Gil Scott-Heron’s third album is split down the middle, the first side being a purely musical experience with a full band (including flutist Hubert Laws and drummer Pretty Purdie), the second functioning more as a live rap session with collaborator Brian Jackson on flute and a few friends on percussion.

For side one, although he’s overly tentative on the ballad “The Middle of Your Day,” Scott-Heron excels on the title track and the third song, “The Get Out of the Ghetto Blues,” one of his best, best-known performances.

The second side is more of an impromptu performance, with Scott-Heron often explaining his tracks by way of introduction (“No Knock” referred to a new police policy whereby knocking was no longer required before entering a house, “And Then He Wrote Meditations” being

AAA Edition – Cut in an all-analogue chain by Frank Merritt at The Carvery, London. 180gm vinyl

Released in 1971, Gil Scott-Herons second album Pieces Of A Man is a stone-cold classic and rightly seen as one of the greatest albums of all time. There is a reason why a full album of songs did not appear as a follow-up. Scott-Herons writing partner, Brian Jackson had been keen to move forward quickly with song-based material, but Scott-Heron saw himself first and foremost as a writer. A new novel, The Nigger Factory, would be published in 1972 and he also enrolled for writing seminars at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Once the decision was made to combine poetry and song, sessions were booked for the 2nd and 3rd March 1972. The first session with Bernard Pretty Purdie (drums), Hubert Laws (flute/pi