Gil Scott-Heron - Pieces of a Man (BGP Records/Flying Dutchman Reissue Vinyl LP)

Gil Scott-Heron - Pieces of a Man | Vinyl LP - BGP Records / Flying Dutchman Reissue (HIQLP 007, gatefold, GZ Media pressing)

• Scott-Heron’s debut studio album, recorded over two days at RCA Studios in New York in April 1971, produced by Bob Thiele and featuring Ron Carter, Bernard Purdie, Hubert Laws and Brian Jackson.
• Contains the studio version of “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”, alongside “Home Is Where the Hatred Is”, “Lady Day and John Coltrane” and eight other tracks that set the template for everything Scott-Heron did afterwards. 
• BGP/Ace Records reissue from the Flying Dutchman masters, mastered by Nick Robbins at Sound Mastering, pressed at GZ Media. Gatefold sleeve.

Gil Scott-Heron was twenty-one years old when Bob Thiele signed him to Flying Dutchman. He had already published a novel and a book of poetry. His first album, Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, was a live set of spoken word pieces with percussion. Pieces of a Man is where the songs arrived. The shift was partly Brian Jackson’s doing. Jackson played piano and electric piano on every track and co-wrote seven of the eleven pieces, and his musicality pushed Scott-Heron from poet-with-a-band to something harder to categorise. The backing is first-call New York session work: Ron Carter on bass, Bernard “Pretty” Purdie on drums, Hubert Laws on flute and saxophone, Burt Jones on electric guitar. Johnny Pate conducted the string and horn arrangements. Thiele, who had produced Coltrane and knew exactly how much room to give a musician, tracked the whole thing in two days at RCA Studios.

The album opens with “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”, a song so widely quoted that its actual musical setting gets overlooked. It’s tighter and more arranged than the spoken-word version on the debut, with Purdie’s drums and Carter’s bass locking underneath Scott-Heron’s vocal. “Save the Children” and “Lady Day and John Coltrane” follow. “Home Is Where the Hatred Is”, later covered by Esther Phillips, closes out Side A. The second half is longer and more reflective: the title track, “A Sign of the Ages”, and the eight-and-a-half-minute “The Prisoner” that ends the record. The writing moves between social commentary and interior life without signposting the transitions, which is partly why the album has outlasted most of the political music that came after it. This is BGP’s reissue from the original Flying Dutchman tapes, mastered by Nick Robbins and pressed at GZ Media in gatefold sleeve.