Jazz vocalist Giacomo Gates has always been an adventurer. After dropping out of engineering school in his early twenties, he heard about the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and immediately picked up and moved north to work on its construction. After brief stints doing everything from hanging sheet rock to bouncing at an illegal gambling club, Gates spent over 14 years running heavy machinery in the most remote corners of the state.

Always an avid fan of jazz, Gates spent his teenage years buying Dave Brubeck and Thelonius Monk LPs and playing guitar in a wedding band.

“I played and sang for the fun of it,” Gates said in a recent interview, “but I kind of put it away in my early twenties—especially the guitar—when I started working construction.”

After over a decade in the tundra of Alaska, jazz found him once again. In the late 1980s, Gates participated in a jazz vocal workshop at a summer art festival in Fairbanks, where he was approached by veteran jazz critic and promoter Grover Sales, who told him, “You’ve got your own sound, and you do something kind of different–you’re never going to get heard up here,” to which Gates replied, “I’m not trying to get heard. I live and work up here.” Sales asked, “Why?” Realizing that even running a bulldozer in the wilderness becomes routine after long enough, Gates returned to his native Connecticut to “take a whack at singing.”

In the 25 years since, he has made a name for himself locally and nationally as a deft interpreter of the Great American Songbook, a nimble scat singer, and a master practitioner of what is known as “vocalese” singing (setting and performing lyrics to improvised instrumental solos). Gates has a robust, life-wearied baritone that is as distinctive as it is timeless. He has six acclaimed records to his name, including his newest adventure, “The Revolution Will Be Jazz: The Songs of Gil Scott-Heron.”

Released this summer, “The Revolution Will Be Jazz” finds Gates taking on the challenge of interpreting the music of Gil Scott-Heron, one of the most influential musical figures of the 1970s. Gates is the first to admit that Scott-Heron was not a “jazzer.” In fact, with his politically charged lyrics and combination of spoken word poetry and music, Scott-Heron has often been cited as the “godfather of rap and hip hop.” Asked how he felt about this title, Scott-Heron once replied, “You can’t blame me for that.” Although Scott-Heron’s style can more accurately be characterized as soul or funk, Gates says that since Scott-Heron was deeply influenced by jazz, it was not a stretch to play his songs in a jazz style.

Although this project has been in the works for three years, its release date this July turned out to be tragically coincidental. Gil Scott-Heron died at the age of 62 just over a month earlier, making “The Revolution Will Be Jazz” the first–but certainly not the last– posthumous tribute to the late master. When Scott-Heron passed, Gates, as well as the CD’s producer, Mark Ruffin (a self-described “Gilophile”), were stunned.

“When we finished it, we were going to go to Gil’s apartment and go, ‘Gil, here man, look what we did. This is a gift,’” Gates said.

Although they never got the chance to give it to Scott-Heron, “The Revolution Will Be Jazz” has become wildly successful in jazz circles, garnering praise nationwide, and spending each of the last three weeks at number one on the JazzWeek Jazz Chart.   Showcasing the enormous emotional range of his songwriting, the album consists of ten Gil Scott-Heron gems. The record contains inspirational calls to action like the emotional standout, “This Is a Prayer for Everybody to Be Free,” as well as clever songs about past legends of jazz, including the funky guitar-driven “Lady Day and John Coltrane,” (which features the bluesy playing of Wesleyan’s jazz guitar instructor, Tony Lombardozzi), and even a few cynically comical cuts like the lead track, “Show Bizness.” But perhaps the most poignant tracks on the album are “Winter in America” and “Gun,” a pair of songs that are richly evocative of the political desolation of the 1970s, yet whose lyrics just as easily could have been written about today.

Upon listening to the album’s often gritty and just-as-often witty lyrics, it is easy to see why Gates says of Scott-Heron, “Gil was like a black Phil Ochs, or a black Bob Dylan; he sang about things that were relevant to the inner city.”

As current as the lyrics sound, making these songs stylistically relevant to a modern audience was not easy.

“Gil was more like pop-funk, but rhythm and blues too—just a little bit more of a 70s sound. We put a little bit more swing feel in it,” Gates explains.

Although Gates says this project was not a conscious effort to move away from straight-ahead jazz, non-jazz audiences will certainly find “The Revolution Will Be Jazz” to be his most immediately accessible release to date. Nevertheless, the album has plenty of swing and enough scat singing to satisfy fans expecting traditional jazz. While “The Revolution Will Be Jazz” continues to gain momentum nationwide and even overseas, Gates has returned to Wesleyan, where he has taught jazz voice for 12 years.

Of his teaching style, Gates says, “I don’t teach do-re-mi.” Instead, he focuses on the art of interpretation, as well as tone, phrasing, breathing, repertoire, and improvisation. Gates is currently accepting new students for the fall semester.