'Winter In America' - a tribute

I first became aware of Gil Scott-Heron around the early to mid-nineties, while I was at university, although it was a while till I actually got where he was coming from. He was often listed on posters around town as playing at something like that year's Jazz Bop or some festival or other. Regrettably, I never did see him live. 

His recorded music, however, became something very special indeed. A combination of deeply soulful and funky tunes, with a killer voice and a unique ability to tell the truth in song - in ways that few others ever came close to matching. His final album came out last year (listen to it in full here) and although he was clearly sounding more frayed than in his earlier years, it was glorious to hear him producing something new and equally up to standard as the rest of his work. Turned out to be his swansong.

I now never will get the chance to see him live, but when I heard that he had died, I immediately wanted to pay some form of tribute to the man. The above video is the result. The audio track is taken from an audience recording of an NYC show from '88, shoved out into the public domain and left on archive.org. The images are largely a combination of Creative Commons images sourced from Flickr and scraps of cutting-room-floor footage from the BBC's 'Digital Revolution' doc, plus a few other bits to pad it out.

The video is probably a little scrappy, both in audio quality and in the state of the editing (both feel free to diss it in the comments), but I hope that it can make for a slight contribution to the range of other content on YouTube that serves to give those that never listened to the man a chance to do so. I also hope that for those that know him or his work well, they'll feel that this humble clip is a worthy tribute, however slight.

RIP Gil.

'My Blackberry Is Not Working!' (WN0035)

A little bit of comedy here - BBC stalwarts Ronnie Corbett and Harry Enfield banging on about tech. The sketch is reminiscent of a different era, but the subject material is bang up to date.

Wordplay at its best!

New video: The Zamora - 'Harry J (Gunslinger)'

I get so easily distracted these days. There I was reading 'Wikinomics' whilst taking a break from working on a new website, when I came across the BBC's project for opening up its archive to mashups. Excited by the possibility, I put the book down and went to the Net to find out about it, only to discover that it had been a pilot project which doesn't seem to have been touched since 2006. A shame really, but it did lead me on to the BFI's site, where you can also make use of their archives.

A fair treasure trove I did find. Some dusty old reels from the silent era - a few of which were actually made in Hove! Anyway, grabbed myself a few and set to work on my own mash up.

Now, I've got material in mind for video projects for Control K and Shelf Life, so I was going to have to pull out something else that I actually had use of. Turned out that one of the tracks that was written by The Zamora, my old band from Brighton that gave me an early taste of life under media exposure (for all of a week or two), fitted perfectly.

'Harry J (Gunslinger)' was, in a few opinions, the best song that we did together. It was also the track that was most collaborative and so much more of a group effort than some musicians playing along to someone else's song.

I managed to knock the video together in a couple of evenings before Christmas. Better get back on with the website now...