Posted: 29 May 2011, 3:20pmSubject: RIP Gil Scott-Heron
US musician and poet Gil Scott-Heron dies at 62
The cause of his death is not clear, but he is believed to have become ill after returning from a visit to Europe.
Scott-Heron's material spanned soul, jazz, blues and the spoken word. His 1970s work heavily influenced the US hip-hop and rap scenes.
His work had a strong political element - one of his most famous pieces was The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.
Scott-Heron's friend Doris Nolan said the musician had died at St Luke's Hospital on Friday afternoon.
"We're all sort of shattered," she told the Associated Press.
Scott-Heron was born in Chicago in 1949 - the son of former football player in Britain - and grew up in Tennessee before moving to New York.
He had a long-running song-writing partnership with pianist and flautist Brian Jackson, who he met at Lincoln University.
The pioneering style he developed while working with Jackson, mixing minimalist percussion with poetry, meant Scott-Heron was often described as the godfather of rap.
But the artist himself rejected this title.
"If there was any individual initiative that I was responsible for it might have been that there was music in certain poems of mine, with complete progression and repeating 'hooks', which made them more like songs than just recitations with percussion," Scott-Heron wrote in the introduction to his 1990 Now and Then collection of poems.
More of a poet than anything else IMO but an amazing figure no doubt.
The cause of his death is not clear, but he is believed to have become ill after returning from a visit to Europe.
Scott-Heron's material spanned soul, jazz, blues and the spoken word. His 1970s work heavily influenced the US hip-hop and rap scenes.
His work had a strong political element - one of his most famous pieces was The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.
Scott-Heron's friend Doris Nolan said the musician had died at St Luke's Hospital on Friday afternoon.
"We're all sort of shattered," she told the Associated Press.
Scott-Heron was born in Chicago in 1949 - the son of former football player in Britain - and grew up in Tennessee before moving to New York.
He had a long-running song-writing partnership with pianist and flautist Brian Jackson, who he met at Lincoln University.
The pioneering style he developed while working with Jackson, mixing minimalist percussion with poetry, meant Scott-Heron was often described as the godfather of rap.
But the artist himself rejected this title.
"If there was any individual initiative that I was responsible for it might have been that there was music in certain poems of mine, with complete progression and repeating 'hooks', which made them more like songs than just recitations with percussion," Scott-Heron wrote in the introduction to his 1990 Now and Then collection of poems.
More of a poet than anything else IMO but an amazing figure no doubt.
