A TALE OF THE UNEXPECTED

'WHEN I go out on stage, I don't know what I'm going to play. So now, I don't know what I'm going to play two weeks from now." From most musicians, that's a stock answer. Not from Gil Scott-Heron. He genuinely is promising improvisation not a change of shirt. He means it when he says: "I might play the whole set backwards."
So Dublin can't expect many signposts to his mystery tour when Gil Scott Heron makes his Irish debut at the Olympia on August 6th. He may be one of the many shadowy presences who hovered over the birth of rap but Gil Scott-Heron isn't a rap replicant.
If he's wary of describing his own music, he has real reasons for resistance. In his recent live double CD, Tales of Gil Scott Heron, he justifiably complains of the bafflement he can cause, figuring that record shops regularly consign his discs to the "Miscellaneous" section.
Miscellaneous might mean Any Other Business but it shouldn't mean Any Other Music. It isn't quite jazz (if you think that's only Benny Goodman and Wynton Marsalis) and it isn't quite rap either (if you believe that must always consist of sampled sounds) but then Gil Scott-Heron started in an earlier era when jazz and the spoken - or declamatory word - weren't supposed to inhabit different and distant neighbourhoods.
When they got here - and his distribution was patchy - Scott-Heron's records on Arista combined street-funk with bitter political words. Indeed as Ronald Reagan took his oath of office to a disco soundtrack, Gil Scott-Heron was one of the very few black American artists holding out against unadulterated hedonism.
He could always shape a winning slogan. 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised' was his song but he got his greatest Transatlantic mileage out of 'B-Movie', his caustic attack on Ronald Reagan's politics of fraudulent nostalgia.
But that was then and we've now moved onto the Clinton circus. Of Reagan and Bush, he now says correctly: "They weren't the only two problems. There were the heads of the problems but they weren't the problems. The problems were the things that twelve years of their leadership have done to the country. I don't suppose you'll be able to clear that up, overnight."
But he can get impatient if he's asked to produce instant manifestos. "I'm a piano player. I play music," he'll insist. "You want to talk about George Bush, then maybe you should talk to Bill Clinton."
He's far more forward talking about jazz. Back in the Sixties, it had especially close connections with black literature. Playwright, Leroi Jones, later Amiri Baraka, doubled as the leading jazz critic. Fellow proto-rappers, The Last Poets, would hymn their jazz heroes while the likes of Charles Mingus and Archie Shepp sometimes set their own musings to music.
Gil Scott-Heron doesn't quite give those dalliances his full endorsement. Of Mingus and Shepp, he says: "I like that too but mostly I like them on their instruments. I don't deal with them as poets. One is a horn player and one was a bass player."
But mention of Mingus gets him enthusing: "Mingus was a genius. His intellectual range, what he knew, did, talked about and dealt with. Maybe that has to do with the fact that I knew Mingus personally. He used to come to sets we used to do at Woodstock and tell us what we were doing and help us a lot. Maybe that has a lot to do with my appreciation of Mingus but I don't like to see anybody else put in the same category as Charlie Mingus as far as intellect and creative attitude."
That background means his performances don't get stuck on the wheels of steel. His forthcoming album, Spirits, available through Acid Jazz, has a track called 'Frankenstein' who symbolises more than one evil for him.
Citing his preference for the stage over the studio, he says: "It's about whether you're a musician or not. You can do everything you want in the studio. Like Frankenstein was created in the studio. Studios are like laboratories where you get to go down and work on the thing for as long as you want to. They're like operating rooms. You can always come out and say 'She's Alive' but it doesn't mean she's alive. It just means she walks around."
Or 'Frankenstein' might concern another matter: who names the names and creates identity. As he reminds me: "We call the monster Frankenstein when actually, it was the doctor's name."
So expect the unexpected. As he acknowledges: "We more enjoy to be reviewed rather than interviewed. I'm coming to Ireland with some people who've been with me for ten or twelve years. Like Larry McDonald on percussion, Ed Brady on guitar and Kim Jordan on the keyboards and Don McGregg on the bass. That's why we're such an excellent live group but do so poorly in the studio.
"Because we know each other so well and communicate so well on stage that we don't have to prepare anything in advance. Like we did this television show a few weeks ago in Baden in Germany and the hardest part of the show was to tell them in advance what we were going to do so they could flash those little signs on the screen."