Richard Williams was at her London debut in 1972: I sat with my friend Charlie Gillett and we were both overjoyed to discover that her band included Richard Tee on keyboards, the guitarist Eric Gale and the drummer Bernard “Pretty” Purdie. A real New York studio ‘A’ team, the kind you couldn’t quite believe you were seeing in a London club.
She told Richard: ‘I took my classical training and used it as the foundation on which I based my arrangements, my dynamics and ultimately my musical expression. I think if you’re rigid about how you see yourself and if you aren’t open to the changes that life brings you, the resentment will show in your music and can interfere with honest expression.’
Ann Powers was often in touch with her: It was classical music that first taught Flack that anything could be incorporated into her art. The compositions she loved struck her as open fields where any idea or feeling could circulate. “For the first three decades of my life, I lived in the world of classical music,” Flack wrote to me. “I found in it wonderful melodies and harmonies that were the vehicles through which I could express myself.” Her classical training suited a character prone from childhood to be careful and self-reflective and made Flack an exceptionally sensitive and deeply inventive interpreter. “My music is inspired thought by thought, and feeling by feeling,” she wrote. “Not note by note. I tell my own story in each song as honestly as I can in the hope that each person can hear it and feel their own story within those feelings.”
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