Jazz Fest Honors Richie Havens, Gil Scott- Heron

The 28th annual Syracuse Jazz Fest is being dedicated to two legendary musical icons of the transformational 1960s and ’70s, Richie Havens and Gil Scott-Heron. each of whom will perform at this year’s Jazz Fest at Onondaga Community College.

Woodstock legend Richie Havens, one of the world’s greatest song stylists, appears on the festival’s Louis H. Everding Main Stage at 6:30 p.m. Saturday, June 26, followed at 8 p.m. by Gil Scott-Heron, the multi-talented social activist, poet and jazz singer.

Jazz Fest founder Frank Malfitano said both artist have had an enormous and incomparable impact on American popular culture.

“Richie’s brilliant 1967 debut release, Mixed Bag, which was released two years before he opened The Woodstock Music & Art Festival in 1969, may well be one of the 10 greatest recordings of all time,” Malfitano said. “For that seminal recording alone Richie deserves to be recognized, and he should have been instantly inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. It’s a landmark recording from one of our greatest American artists.”

For decades, Gil Scott-Heron has been blending storytelling, jazz, funk, blues, poetry and politics. “An incomparable musician, stylist, comedian, composer, arranger and balladeer, Gil is carrying on the tradition of black awareness and political consciousness in contemporary music that was pioneered by James Brown, Sly Stone, Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield and Donny Hathaway,” Malfitano said. “He’s the last of a vanishing breed, and a giant.”

Born in Brooklyn, Havens rose to prominence playing guitar and singing in Greenwich Village coffeehouses in the early-1960s. Since that time, Havens has continued to use his music to convey messages of brotherhood and personal freedom.

Likewise, Chicago native Gil Scott-Heron got his big break in New York City in 1970 when he recorded his debut LP, Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. That disc included his signature work and a visionary track has become Scott-Heron’s signature performance piece, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” which brilliantly satirizes politicians, film stars, TV shows and mindless mass consumerism.

Similarly, Havens’ most famous performance was his sixth Woodstock encore, an improvisation based on the old spiritual “Motherless Child” that became “Freedom,” a song now considered to be the anthem of a generation.

The Syracuse Jazz Fest will again be staged on the beautiful hilltop campus of Onondaga Community College, on Friday, June 25, through Saturday, June 26. Admission to all events is free, For information, visit syracusejazzfest.com.