Between 1971 and 1980, the composer and musician Brian Jackson collaborated with Gil Scott Heron on nine albums: two as part of the band and seven others as the primary creator and producer. When Jackson moved on, he went to work for the New York City municipal government as an IT specialist and collaborated with Roy Ayers, Kool and the Gang, and Gwen Guthrie, among others. Jackson and Scott Heron’s compositions and performances served as the musical conscience of the 1970s when the post-Civil Rights era gave way to American proxy wars and capitalist economic crises.  Songs like”Winter in America” and “The Bottle” captured this dystopia well. But Jackson also composed music like “(What’s the World) Johannesburg,” making connections to struggles elsewhere in the Black diaspora, off the 1975 album “From South Africa to South Carolina.”

For the music critic Robert Christgau, “… (t)his is what happened to Pharoah Sanders and I say yeah. The danceability of Jackson’s music reifies the tribal aspirations of new-thing avant-gardism just as Scott-Heron’s talent for modest analysis brings all that cosmic politicking down to earth. Also, I’m really getting to like Scott-Heron’s singing–his instrument will never equal Leon Thomas’s or Pharoah’s, but that’s not what it’s about.”

Jackson once told a Montreal radio station about how he and Scott Heron met: “He had this way with words, and I thought, ‘People have to hear this stuff.’ What I had to offer was the music, and I figured if we can take his words and make this tribal knowledge rhythmic and musical, we can draw people to hear it.” They broke up in 1980 over creative and other differences. Later, Jackson realized he was not being paid royalties on their joint projects. They had also chosen different paths. In 2010, a music website described the physical contrasts between them:

Today, Gil and Brian’s contrasting physical demeanour reflects the very different paths they’ve travelled since the split. Gil, who’s battled with chronic cocaine addiction, creative stalemate and two stretches in jail, exudes a weathered disposition. His frame is cigarette-thin, his hair and beard a charcoal-gray. He’s been round the block so often, he’s lapped most of his contemporaries. Brian’s physique is fuller, healthier and he sports shoulder-length dreadlocks. Like Gil, he’s also cultivated a goatee. But if it wasn’t for the few wisps of silver in Brian’s beard, he’d look half Gil’s age.

Along with Raquel Cepeda (journalist and director of “Bling, A Planet Rock”), DJ Laylo (DJ and filmmaker), Eddie ‘Stats’ Houghton (a writer for The Fader), Wills Glasspiegel (artist manager and radio producer) and Masauko Chipembere (musician and composer), Jackson will join a discussion at The New School about music and politics – “When It Hits You, You Feel No Pain” – on Wednesday, April 27 between 6 and 8 pm.  The event will be held at the Lang Cafe at 65 West 11th Street.

Boima Tucker, himself a DJ and a graduate student at The New School and one of the organizers, explains the rationale for the panel: “Music has the power to move people’s bodies, but does it have the power to move their bodies into action? Music and politics are often intimate partners in society, whether an artist consciously connects them. What role does music play in the politics of today’s world? What is the responsibility of artists as public figures to be politically conscious? Can the two stand on their own, or are they forever linked? We will explore some of these questions at this panel as part of GPIA’s Media and Culture Concentration Conversations series.”

The panel will be moderated by Megan Bandle, the organizer behind the South Africa House Initiative in Brooklyn.