Winter in America

Winter in America (Strata-East SES-19742) was produced by the pair under the name Perpis-Fall Music, with Jose Williams as engineer. Jackson says the budget was four thousand dollars, which forced eight tracks instead of sixteen, and that sessions ran eight to ten hours for three or four songs a day after heavy rehearsal; he played a Fender Rhodes and sometimes a Farfisa, and much of the overdubbing was done by the two of them. Wikipedia says the September sessions were the two alone, which explains the sparse sound, and that Danny Bowens on bass and Bob Adams on drums came on the last day, October 15; Jackson names them on "The Bottle", "Rivers of My Fathers" and "Back Home". Wikipedia says Jackson sometimes played flute in the hallway, while Jackson himself describes vocals in a cork-lined closet used as a booth, with him in the same room. The working title was Supernatural Corner, after a house in Logan Circle in Washington that Scott-Heron thought haunted, and it began as a musical novel with spoken vignettes about a Vietnam veteran, which were dropped. The cover painting is by Eugene Coles.

Strata-East, founded in 1971 by Charles Tolliver and Stanley Cowell, offered artists 85 percent of gross sales if they delivered the finished product. The album did not chart on the Billboard 200 but reached number six on the jazz chart, selling over 300,000 US copies according to a 1990 Los Angeles Times article, and was out of print in the US for nearly 25 years before the Rumal-Gia/TVT CD reissue of March 10, 1998; a vinyl reissue followed for Record Store Day 2024. Uncut's Barney Hoskyns called it a masterwork of ghetto melancholia and stark political gravitas, Pitchfork's Michael A. Gonzales gave it 9.3, AllMusic's Ron Wynn five stars, and Christgau C+, praising "The Bottle". Jackson said in 2018 that he hated that it is still so relevant.