Gil Scott-Heron’s final album, 2010’s I’m New Here, was a moving but unfinished statement from an important but overlooked artist. By the mid-’00s, the writer, poet, and singer had a long and storied career behind him, with more than a dozen albums of word-dense soul and R&B, two novels, and one phrase, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” taken from his song of the same name, that echoed through culture and became more famous than he would ever be. He was a crucial voice of protest who deeply influenced black music across genres—hip-hop especially—but he hadn’t done much in a while. His last LP had been released more than a decade earlier. In the years between, he’d had drug problems, which led to health problems and legal problems, including an extended stretch incarcerated at Riker’s Island. A lot of people had forgotten about Scott-Heron, but Richard Russell, who founded the label XL, remembered, and he got in touch.
Scott-Heron wasn’t in a place where he could offer much creative input, but Russell persuaded him to make a record, a little at a time, and he built I’m New Here from fragments. In a New Yorker profile of Scott-Heron that ran six months after the album’s release, the writer and singer, then 61, said that he didn’t think of the album as his creation. “This is Richard’s CD,” he told Alec Wilkinson. “My only knowledge when I got to the studio was how he seemed to have wanted this for a long time. You’re in a position to have somebody do something that they really want to do, and it was not something that would hurt me or damage me—why not? All the dreams you show up in are not your own.”
A decade later, the songs, poems, and conversational snippets Scott-Heron recorded with Russell are showing up in another dream, this one imagined by Chicago drummer and producer Makaya McCraven. It’s the second album-length reworking of the I’m New Here material, following Jamie xx’s 2011 collection We’re New Here, but this one feels definitive. Though Jamie xx assembled a fantastic record, one thick with hypnotic samples and irresistible beats, We’re New Again brings us closer to Scott-Heron’s world.
Working with his regular circle of collaborators, many of whom have made highly regarded albums of their own in recent years (Jeff Parker on guitar, Brandee Younger on harp, Junius Paul on bass, Ben Lamar Gay on instruments and percussion), McCraven brings Scott-Heron’s work down to earth and situates it in a milieu the elder artist would have recognized. With arrangements that move between dirty blues, angelic spiritual jazz, and free-form drumming, McCraven has created a kind of survey of 20th-century black music that doesn’t draw undue attention to itself, one in which every piece fits together.