“I can see this now as a 69-year-old man, but I wasn’t equipped to understand those things at that age,” Jackson said. Soon, Jackson stopped receiving royalty payments from Brouhaha; he never got them again since then. It didn’t help that Scott-Heron became dependent on cocaine—first powder, then crack—which would eventually derail his own career, sometimes leaving him looking for money.
Jackson did freelance work for a while, playing with Kool & the Gang and Phyllis Hyman, among others. And he shopped around some demos that he’d made with the help of engineer Malcolm Cecil, who’d produced a few of his and Scott-Heron’s albums. But more than a dozen labels turned them down, and in 1983 he joined New York City, where he remained until retiring in 2017.
Immediately, employees began to emerge from the woodwork – especially artists of a younger generation, such as Vega, eager to touch the hem of an idol. In mid-2018, Jackson regularly recorded with Daniel Collás, a producer known for his work with the Phenomenal Handclap Band, to put together what would become “This Is Brian Jackson”.
The album features two tracks from recordings he made in the late 1970s with Cecil and members of the Midnight Band. Another is a tune that Jackson recorded at the time during a session at the Electric Lady Studios in New York, for the soundtrack of a black indie film, ‘The Baron’. Those tapes were lost, so he and Collás re-recorded the song.
“Our mission was to make that album that I would have made in ’77 or ’78 by now,” Jackson said.
Not long after he started recording with Collás, Jackson was approached by famed hip-hop producers Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge, who had just started a project called Jazz Is Dead that featured collaborations with musical elders. The album they made together breathes the spirit of Miles Davis’ jazz rock from the early 1970s and was released last year.
