting the stage for conscious hip hop and rap poets, Scott-Heron’s incisive Afro-centric social commentary delivered in his sonorous tenor speaking and singing voice became a clarion call of the 70s while Jackson’s lush bluesy Fender Rhodes soundscapes floated the messages into the world. On classic albums such as Pieces of a Man (1971), Winter in America (1974), First Minute of a New Day (1975), and Bridges (1977), the pair created a much imitated, soulful experience in an astoundingly fertile musical era. Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Al Green, Curtis Mayfield, Parliament-Funkadelic, and Joni Mitchell were all in prime creative eras. The Midnight Band added their progressive Black voices to that heady landscape.

Though intimately involved with making their albums Jackson distanced himself from the music after their breakup. Creative differences which initiated the dissolution evolved into legal roadblocks. Jackson went to work for the city of New York supporting his family as a computer programmer. Scott-Heron embarked on an erratic downward trajectory. Much later Jackson understood they had unique alchemy as duo which couldn’t be re-created singularly.

“There's something about the combination of energy that Gil and I brought to music that neither one of us would have ever been able to duplicate on our own simply because it wasn't a part of one or the other,” Jackson said.
Though Scott-Heron’s reputation was based on his incendiary social political commentary, much of his music deals with domestic drama.
The most memorable songs — “A Very Precious Time” and “Your Daddy Loves You” are direct and earnest, not buoyant like Stevie, not alliterative like Simon or Dylan. “Lady Day and John Coltrane” is a groover but not hook filled like Sly or thumping like George Clinton. “Save the Children” and “I Think I Call It Morning,” are smooth but not saccharine. More jazz than pop, more soul than R&B, more indie than mainstream - a kind of emo-soul. There are popular jewels of the repertoire — “The Bottle” a club ready dance classic and the brooding nuclear disaster cautionary tale “We Almost Lost Detroit” — an ear worm which always sounds dramatic and fresh.

The music has a jazz foundation. Both Jackson and Scott-Heron wanted that so Ron Carter was brought in to hold down the bottom on Pieces of a Man, the first record they made together. Carter’s supple bass takes the lead throughout the record, with drummer Bernard Purdie’s distinctive shuffling grooves and Hubert Laws’ swinging flute solos filling the crevices. It was the de facto musical director Jackson’s first professional session. “That was probably the most terrifying experience I have had,” Jackson told me. “Imagine being 18 years old, thrown into that recording studio, everybody waiting for you to perform.”

The veterans made sure it was a rite of passage. They questioned his arrangements, made him defend creative decisions. “They challenged what my intentions were with the music,” Jackson said. “That's part of the tradition. At the end of it I had a new kind of confidence, a new kind of belief in what I was doing.”

A group was formed with drums, percussionists, horns, electric bass, Scott-Heron on piano and vocals, and Jackson on piano, flute, and vocals - the Midnight Band. They became road warriors playing over two hundred dates a year sharing stages with Earth, Wind and Fire, Herbie Hancock and the Headhunters, and Weather Report. In December of 1975 they were the musical guests on Episode Seven, Season One of Saturday Night Live. Richard Pryor hosted.

Things did not end well for Jackson and Scott-Heron. After parting in 1980, they never worked together again. Jackson was denied royalties for songs he co-wrote with Scott-Heron but made music with a variety of artists (Kool and the Gang, Phyllis Hyman, George Benson, Gwen Guthrie, Roy Ayers, and Will Downing) before leaving the business for over 30 years. Scott-Heron continued as a legacy solo act, fading away as drug addiction, incarceration and legal troubles derailed his career.

Over the last decade Jackson has been reclaiming his creative legacy by engaging with the music he brought into the world fifty years ago. It took an attitude adjustment to get here. “There was a time when I thought, well, I don't own enough of it, there's too much contention around it for me to actually wanna go out there and promote it,” Jackson said. But he did play the music and the reactions from strangers in the audience to his wife at home were a revelation.
“I've done shows where afterwards grown men would come up to me and say, “I cried the whole set.” I can't tell you how many times people have said that,” Jackson told me. “It still takes me by surprise, but I realized there is something important about me doing it.”

He has worked with a variety of younger artists who revere the elder statesman craving a direct connection to his art and experiences.
One of those creatives is San Francisco vocalist and composer Martin Luther McCoy, a member of the SFJAZZ Collective for several seasons. McCoy and Jackson have performed together in Europe and briefly toured as the New Midnight Band with McCoy assuming the vocal lead in the band. The experience left both men open to further exploration of the partnership.
“For me, this is one of my OGs and I get a chance to honor him,” McCoy said. “If he doesn't tell these stories and there's no recollection of them, then people will no longer know what the struggle was about, what it felt like, what it tasted like.”

McCoy has become an essential Black popular music historian illuminating rich veins of the culture through performance. “For me, certain works are everlasting for different artists for different reasons,” McCoy said. “Gil Scott because of the proficiency of the wordplay alone is like a master class in songwriting in my mind.”

The performance will feature classics and deep cuts from the Jackson/Scott-Heron songbook, some tunes will be re-imagined and original material from the players will be included as well.
“There may be people who only were familiar with “The Bottle” but boy, does their life change when they've heard more,” McCoy said.

There’s undeniable resonance with this material and the contentious times we live in today. Jackson observes they were just reporting from their world.
“The only thing that we could write about was what we had experienced as young Black, twenty-somethings in America,” Jackson said. “I think we were fairly accurate in describing our feelings, our experience.”

Martin Luther The Real McCoy, Brian Jackson, Howard Wiley and Kev Choice perform "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," a tribute to Gil Scott-Heron, on 10/19. Tickets and more information are available here.

Marcus Crowder is a Northern California based arts journalist. For 17 years he was the theater critic at the Sacramento Bee where he also wrote about jazz, pop, and dance. His work has appeared in Alta Journal, American Theatre, Comstock’s, Sactown, The San Francisco Chronicle, and 7x7.