Movies

Brian Robert Jackson (born October 11, 1952) is an American keyboardist, flautist, singer, composer, and producer known for his collaborations with Gil Scott-Heron in the 1970s. The sound of Jackson's Rhodes electric piano and flute accompaniments featured prominently in many of their compositions, most notably on "The Bottle" and "Your Daddy Loves You" from their first official collaboration Winter in America.

Early life
Jackson was born in Brooklyn, New York, United States, to Clarence and Elsie Jackson, respectively a New York State parole officer and a librarian at the Ford Foundation. He spent the first two years of his life in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, later sharing a house in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn with his uncle Howard, wife Dorothy and young cousin Sidney until his parents separated by the time he was five.

Unable to take on the responsibility of sharing mortgage payments alone, Elsie was forced to move to a one-bedroom apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn until she remarried in 1968.

Jackson studied music in Fort Greene with his mother's childhood teacher, Hepzibah Ross (fondly called 'Aunt Heppie') with whom he took lessons for seven years. When Elsie was unable to continue payments for lessons, Aunt Heppie granted him a scholarship, simply stating that Jackson showed 'great promise.'

His mother later married Alvin S.Lovell a General Practitioner from Bedford Stuyvesant who often donated his services to uninsured residents of the community. In 1968, their daughter and Brian's sister, Alison Lovell, was born.

From 1965 until 1969, Jackson attended Brooklyn's Erasmus Hall High School, where he met other musicians and began to form bands on the outside while participating in school music programs.