Foto: Volker Beinhorn
Critics in the early 1970s called Gil Scott-Heron the most important Black voice since Martin Luther King Jr. and described him as a black Bob Dylan. “His poetry is with much muscle, with stiletto humor, with street talk, much of it justifiably angry and accurate,” the New York Times wrote in 1975, marveling at the angry man from the Bronx. No wonder that decades later Scott-Heron was celebrated as the “Godfather of Rap”. Born in Chicago, the musician, poet and pugnacious activist for human rights himself lived for years in the Bronx. Returning to his black roots, he died May 27, 2011, in New York’s urban district Harlem. His legacy includes a great concert Gil Scott-Heron gave with his band at the Schauburg Theater in Bremen on April 18, 1981. The technicians of Radio Bremen were on site and recorded this ecstatic show, which will be released worldwide at the end of June as a DoCD and of course as a download as well.