For Gil, the metaphor of “Winter in America” was something he’d been thinking about since he watched the president of the United States assassinated on television when he was 14 years old. “The day that John Kennedy was killed is the day I’ve pinpointed as the day that started the Winter in America,” Gil told Mojo magazine in 2003. “The deaths of Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King were all part of that.”

Ten years later, America hadn’t changed so much as it continued to buckle. Richard Nixon (one of Gil’s favorite political villains) stood in the White House, broken men returned from the Vietnam War, drugs flooded the streets, and racism showed its ugly face when it came to schooling, housing, and job security. Black leaders, including Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, were dead and surrogate saviors came in guise of badass movie Mack’s wah-wah walking through Harlem on the silver screen as they headed somewhere to “stick it to the man.”

However, Gil’s material wasn’t simply about entertaining the masses, he wanted to make a difference. His NYC blues ideology became his specialty and Winter in America—with its heavy Fender Rhodes presence (played by both Jackson and Gil), soulful flute, and intimate resonance in the recording that sometimes sounded like rough demos—was the perfect balance.

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gil-scott-heron-brian-jackson-winter-in-america/

first minute of a new day has been one of my favorite albums since i was in my teens (along with blood on the tracks...i can't believe they were released in the same week), but i haven't listened to gil and brian jackson's earlier collaborations as much.

by Bob Dylan, and surpassed only by Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On?"

It is one of the centerpieces of the Black Art Movement.