If the original studio version was a breezy swing groove - like eating passion fruit and listening to The Roots - the live version backed by Fatback Taffy’s dirty-ass funky (damn, I feel sticky) groove is more like a “long slow drag” than a “long walk”. Scott gives early indication of her desires to take her flow somewhere else on the opening track “A Long Walk (Groove)”. Backed by her band “Fatback Taffy” (like chewing on bacon flavored Now-and-Laters I guess), Scott gives sassy, confident live spins to nine of Who Is Jill Scott’s? 17 tracks including a nine-minute version of “He Loves Me (Lyzel in E-Flat)”and an original playful ditty called “Fatback Taffy”. Constitution Hall (that would be “daughters of the american revolution” right? Holla back Marian Anderson) in Washington, D.C. Human.” This side of Scott which is often lost in People‘s “50 Most Beautiful” photo-ops and sanitized bourgeois neo-soul documentaries, plays a starring on the “live” disc, that was recorded in August of 2001 at the “D.A.R. We have this thinking that soon as we see somebody with a natural they automatically positive. Parodying one listener’s high pitched shrill of a comment that “Jill Scott’s supposed to be such a positive person”, Scott responds, “first off I never said that. On the live disc, titled 826 for the August 26th date of the recording, Scott recalls promotional radio appearances where listeners would call in and ask why she would make a song about fighting “anotha sista”. As brilliant as Scott’s debut was, in the real world where videos on MTV and BET read like ethnographic surveys and forms of cross-cultural ghetto surveillance (do they really do that?), ain’t nothing more appealing than a “girl-fight” and the video for “Gettin’ in the Way” was just that-you can almost here the thoughts of some of the folks in the video asking “whose ass that big girl about to whup?” Scott speaks directly to this aspect of her music as she addresses the audience after her rendition of “Gettin’ in the Way”, the song that initially brought her to the attention of urban radio and video programmers. Naw, Jill Scott is about grown woman thangs, as in “I’ll whup your ass if you throw shade at my man again” - grown as loving hard and passionate like sucking on that last chicken bone at the bottom of the Buffalo wing bucket. Live performances are where a litany of black performers from Mahailia Jackson to Joe Tex to Luther Vandross have made their money and staked their legacies and Experience: Jill Scott 826+ helps counter any thought that “Jilly from Philly” is some one-dimensional “Video” pin-up girl for VH-1 styled positivism (not mentioning any names here). One, only hinted at and the chance to get “new” material to savagely hungry audiences needing a new dose of what Angie Stone calls “Real Soul Music”. Experience: Jill Scott 826+ is a clever commercial move, providing Scott with a live forum to get at that grits and greasy groove (look you can’t eat a Philly Cheese Steak without getting your hands dirty, so you gotta lick away) that Who Is Jill Scott?: Vol.
This was Jilly from the git-go, so the promise that she would be captured live - Mfers still talking ’bout the Essence Festival - was indeed a wonderful thought in an hour of mourning, terror, anger and RECOVERY. Positive non-complicated Sistuh-girl talk for bright eyed corn-rolled gals in the hood, grown woman talk for the beauty parlor and the kitchen, while the men, the brothas, triflin’ and otherwise, be watchin’ the game, careless whispers on long walks in the rain (“love rain down on me”). Jilly had been made “real” from the start-fried pork rind, chic-o-stick, Philly cheese steak, pink roller, braiding hair on the stoop (like Robert said “c’mon and braid my hair”), dukey chain, egg and grits real. Of course it was a live follow-up that made Badu real again (so call “Tyrone”) though her brilliant follow-up was lost on those same audiences. And the talk, often in hushed, stern tones about that poem, where Jilly from Philly puts that brown girl (sometime caramel) grown woman “Thickness” in perspective.
A bare foot, woman-loosed rendition of “He Loves Me (Lyzel in E Flat) at the Lady of Soul Awards. Breaking off a little live sumpthin’ during Divas Live 2001.
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