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MUSIC
Vivid Live: The Music Of Gil Scott-Heron
★★★
Sydney Opera House, May 27
Reviewed by Bernard Zuel

You can see the bones – actually, to be fair, a good bit of the flesh too – of a special show in this tribute to the work of poet/proto-rapper/singer/activist Gil Scott-Heron.

The material is a given, especially in a tight setlist of about a dozen songs from a productive decade beginning in the early ’70s for the late Scott-Heron and his chief collaborator and cowriter, Brian Jackson.

Now 73 but a bald ball of energy and positivity, the rather under-eulogised half of that team, when not shining melodically with his flute, led the show from his Rhodes piano at centre stage, offered vocal counterpoint in Lady Day and John Coltrane, and in Winter In America provided a liquid jazz vocal in the key of acceptance that “an empire must fall” – something which might have given comfort to NSW Blues players who at that very moment were being smacked mightily at the other end of Sydney. His work holds up.

In Home Is Where The Hatred Is, the blend of Stevie Wonder, Norman Whitfield and Latin jazz felt potent; A Prayer For Everybody To Be Free built to a glowing euphoria that overwhelmed the built-in despair; the closing Guerrilla raised the optimism further when realism might have suggested otherwise.

That’s why it was a shame for what clearly were some quality musicians and for these lithe songs that the sonic imbalance regularly crunched guitar and the two extra flautists under an assault of drums and occasionally over-prominent bass, while the dual keys would merge into a wash.

Also mixing the good and less good was rapper/vocalist Yasiin Bey, whose representation of Scott-Heron is not mimicry or even strictly speaking a tribute. His own charisma was convincing, his smoother delivery often soothing rather than inflammatory. Opening the show with The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, a song that is 50 per cent rhythm and flute and 50 per cent tone, gave Bey a chance to set himself in a comfort zone as he crouched over his microphone, before stretching out with Free Will and reminding everyone that he is more than adequate as a singer.

However, his need to refer to the words occasionally on a stand, or at one point his phone, took us out of any idle thoughts of transubstantiation, and despite his obvious enjoyment it wasn’t until the penultimate song of the set, A Prayer For Everybody To Be Free, as he shed sunnies and cap and declared that “freedom is everybody’s job”, that he really asserted a commanding presence.

For him and the show, there is room to grow into this.