as part of Fabbrica Europa 2024

Musician and composer Silvia Bolognesi with her double bass offers a solo that dialogues with the voice of Gil Scott-Heron taken from recordings, interviews, declamations, slam poetry. Together with her, the expert and teacher Francesco Martinelli will tell his unique figure through the story of his life.

Gil Scott-Heron was an American poet, musician and activist known for his work as a spoken-word performer in the late1960s and 1970s.
Born in Chicago in 1949, he spent his early childhood in Tennessee before moving to New York and growing up in the Bronx during his high school years. After a year at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, he published his first novel, “The Vulture.”
His father, Gil Heron, was a Jamaican footballer who in the 1950s became the first black man to play for Celtic in Glasgow, Scotland.
He began recording music in 1970 with the live album “Small Talk at 125th & Lenox,” featuring Bob Thiele, co-writer Brian Jackson, Hubert Laws, Bernard Purdie, Charlie Saunders, Eddie Knowles, Ron Carter, and Bert Jones, all jazz musicians. The album included his aggressive diatribe against the white-owned corporate media and middle-class American ignorance of urban problems in songs like “Whitey on the Moon.”
Scott-Heron, well-known for his single “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”, is considered by many to be one of the fathers (both musical and “spiritual”) of hip hop.