Rahsaan Roland Kirk (1936-1977) Artist Biography by Chris Kelsey
Arguably the most exciting saxophone soloist in jazz history, Kirk was a post-modernist before that term even existed. Kirk
played the continuum of jazz tradition as an instrument unto itself; he
felt little compunction about mixing and matching elements from the
music's history, and his concoctions usually seemed natural, if not
inevitable. When discussing Kirk,
a great deal of attention is always paid to his eccentricities --
playing several horns at once, making his own instruments, clowning on
stage. However, Kirk
was an immensely creative artist; perhaps no improvising saxophonist
has ever possessed a more comprehensive technique -- one that covered
every aspect of jazz, from Dixieland to free -- and perhaps no other
jazz musician has ever been more spontaneously inventive. His skills in
constructing a solo are of particular note. Kirk had the ability to pace, shape, and elevate his improvisations to an extraordinary degree. During any given Kirk
solo, just at the point in the course of his performance when it
appeared he could not raise the intensity level any higher, he always
seemed able to turn it up yet another notch.
Kirk
was born with sight, but became blind at the age of two. He started
playing the bugle and trumpet, then learned the clarinet and C-melody
sax. Kirk
began playing tenor sax professionally in R&B bands at the age of
15. While a teenager, he discovered the "manzello" and "stritch" -- the
former, a modified version of the saxello, which was itself a slightly
curved variant of the B flat soprano sax; the latter, a modified
straight E flat alto. To these and other instruments, Kirk
began making his own improvements. He reshaped all three of his saxes
so that they could be played simultaneously; he'd play tenor with his
left hand, finger the manzello with his right, and sound a drone on the
stritch, for instance. Kirk's self-invented technique was in evidence from his first recording, a 1956 R&B record called Triple Threat.
By 1960 he had begun to incorporate a siren whistle into his solos, and
by '63 he had mastered circular breathing, a technique that enabled him
to play without pause for breath.
In his early 20s, Kirk worked in Louisville before moving to Chicago in 1960. That year he made his second album, Introducing Roland Kirk, which featured saxophonist/trumpeter Ira Sullivan. In 1961, Kirk toured Germany and spent three months with Charles Mingus. From that point onward, Kirk mostly led his own group, the Vibration Society, recording prolifically with a range of sidemen. In the early '70s, Kirk
became something of an activist; he led the "Jazz and People's
Movement," a group devoted to opening up new opportunities for jazz
musicians. The group adopted the tactic of interrupting tapings and
broadcasts of television and radio programs in protest of the small
number of African-American musicians employed by the networks and
recording studios. In the course of his career, Kirk brought many hitherto unused instruments to jazz. In addition to the saxes, Kirk
played the nose whistle, the piccolo, and the harmonica; instruments of
his own design included the "trumpophone" (a trumpet with a soprano sax
mouthpiece), and the "slidesophone" (a small trombone or slide trumpet,
also with a sax mouthpiece). Kirk
suffered a paralyzing stroke in 1975, losing movement on one side of
his body, but his homemade saxophone technique allowed him to continue
to play; beginning in 1976 and lasting until his death a year later, Kirk played one-handed.
Having spent almost all his life without eyesight, Rahsaan Roland
Kirk could never understand why people were preoccupied with his show’s
visual aspects. But how could we not be? Who would not be mesmerized by
the sight of a man in a towering fur hat, wraparound shades and a long
caftan, with three saxophones, a flute, a clarinet, a whistle and a
siren hanging from his neck—instruments that he often played two or
three at a time, sometimes 10 or 20 minutes at a time, thanks to his
circular breathing? Who wouldn’t be distracted by that? And when he
stuck a wooden flute in his right nostril and played a melody on it—oh,
man, fuhgeddaboutit.
Kirk’s protests were a bit disingenuous anyway. He knew perfectly
well how eccentric he appeared onstage and did little to tone it down,
for he realized that his theatricality attracted attention in a
competitive environment. What frustrated him was that audiences, having
been attracted by the showmanship, couldn’t then get past it and
appreciate the music. That’s the double-edged sword of taking an
unconventional path through the show-biz world—the very thing that gets
you noticed can prevent you from being respected. Just think of Dolly
Parton, whose blonde-bombshell routine made her famous but obscured the
brilliance of her songwriting. Think of Sun Ra.
You could argue that Kirk’s multiple horn playing was inseparable
from the refracted prism of his harmonies—just as Sun Ra’s
rocket-from-Saturn shtick was inseparable from the otherworldly genius
of his harmonies—and you’d probably be right. Maybe Kirk couldn’t have
achieved what he did if he hadn’t been willing to follow his sonic
explorations into the kind of circus theatricality that some people
might snicker at. But it has complicated the assessment of his proper
place in jazz history. Is he a curious footnote like the bagpipe-playing
Rufus Harley? Or is he a major figure like his one-time employer
Charles Mingus? Or something in between?
It’s now been a bit more than 30 years since Kirk died on Dec. 5,
1977, enough time for his reputation to have withered if he had been
merely a novelty act. Instead his profile keeps rising. The reissues
keep coming; his compositions are still being performed and recorded. If
critics haven’t given him a mountaintop position next to Mingus and
Coleman, they keep pushing Kirk up the slope—just as they have with Sun
Ra since his death. Kirk’s praises are still being sung by musicians—and
not just by jazz players of his own generation.
Derek Trucks, for example, was born a year and a half after Kirk died
and now plays guitar in his own Derek Trucks Band and the Allman
Brothers Band. Trucks is such a big Kirk fan, however, that the relative
youngster has recorded Kirk’s composition “Volunteered Slavery” on his
group’s most recent studio album, 2006’s Songlines (Sony), and on two
live releases: the 2004 live album Live at Georgia Theatre and the DVD
Songlines Live. “The first time I heard Rahsaan,” Trucks says, “was on
that Atlantic compilation [1993’s Does Your House Have Lions]. It felt
much the same way those Hendrix records felt, that he was blowing the
rules wide open and was just playing music. In my mind it seemed that
Rahsaan and Hendrix came from the same far-off planet—like superheroes.
You could tell by Rahsaan’s tone and his phrasing that he knew his
stuff, that he could play inside when he wanted to. But he didn’t always
want to, and when he wanted to go outside, that felt just as honest and
as musical as playing inside.”
Jeff Coffin, the saxophonist in Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, was
only 12 when Kirk died, but Coffin too has fallen under the late reed
player’s spell. Charles Mingus’ Oh Yeah, the album that introduced the
Flecktone to Kirk’s multi-horn inventions, didn’t leave Coffin’s CD
changer for months. His new solo album, Mutopia (Compass), showcases his
own approach to double-horn playing. “I stole a lot of stuff from
Rahsaan,” Coffin cheerfully confesses. “It’s fascinating to experiment
with instruments the way he did. Rahsaan used to tap on the keys of his
flute to get a percussive sound, so I tried that on my tenor saxophone.
Rahsaan used his whistles as a drone instrument, and I’m interested in
Indian music, so I adopted that too. That’s what a lot of musicians get
from Rahsaan—the permission to explore. I do a lot of clinics and one
thing I try to get across to the students is it’s OK to experiment with
your instrument.”
The poll-winning trombonist Steve Turre, who served several stints in
Kirk’s bands, assembled a group featuring multi-reedist James Carter
for the 2004 Kirk tribute album, The Spirits Up Above (HighNote), and
led the all-star band last December at Saint Peter’s Church in New York
City that paid tribute to Kirk close to the 30th anniversary of his
death. Turre argues that only when people turn away from the visual—and
Kirk’s videos are popular items on YouTube—and focus on the aural will
they fully grasp Kirk’s achievements. “It’s all about listening,” Turre
insists, “though I don’t think kids are taught that today. When I first
encountered him, I’d just listen and go with the flow. We used to go up
to his hotel room and listen to records in the dark. He was sightless,
so he didn’t need the lights. It made me concentrate on the sound. It
took me inside Rahsaan’s world and allowed me to experience music as he
did.
“Yeah, the unusual aspects of his shows were amazing, but I didn’t
let that stop me from hearing the music. His shows were unconventional,
but only because he was being himself. It was all about feeling; it
wasn’t all mechanical and contrived; it wasn’t different for different’s
sake. It wasn’t for an intellectual concept; it was just Rahsaan being
Rahsaan.”
It’s all there on the 10-CD box set, Rahsaan: The Complete Mercury
Recordings of Roland Kirk. On 1963’s “Variations on a Theme of
Hindemith,” Kirk starts on flute, at first warbling conventionally and
then overblowing. He moves to manzello (his customized adaptation of the
saxello, itself an adaptation of the straight soprano sax) for a long
solo spiced by squealing bursts from his siren whistle. He then begins a
drone on the tenor sax while soloing on the stritch (Kirk’s customized
version of a straight alto sax). Each of these five instruments adds a
new surprise to the piece, but behind each surprise is an idea.
Kirk opens and closes 1965’s “Mystical Dream” by playing tenor sax,
stritch and oboe as a one-man horn section and gets a warm, choir-like
sound that reinforces the sense of reverie. “From Bechet, Byas, and
Fats” from the same session features Kirk’s circular breathing as he
sustains his tenor-sax solo for a long, unbroken string of bars. But
what’s remarkable about the solo is not its length but its constant
invention. On 1961’s “You Did It, You Did It,” he sings through his
flute, not merely to get a strange sonic effect but to enhance the
bluesy underpinnings of the song. “He was way ahead of his time,” claims
Turre. “Yes, some people weren’t ready for it, but if he were around
today, it would be much more acceptable. I knew him well, and it really
hurt his feelings when people would say that playing three horns was
just a gimmick. Because he was playing some heavy music on those horns.”
Any new musical technique—whether it is the electric guitar,
saxophone dissonance or the musical saw—seems a gimmick when it first
appears. No one thinks of electric guitar and saxophone dissonance as
novelties anymore, because too much great music has been made with them.
The musical saw, by contrast, still seems a gimmick, because the
instrument has yet to find the genius who might unleash its
possibilities. Kirk’s innovations—the multiple horn playing, the
circular breathing, the flute singing, the uncommon instruments—have
been imitated by a few musicians. But he doesn’t require followers to
prove the worth of his breakthroughs because he has already proven great
music can be made with them.
Kirk didn’t invent his techniques any more than Charlie Christian
invented amplification or John Coltrane dissonance. There had long been
musicians who would play multiple horns or employ circular breathing in
carnivals and juke joints for the sheer “wow” factor of the spectacle.
But because such practices were disdained they were also free from
expectations, and Kirk, like Christian and Coltrane before him, could
write his own rules in the absence of any precedents. In other words,
the very weirdness of the techniques was not incidental to the resulting
innovations, but served as the door through which the breakthroughs
walked. “His willingness to try such unusual methods was part of his
creativity,” maintains Kirk’s longtime friend Jimmy Heath. “Anyone who
tries something new finds themselves having to justify themselves. The
whole bebop generation went through that. Whenever someone comes out
with something else, the new movement is belittled by people who are
doing what they think should be done. But any movement that comes along
has something to offer.”
It’s useful to remember that most of Kirk’s unusual techniques were
not adopted when he was an adult professional trying to find an edge in a
competitive business but were taken up when he was a teenager trying to
find his musical voice. They were not extraneous additions to his
playing; they were at the core of his sound from the beginning. “The
basic gestalt of his music—the joy, the overwhelming virtuosity, the
experimentation—was all there in the ’50s,” insists Kirk’s childhood
friend Todd Barkan. “In his youth, he adapted the day-to-day objects of
his environment for music-making purposes—even a garden hose became the
black mystery pipes. When I traveled with him in the ’70s, he didn’t
seem substantially different from the person I’d known in the ’50s, only
more organized and focused.”
Barkan, who would become the founder/owner of the Keystone Korner in
San Francisco, a programmer for Jazz at Lincoln Center and a producer
for everyone from Archie Shepp to Freddy Cole, met Kirk in what can only
be described as a great coincidence. In the summer of 1954, Barkan was
an 8-year-old white kid on a Columbus, Ohio city bus, traveling by
himself to a minor-league baseball game. He noticed that in the backseat
of the bus, an 18-year-old black kid was playing tenor saxophone,
apparently in a duet with the bus engine. “I can only say that he
sounded like a snake charmer from another planet,” Barkan says today.
“It was a sound I had never heard in my life, but it was something that
was certainly seductive. I’d been listening to my parents’ Duke
Ellington and Dave Brubeck records, so I was open enough to what he was
doing to want to know more.”
Fearlessly curious in the way that only pre-pubescent children can
be, Barkan walked back and asked the teenager who he was and what he was
doing. The older kid said he was Ronnie Kirk—it was only later, early
in his professional career, that he became Roland Kirk, and only in 1970
that he announced his final name change with the album Rahsaan Rahsaan.
Barkan was quickly invited over to Kirk’s home to listen to some LPs.
“He liked the fact that someone outside his community was interested in
the music that he loved so much,” Barkan says. “I was, of course, very
ingenuous and naïve, but he was always interested in sharing the music
with those open enough to receive it. We would spend a day listening to
tenor saxophonists, so I would learn what they sounded like. Then a day
listening to alto saxophonists. This was my Jazz 101, but it was done in
a non-pedantic way. He’d say, ‘Here’s Jimmy Rushing, ain’t that cool?’”
Kirk had been blind from infancy, but his mother Gertrude made a
point of making him as independent as possible. She encouraged him to
travel on his own and to pursue his music without fear. Though she died
when she was 36, she instilled such pride in her son that he often
bristled at any slight. “He disliked the word ‘blind’ profusely,” his
widow Dorthaan Kirk points out. “He’d say, ‘I’m not blind; I just don’t
see the way the rest of you do.’ When we’d go down the street and see a
sightless person with a cup begging for money,’ he never wanted to put
money in the cup, because he thought everyone should be as independent
as he was. I’d tell him, ‘Not everyone can be as confident as you are.’ “One of the things I hated most was going to a restaurant with him.
The waitress would inevitably ask, ‘What does he want?’ He would get so
angry. He’d say, ‘Miss, maybe I can’t see, but I can talk and I know
what I want.’ OK, so we get the food, but then the check comes and who
do you think the waitress gives the check to? He’d say, ‘Miss, do you
think because I can’t see I don’t have any money?’ He probably had more
money in his pocket than anyone else there.”
Though he was blind, he loved to go as a teenager to the Gaetz Music
Store in Columbus and have the owner pull out strange instruments and
describe them. That’s how Kirk found the mangled saxello, pulled from
the shop’s cellar, that he turned into the “moon zellar” or “manzello,”
and the straight alto that he customized as a “stritch.” When he was
about 16, Kirk had a dream of playing his tenor sax and his two new
acquisitions at once, and he immediately set out to figure out how to do
it in his waking life.
This created a pattern that would continue the rest of his life. Kirk
was always picking up unlikely instruments and bending them to his
will. Jimmy Heath remembers the time he received a shakuhachi, a
Japanese wooden flute, as a present from his brother Tootie. Not long
after, Jimmy went to see his old friend Kirk at Pep’s, the Philadelphia
nightclub. “I told Rahsaan, ‘My brother Tootie gave me this shakuhachi
but I can’t get a sound out of it,’” Heath remembers. “I handed it to
Rahsaan and he immediately got a sound out of it. That was embarrassing
enough, but I went back there three days later and he said from the
stage, ‘Jimmy Heath, I’m going to play a song on the shakuhachi.’ He had
already mastered it and was already making music with it.”
“Every time I saw him he was trying something different,” adds Turre.
“One time he had a transistor radio hanging around his neck with all
those whistles and bells. He’d turn on the radio, put a mic on it and
start twisting the dial. He’d play along with whatever came on. If it
was classical music, he’d play along with that; if it was country music,
he’d play with that.
“Another time we were trading fours on the bandstand and he reached
over—remember, he couldn’t see—took the mouthpiece out of my trombone,
put it in his saxophone and started playing it. It didn’t sound as
reedy; it sounded more round and less edgy. The way I took it, he was
opening my ears as if to say, ‘If you can hear it, you can play it. Why
don’t you try to get to this on the trombone?’ He didn’t teach by
saying, ‘Look on page 32’; he taught by example.”
On a tour in 1970, Kirk brought along a conch shell and Turre kept
waiting to see how the bandleader would use it. It just hung from his
neck, untouched, for several dates. But one night, when some drunks were
being disruptive during the show, Kirk picked up the shell and held a
note with circular breathing for four minutes until everyone eventually
noticed and fell silent. Turre was so fascinated by the shell’s calming
effect that he borrowed his employer’s conch and eventually became the
instrument’s virtuoso.
“I was a little wary at the beginning,” he admits, “because I didn’t
want to go through the same thing Rahsaan had gone through, of having
people say it was just a gimmick. Fortunately most people like it—a few
don’t, but that’s their problem, not mine. I know one thing: Dizzy liked
it; Art Blakey liked it. Woody Shaw liked it. If those people like that
like it, I know it’s right. What do I care if Joe Blow doesn’t like
it?”
By the mid-’50s, Kirk was touring the Midwest, often with soul-jazz
organ groups, bringing his unusual assortment of horns with him. He
recorded his first album, Triple Threat, for King Records in 1956, and
an impressed Ramsey Lewis got him a contract with Chess Records, which
released Introducing Roland Kirk in 1960. But it wasn’t till the
following year, when Kirk joined Charles Mingus’ band for four months,
stood out as a soloist on Mingus’ Oh Yeah, and signed his own long-term
contract with Mercury Records that Kirk made much of an impression on
the national jazz community.
“Even when I was underage, I’d go see him play in Columbus,” Barkan
recalls. “You could go in the clubs if you wore a Hawaiian lei so you
wouldn’t be served drinks. You were like a mascot, not a customer.
Rahsaan was playing the multiple horns even then, but that wasn’t what
people were responding to; he was already a virtuoso tenor player, and
people responded to the joy and energy he brought to that instrument,
even in the late ’50s.”
“He fought that gimmick label his whole life,” Dorthaan Kirk says.
“What he wanted more than anything in his music was just to be
acknowledged as a tenor saxophonist. That doesn’t mean he didn’t love
the other instruments, especially the flute, but the tenor was his main
instrument.”
Kirk played more tenor than anything, and on his two pre-Rahsaan
masterpieces—1961’s We Free Kings (Mercury) and 1965’s Rip, Rig and
Panic (Limelight)—his tenor solos were the highlights. He favored the
big, brawny sound of the Texas/Oklahoma blowers like Illinois Jacquet,
Don Byas and Arnett Cobb, but he was also capable of shaping that power
with the lyricism of a Lester Young or Dexter Gordon. “I feel very
strongly that the more theatrical, circus aspects of his performance—and
I use the term circus with a lot of love,” adds Barkan, “did distract
from a proper appreciation of his enormous depth and importance by the
mainstream jazz world. People like Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, James Moody
and Booker Ervin loved Rahsaan’s playing as a straightahead tenor
player. The other stuff was an important part of his presentation but it
was to some extent window dressing. The challenge in giving Rahsaan his
proper due as a mainstream jazzman often gets lost in the cloud of
discussion about his multi-instrumental virtuosity.”
Early in his career especially, Kirk proved his mainstream discipline
and chops by recording not only with Mingus but also Quincy Jones, Roy
Haynes and Jaki Byard. But much like Mingus, Kirk found himself stranded
between the bebop establishment and the free-jazz renegades during the
’60s. Both men were too fond of introducing political commentary and
dissonance into their music to be fully trusted by the boppers, and too
fond of quoting Duke Ellington, Lester Young and Jelly Roll Morton to be
fully trusted by the radicals. You wouldn’t think that someone who
played nose flute and siren onstage would be obsessed with jazz history,
but Kirk was. “Dizzy always said, ‘You have to have one foot in the
past and one foot in the future,’” Heath points out. “You have to rely
on your heart’s ear to tell the new that will endure from the new that
won’t. I knew Rahsaan was going to endure, because he knew his history
but wasn’t afraid to try something new.”
“When he died, he had more than 7,000 albums,” Dorthaan Kirk points
out. “I know because I inventoried them when we moved from Philadelphia
to East Orange, N.J., in 1974. When I went with him to the record store,
I’d have to read every title, every composer, every sideman, and he
would explain how they were important even though they were sidemen.
“He had to go to the store every week to find out what the new
releases were—[he] often would go to the store by himself. He’d take the
88 bus to Port Authority; the cops at the Port Authority would get him a
taxi to Ponte Music Company, then he’d go to Happy Tunes in the
Village, where Jim Eigo would help him go through the records. Jim would
get him a taxi and call me to tell me approximately what time his bus
would get back to Jersey.”
“He not only knew where all those records were, he knew who was
playing on each one,” Turre adds. “He could not only play the older
styles, but he could also take you way out into the ozone. He played the
whole history of the music, but it was never cloning, it was never
mimicry; it was always Rahsaan. When he played in the traditional New
Orleans style, it was on a song he wrote called ‘Red Beans and Rice.’
When he played in the Ellington style, it sounded like it was Ellington,
but it was Rahsaan.”
In 1965, kirk moved from Mercury to Atlantic Records, where he forged
a fruitful partnership with the late producer Joel Dorn (and with
Dorn’s teenage assistant, Hal Willner). This era yielded two more
masterpieces—1968’s The Inflated Tear and 1969’s Volunteered Slavery. It
was also during these years that Kirk’s impact first registered beyond
the jazz realm in the rock world.
Kirk often made caustic comments about the pop world in interviews
and from the stage, but he did record Dionne Warwick’s “I Say a Little
Prayer” and “Walk on By” as well as Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine”
and Stevie Wonder’s “My Cherie Amour.” He even recorded the Beatles’
“And I Love Her” and quoted extensively from “Hey Jude” in the coda for
“Volunteered Slavery.”
In 1967 Ian Anderson was a young London musician who was depressed by
the realization that he’d never be as good a guitarist as Eric Clapton.
He was fooling around with the flute, but he couldn’t imagine the
slender silver stick being accepted in rock ’n’ roll. But when Anderson
pulled out the flute for a show by his band Jethro Tull, his old
schoolmate (and future Tull bassist) Jeffrey Hammond said, “I have this
record you should listen to.” It was Kirk’s I Talk With the Spirits.
“That was his flute album,” Anderson remembers. “He was singing and
scatting through his flute the same way I was, only he was a lot better
at it. But that put the seal of approval on the flute as a cool
instrument and on singing through it as a technique. It was a way of
vulgarizing and humanizing something that’s often thought of as a
refined classical instrument. It brought back that earthiness, that
gritty, subversive quality to an elegantly designed artifact. It allowed
me to make the flute something that could stand up next to Clapton and
Hendrix.”
One particular track from Kirk’s flute album, “Serenade to a Cuckoo,”
especially captivated Anderson. It was a simple enough that a fledgling
rock ’n’ roll band like Jethro Tull could master it, but it had a
bird-song quality that entranced the group’s young audiences. It quickly
became a mainstay of the band’s live shows and eventually appeared on
Jethro Tull’s first album, This Was. Anderson actually got to meet Kirk
at the 1969 Newport Jazz Festival. “Rahsaan was a lot like Captain
Beefheart,” Anderson now says. “They’re cut from the same cloth. There’s
something about these colorful shamans. They can tease us, but we go
along with it, because we know they’re touched by genius, but at the
same time there’s a little bit of the snake oil for sale.”
“There’s a video of Rahsaan when he was opening for Led Zeppelin on
TV in London,” Coffin points out. “You see the guys from Led Zeppelin
hanging out on the side awestruck by what they’re seeing. Rahsaan
stomped his foot and went into ‘I Say a Little Prayer for You’ over what
sounded like a thousand-year groove that they’d just come up with. I
must have rewound that clip a hundred times. I couldn’t understand how
it could be so heavy, that music.”
“The fact that Rahsaan continues to influence so many musicians so
long after his life,” adds Trucks, “is the true measure of his
greatness. I play Rahsaan for a lot of people who aren’t into jazz and
it gets them interested in jazz. With a lot of listeners you have to
crack them over the head and wake them up and once you’ve got their
attention they can appreciate the more subtle things. And there is a lot
of subtlety in Rahsaan’s music, especially the ballads.”
Kirk’s showmanship distracted not only from his achievement as a
tenor player but also as a composer. But several of his compositions
have entered the canon. Everyone from Grover Washington Jr. and Jon
Hendricks to Max Roach, Dave Douglas and former Kirk pianist, the late
Hilton Ruiz, has recorded “Bright Moments.” Ruiz also recorded “Serenade
to a Cuckoo,” as did Jane Bunnett and Jethro Tull. “Spirits Up Above”
was cut by Stanley Turrentine, Eugene Chadbourne and Osibisa;
“Volunteered Slavery” by Trucks and Funkadelic’s Bernie Worrell.
“‘Volunteered Slavery’ is such an eerily strong melody,” Trucks
declares, “such a simple thing but the first time I heard it it stuck
with me for months. I meet people who can’t shake it after they first
hear it. It almost sounds like a field holler, and yet it allows you to
do all kinds of rhythmic and harmonic things with it. Whenever a melody
is strong enough you can do a million things with it, that’s a
standard.”
“‘Bright Moments’ is definitely a standard,” Turre adds. “So are
‘Three for the Festival’ and ‘The Inflated Tear.’ If a song is just
candy for the brain, it will fade with time. But if it touches the
heart, it will last. Why do you think people still care about Ray
Charles? Because he touched people—country people, rock people, jazz
people were always touched by Ray. The same is true of Rahsaan.” In 1975, two days before Thanksgiving, Kirk suffered a massive stroke
at his New Jersey home that left the whole right side of his body
paralyzed. He had the keys of his horns refitted so he could play one,
even two horns, with only his left hand. He continued to tour and
record, but it wasn’t the same. A little more than two years later he
died in Indiana while on tour. He was 41.
The only time I got to see Kirk was during that last year, when he
played at the Famous Ballroom in Baltimore on Jan. 23, 1977. The high
ceilings were painted a dark blue and dotted with clouds and stars; the
stage was surrounded by a striped satin canopy. Backed by Turre, pianist
Hilton Ruiz, bassist Phil Bowler and drummer Sonny Brown, Kirk wore a
shiny suit, a stocking cap and wraparound shades. His right arm hung
limply, but his left arm compensated by darting around his chest,
playing first his tenor, then the manzello or stritch, then his new
L-shaped flute that he could play one-handed.
I was a 24-year-old kid, just beginning a music journalism career,
and I was easily distracted by the vaudeville aspects. I loved the
showmanship, but in the callowness of youth I didn’t take it as
seriously as, for example, the elegance of Dexter Gordon, who played
there four months later.
It was only later that I learned to shut my eyes, to shut out the
distractions and listen to the music without worrying about how it was
made. When I did that I could hear that there was something more going
on than the weird instruments and strange techniques. On the best
records, there was a powerful drama of frustration and yearning, as
powerful as Mingus’ great tracks. Kirk wasn’t nearly as consistent as
Mingus and can’t be ranked as highly. But Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the
Whistleman, the pied piper of jazz, certainly deserved to be taken as
seriously as Dexter Gordon.
Kirk was born Ronald Theodore Kirk in Columbus, Ohio, but felt compelled by a dream to transpose two letters in his first name to make Roland. In 1970, Kirk added “Rahsaan” to his name.
Preferring to lead his own groups, Kirk rarely performed as a sideman, though he did record with arranger Quincy Jones, Roy Haynes and had especially notable stints with Charles Mingus. He played the lead flute and solo on Jones' Soul Bossa Nova, a song popularized in the Austin Powers films (Jones 1964; McLeod et al. 1997).
His playing was generally rooted in soul jazz or hard bop, but Kirk's knowledge of jazz history allowed him to draw on many elements of the music's history, from ragtime to swing and free jazz. Kirk also regularly explored classical and pop music.
Kirk played and collected a number of musical instruments, mainly various saxophones, clarinets and flutes. His main instruments were a tenor saxophone and two obscure saxophones: the manzello (similar to a soprano sax) and the stritch (a straight alto sax lacking the instrument's characteristic upturned bell). Kirk modified these instruments himself to accommodate his simultaneous playing technique. He typically appeared on stage with all three horns hanging around his neck, as well as a variety of other instruments, including flutes and whistles, and often kept a gong within reach. Kirk also played harmonica, english horn, recorders and was a competent trumpeter. He often had unique approaches, using a saxophone mouthpiece on a trumpet or playing nose flute. He additionally used many extramusical sounds in his art, such as alarm clocks, whistles, sirens, a section of common garden hose (”the black mystery pipes”) and even primitive electronic sounds (before such things became commonplace).
Kirk was also an influential flautist, employing several techniques that he developed himself. One technique was to sing or hum into the flute at the same time as playing. Another was to play the standard transverse flute at the same time as a nose flute.
Some observers thought that Kirk's bizarre onstage appearance and simultaneous multi-instrumentalism were just gimmicks, especially when coming from a blind man, but these opinions usually vanished when Kirk actually started playing. He used the multiple horns to play true chords, essentially functioning as a one-man saxophone section. Kirk insisted that he was only trying to emulate the sounds he heard in his mind.
Kirk was also a major exponent and practitioner of circular breathing. Using this technique, Kirk was not only able to sustain a single note for virtually any length of time; he could also play 16th-note runs of almost unlimited length, and at high speeds. His circular breathing ability enabled him to record Concerto For Saxophone on the Prepare Thyself To Deal With A Miracle LP in one continuous take of about 20 minutes' playing with no discernible “break” for inhaling. His long-time producer at Atlantic Jazz, Joel Dorn, believes he should have received credit in The Guinness Book of World Records for such feats (he was capable of playing continuously “without taking a breath” for far longer than exhibited on that LP), but this never happened.
The Case Of The 3-Sided Dream in Audio Color was a unique album in jazz and popular music recorded annals. It was a two-LP set, with Side 4 apparently “blank,” the label not indicating any content. However, once word of “the secret message” got around among Rahsaan's fans, one would find that about 12 minutes into Side 4 appeared the first of two telephone answering machine messages recorded by Kirk, the second following soon thereafter (but separated by more blank grooves). The surprise impact of these segments appearing on “blank” Side 4 was lost, of course, on the CD reissue of this album. These spoken-word segments reflected the tenor of the times, so to speak, with the rather pessimistic theme that humanity had “blown” its chance to live in a world of peace and harmony. But this was entirely in keeping with the fact that, despite his loss at an early age of his visual acuity, Rahsaan was very much on top of societal developments, racial and economic injustice and disparity. (Indeed, he had participated many years previously in protests against the failure of TV show hosts like Merv Griffin to hire any non- white musicians.) He gleaned information on what was happening in the world via audio media like radio and the sounds coming from TV sets. His later recordings often incorporated his spoken commentaries on current events, including Richard M. Nixon's involvement in Watergate. The 3-Sided Dream album was a “concept album,” somewhat akin to the Beatles' “psychedelic” phase in the incorporation of “found” or environmental sounds and tape loops, tapes being played backwards, etc. Snippets of Billie Holiday singing are also heard briefly. The album even confronts the rise of influence of computers in society, as Rahsaan threatens to pull the plug on the machine trying to tell him what to do.
In 1975, Kirk suffered a major stroke which led to partial paralysis of one side of his body. Despite this, he continued to perform, modifying his instruments himself to enable him to play with only one arm. At a live performance at Ronnie Scott's club in London he even managed to play two instruments, and carried on to tour internationally and even appear on TV.
He died from a second stroke in 1977 after performing at the Bluebird nightclub in Bloomington, Indiana.
NOTE: This is an excerpt from the biography Bright
Moments : The Life and Legacy of Rahsaan Roland Kirk, published by
Welcome Rain (2000).
"Who has the hippest chops in the world?" --Roland Kirk, "Hip Chops"
Throughout the sixties and early seventies Roland
was a ubiquitous presence on the New York jazz scene. He was great in jam
sessions but if he was ever challenged, or if anyone tried to mess with
him, he would rise to the occasion and forget it!" Dan Morgenstern said
with a chuckle. "One thing about him that made him like the old-timers
was his competitiveness. In that way he was a throwback to guys like Roy
Eldridge and Hot Lips Page who would excel in that kind of situation. Roland
always sounded terrific and vital with a certain directness that sightless
people often have. He was a hard act to follow. That's why musicians might
mutter about him being a circus act. Roland got to people. He would really
break it up."
"Rahsaan could play any style - classical,
straight ahead or swing. He played the finish off the saxophone. And the
way he played flute! He gave me the impetus to blend styles. Even if you
couldn't stand him, you had to respect Rahsaan," Grover Washington insisted.
"He came ready. He lived it every day - walkin' and talkin' it. Rahsaan
was passionate and full of life. He swung hard. When you got up on the
bandstand with him, it wasn't about a cutting session. He would always
share his knowledge and love of the music with you. He'd be hollering the
changes while he was playing, to make you more comfortable."
Not everyone who had the opportunity to jam
with Kirk felt the same way. Dave Liebman, whose distinctive tenor and
soprano sax was a key component in funk and fusion ensembles led by Miles
Davis and Chick Corea, found Kirk anything but "comfortable" to play with.
In his speedy staccato Brooklyn-ese Dave recalled a run-in with Rahsaan
that was more a harsh lesson than a bright moment.
"Bob Moses is a very old friend of mine and
was playing (drums) with Rahsaan," Liebman explained. "Moses helped me
get into the scene when I was 16 or 17 years old. He invited me down to
the Showboat, a famous jazz club in Philadelphia where they were playing.
This was in '64 or '65. I was a kid. I was just 18. Anyway, I ended up
on the bandstand and Rahsaan turns around and calls ''All The Things You
Are' First note is F#. 1-2-1-2-3-4!' Boom! Then he points at me. Forget
it! I fumbled something and crawled into a hole. I probably couldn't do
it now! The next tune was 'December Song.' It was something I sort of knew.
I played the melody and that was it. He was doing the gunfighter at the
OK Corral/cutting session stuff they did in those days. Now it's more like,
(in a laid back voice) 'Hey, What do you know?' But with Rahsaan it was
sink or swim. In a way he was making a point. If you don't know what you're
doing, don't get up here. So it was a lesson. In general his vibe could
be pretty nasty. He would harangue audiences but I had a certain amount
of respect for him. He was a fantastic musician capable of anything, but
his taste wasn't up my alley
"It could have been a simple case of retribution
for all the years of neglect and negligence Rahsaan suffered," Joel Dorn
offered in response to Liebman's tale of humiliation "If there was a white
guy that everybody was talking about, Rahsaan would take care of him. What's
so hard to understand about that? Was it a waste of time and energy? Yeah,
but it's a natural result of every action calling for an equal and opposite
reaction." "It was the time of black power and black pride,"
recalled Mark Davis. "When Rahsaan would hold that saxophone up after a
solo, he was really saying, 'Here I am! The Miracle of the Saxophone!'
He would frequently challenge anybody to come up on the stage and play
with him. Rahsaan really had it in for Herbie Mann and it was justified
in a way. His point was that only a white guy could make a living playing
the flute. Until Hubert Laws came along black musicians had to play all
the reeds and maybe once in a while they'd get a flute solo. If Rahsaan
was playing a festival with Herbie, he would dare him to come on stage
and play the flute with him. Of course he never did."
Many of Rahsaan's friends and fans believed
he was denied the recognition he deserved on the instrument. One night
at Lennie's on the Turnpike after Kirk played a stunning flute solo on
"My Cheri Amour," Lennie Sogoloff, the jovial proprietor quipped, "If Herbie
Mann tried that he'd sprain his tongue."
Les Scher first heard Roland Kirk live at the
Village Gate on a double bill with Herbie Mann. At the time, Mann had a
hit with "Comin' Home Baby" and was drawing big crowds. "His real name
is Herbert Solomon," Les pointed out. "Rahsaan used to say Herbie changed
his name because that's the only way he could prove he was a man! Rahsaan
was a much better flute player. He was a heavy- duty cat. He completely
blew Herbie Mann off the stage." After the show Les claimed he was "shaking
and shaking." Just a lad of eighteen, Scher was "too afraid to approach
him" so he watched sheepishly from the doorway as Rahsaan put his instruments
away."
"Rahsaan, like Mohammad Ali had an accurate
perception of himself as being on top. He worked very hard to get there.
When he really arrived and knew what his position was, he always gave credit
to his predecessors and to other musicians of the time who were putting
a real, sincere effort into what they were doing. He always dug Yusef,
Pharoah and Trane," Mark Davis said.
Pianist Larry Willis remembered experiencing
Kirk for the first time at Count Basie's on 132nd Street and 7th Ave. in
Harlem: "He came on the bandstand and scared everybody to death," Willis
recalled with a laugh. "I saw other horn players putting their instruments
back in their cases!"
Although Rahsaan was branded "way-out" by the
mainstream, the avant-garde remained hesitant to embrace him as one of
their own. Bassist Burnie Loring claimed that even in his scuffling days
in the Midwest Kirk was capable of "playing the most modern and exotic
stuff you ever heard - as avant-garde as anything these days in Manhattan."
"Kirk doesn't fit into the avant-garde," Chris
Welch proclaimed in Melody Maker. "Yet he is truly one of the only free
players in jazz today." The term "free" became a yardstick by which musicians
like Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor and Anthony Braxton measured the spirit
and intensity of their creative output.
"The real Free/Avant-Garde cats loved him,"
Steve Turre claimed. "Pharoah, Archie, the Art Ensemble, all loved him.
When we worked in Chicago everybody came down to see him. They recognized
what he was doing but the press didn't because he played all the music.
Rahsaan didn't express only one sentiment of feeling."
While shopping at Tower Records in the Village
one August afternoon I bumped into the brilliant composer/multi-instrumentalist
Anthony Braxton. With his arms overflowing with books and discs he still
managed to poke through the Ornette Coleman section with a spare finger.
"Mr. Kirk was very inspirational and always
helpful to the young guys," Braxton said, bubbling with enthusiasim. "I
used to go see him in Chicago and he'd let me sit in on the last set of
the night. My first performance in New York was actually with him at the
Village Vanguard! We played 'Take The A Train'," he recalled fondly.
"We used to talk a lot about the avant-garde,
which he was quite capable of carrying out, but it wasn't part of his musical
ethic," Michael Cuscuna explained.
"That's what freedom's all about learnin' somethin' then throwin' it away."-- Roland Kirk
"A lot of the so-called 'free' musicians weren't
hip to Rahsaan because he could go further out than any of them and at
the same time he insisted you do your homework. For most of those cats
it wasn't by choice it was by chance," Steve Turre emphasized. "If you
couldn't play the changes he'd get on your case. He'd say, 'How come you
wigglin' your fingers when you haven't played the tune yet?'
"Rahsaan would always extend the opportunity
to younger musicians to sit in. Once in Detroit this guy sat in with a
bass clarinet. It was obvious this person liked Coltrane, but only the
outside stuff. We played 'Impressions' (the original recording featured
Eric Dolphy, the master of the bass clarinet) and immediately this young
person started honkin' and squeakin'. Rahsaan was cool. Afterwards he said,
'OK, We played what you wanna play. I know you like Coltrane, so let's
do 'Giant Steps' 1-2-3-4! and this guy completely folded. Then Rahsaan
gave him a tongue-lashing. He said, 'How can you be into John Coltrane's
music and you ain't learned 'Giant Steps'? You better go home and learn
it! I don't mind you goin' outside but it's gotta mean somethin'. Don't
go outside just 'cause you can't go nowhere else!"
In the liner notes to The Man Who Cried
Fire, a posthumous compilation of live recordings culled from the Keystone
Korner, Rahsaan spoke about his relationship with John Coltrane: "One thing
that has never been written about is the closeness of John Coltrane and
myself. We were very close. This was dismissed for what reason I don't
know. We used to get together and talk about reeds and music. One night
we were down in the Village listening to Freddie Hubbard and Max Roach
and John talked about how he felt up against the wall in his music because
a lot of musicians had told him what he was doing wasn't hip enough."
"Roland was always willing to listen to someone
he respected when they changed direction. He'd always give them the benefit
of the doubt. He called me when Coltrane's "Ascension" came out," Cuscuna
recalled. "He'd been listening to it all day and wasn't sure about it.
He was struggling with it because it was Coltrane and he loved and respected
him. Some of the other musicians just said it was bullshit! He would never
dismiss anything like that. Whereas they wouldn't put the effort into understanding
what someone else was trying to do."
Drummer Max Roach believed the music of the
'40's was the prime source of inspiration for Kirk and his peers: "John
Coltrane is an extension of the whole '40's thing and all of a sudden everybody's
that. McCoy Tyner, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, they are all extensions of the
'40's and the reason why they are who they are today is because of the
time they spent analyzing and feeding off the '40's."
Kirk loved and respected Coltrane dearly. He
openly praised the man as a true giant of his time. Inspired not only by
Coltrane's colossal tone and hip chops but by his spiritual philosophy,
Rahsaan paid tribute to Trane throughout his career as part of his mission
to promote and preserve black classical music.
Shocked by the news of Trane's sudden death
in July 1967, author Bill Cole, in need of solace, went to hear Roland
Kirk play the Both/And Club in San Francisco. Kirk dedicated a soulful
medley for his fallen friend that spurred Cole to declare it "was by far
the best thing I ever heard him play."
This new improvised piece soon became the centerpiece
to Roland's set. "A Tribute To John Coltrane" was recorded a year after
its conception at the Newport Jazz Festival in July 1968. As Kirk explained
in his introduction, the music was "a memorial and a short medley of tunes
that John Coltrane left here for us to learn." Beginning on tenor with
an introspective rendition of Billy Strayhorn's "Lush Life" Kirk switches
over to manzello, mimicking Coltrane's spiraling soprano on Mongo Santamaria's
classic "Afro-Blue." Finally Roland blasts off with a furious tenor solo
on Coltrane's own "Bessie's" Blues." Giving it every ounce he's got, Kirk
was supported by one of his sturdiest rhythm sections: Ron Burton on piano,
Vernon Martin's punchy bass and Jimmy Hopps on drums. On his frequent tours
of Europe Kirk often showcased his maniacal manzello with a soaring rendition
of Coltrane's modal masterpiece "My Favorite Things."
Back in 1964, while at Oberlin College, Todd
Barkan stopped by the Sheraton Motor Inn on Euclid Avenue in Cleveland
to see Roland Kirk play with the 3 Blind Mice. "They were outstanding,"
Barkan exclaimed. "But across the street at Leo's Casino was the John Coltrane
Sextet with Eric Dolphy and Wes Montgomery!" Underage at the time, Todd
had to don a humiliating pink plastic Hawaiian lei and sip soft drinks
at the bar, but that hardly phased him - he showed up for all six nights.
"One night Rahsaan sat in on the second set.
They played 'Impressions' for about two and a half-hours. Those long solos
just drove Elvin and McCoy nuts. At one point Elvin got up and left, went
somewhere to get high and then came back a half an hour later. You couldn't
hear the piano that well, or the bass. Those guys played hard and got frustrated.
They had blood on their hands. By the time Rahsaan sat in there was nobody
left in the place because by that point in his career, Coltrane was just
too heavy for most people. These guys would bring their dates thinking
they'd hear 'Chim Chim Cherie' or 'My Favorite Things.' Trane would come
out and play three notes at once on his horn and by the time the second
tune began the house was half-empty," Todd said with a chuckle. "It was
just too 'out' there. It was some of the greatest music ever made and there
were only twelve people there to hear it!"
Kirk knew all too well that the music's brightest
moments were sadly often witnessed by just a handful. Years before, he
himself heard Charlie Parker playing to a near empty house in Saint Louis. On one unusually slow night at the Village
Vanguard in the early seventies Rahsaan told the small but devoted crowd;
"We really appreciate your kind attention. Sometimes crowds are very unruly,
especially when we just have chairs and tables. Chairs and tables and rats
and roaches. They can be really unruly," he joked. "They don't respond
at all!" But even when faced with "chairs and tables and rats and roaches"
Rahsaan always played like there was no tomorrow.
"I feel guilty when I play and don't give it
my all like Rahsaan did," Michael Max Flemming confessed. "I know it's
possible, I was there. I saw it. It was like a hydrogen bomb going off,
over and over again, night after night. He wasn't happy unless he made
the people scream after every song. Maybe it was because he couldn't see
the look on their faces. He had to hear them yell."
"To him there was an inner integrity to the
music," Mark Davis imparted. "Some guys were faking it. To them it was
no big deal. So what - they're faking it and making a little money. But
to Rahsaan, they were swiping at the core. He hated phonies. He used to
say if Diana Ross was walking on the other side of the street, he'd cross
over, just to hit her with his stick. How dare she represent Billie Holiday
in 'Lady Sings The Blues." She had no voice!"
"I had to go to the movies and pay
the price to see Diana Ross
mess up Lady Day
Damn! That was a helluva price to pay
That broad's so skinny
You can put her in a violin case!
Damn, what a terrible waste! She was doin' alright
when she was singin' with The Supremes
Why'd she have to go and mess up
my Lady Day Dreams?"
- Rahsaan Roland Kirk, "Clickety Clack"
Rahsaan had zero tolerance for poseurs and wannabes.
He expected musicians to do their homework before getting on stage with
him. When sitting in at a jam session if you didn't know what you were
doing, it would be wise to listen and learn, especially when the likes
of Rahsaan Roland Kirk held court.
"I'd been playin' some flute and trumpet and
he said, 'You should come sit in with me,'" Bruce Massey remembered. "I
constantly saw people sit in with him but I never had the balls to do it
'cause you never knew what he's gonna call out. If he called out an Ellington
number and you don't know it, you're toast! I saw a guy come in with a
flute that didn't know a Sidney Bechet number. He said, 'What? You don't
know that? Well, what do you know?' The guy said, 'A Train.' Rahsaan said,
'What key do you need it in?' He just killed this kid. Afterward the kid
was just shakin'."
Cellist, composer and arranger Akua Dixon of
Quartette Indigo (and wife of Steve Turre) recalled a humorous/pathetic
scene that went down one night at the Vanguard; "This chick had begged
him to let her sit in. Rahsaan had a siren and when somebody played too
long, he'd go ahead and blow the whistle on them. She was up on the bandstand
and he blew the whistle but she just kept honkin' and squeakin'. Now there's
good 'outside' and there's 'honkin' and squeakin'. As far as Rahsaan was
concerned she was 'honkin' and squeakin'. He blew the whistle on her again
and she didn't get off the stage. She was really movin' all over the place.
She came next to him and he reached over and grabbed the mouthpiece right
off her sax! She started cryin' 'Oh Rahsaan! Please! Why'd you do that
to me?' He was amazing! He could hear things so well. He could tell right
where she was. It wasn't like he was fumbling. He just reached over for
that mouthpiece and grabbed it!"
"I remember goin' home mad after Sonny Stitt
spanked my butt. Ain't no talkin' about it after the man spank you. Just
say 'Later, I'll be back!' Rahsaan told his audience at the Jazz Workshop
in Boston in 1972.
"After he got to know me he would allow me
to come sit in. I asked him to play a blues so I could get through it and
he called the fastest blues in the key of D flat you ever heard!" Byard
Lancaster said with laugh.
"He would never put a guy down if he was tryin',"
Burnie Loring explained. "Rahsaan was never harsh to a weak player. He
made you play better! He was supportive of honest people. But if he thought
you were pretentious, he'd take you apart."
Bill McLarney recalled a night at the Jazz
Workshop when a friend of Kirk's begged him to invite his poet/girlfriend
up to the stage to read, while the band improvised behind her. "She got
up and did a really dumb poem about her cat. It was really out of place,
but the band tried to do something behind it. Some guy in the audience
starting insulting her with half-sexist, half-racist hippie-dip comments.
Rahsaan suddenly stopped the band and said, 'You can think whatever you
want to about this lady's poem. But she's doin' somethin'! What can you
do brother? You got an instrument? Bring it up here and play it! Can you
sing? Come on up here and sing. Can you tell a joke? Come on up and tell
one. Can you fight? Then come on up here and box with me!' He completely
shut the guy down in an instant," Bill said with a laugh. 'She's got more
courage than you got brother!' he said." From Kirk's point of view, it made no difference
what you did, whether you were a plumber or a caligrapher, it was your
commitment to your work, your art and life that mattered most. Rahsaan's
manic drive and obsessive nature was simply too much for most people. His
habit of dominating the scene often drew accusations of grandstanding from
his fellow musicians. But unless provoked, Rahsaan was not in the routine
of deliberately shredding his peers. He never purposely went looking for
someone to burn. In reality Rahsaan had developed a greater musical vocabulary
and ability to express himself than most musicians could imagine. At times
he was certainly was guilty of being "over-enthusiastic." One night at the Vanguard, Frank Foster watched
knowingly as Kirk pulled the rug out from under alto saxophonist Sonny
Red Kyner. "He was playing a gig with his group when Rahsaan walked in."
Foster said, unable to recall whether Sonny invited Kirk to sit in or if
Rahsaan muscled his way onto the bandstand. Either way, it wasn't long
before Kirk had the audience in the palm of his hand. "Naturally the crowd
went wild," Frank said. "Sonny Red bore it for a while but then became
angry because the crowd was goin' bonkers over Rahsaan. He packed up his
horn and left his own engagement. Sonny Red just walked out and Rahsaan
finished his gig!"
Cecilia Foster was also in the crowd that night
with her husband: "It was the last set of the evening when Rahsaan came
up and joined him," Cecilia recalled. "The people went wild. They were
so exited over him that Sonny Red packed up his bags and went home! It
was his gig! I said, 'Rahsaan, the man left - You ran him out of his gig!'
He said, 'I didn't run him out! He invited me up to play but since he's
gone, we might as well finish his gig, right?' I said, 'I don't believe
you!' He said, 'the people paid to come in, they gotta hear some music!'
John Stubblefield remembered a bad scene opening
for Rahsaan when he used to blow sax with the Basic Black Band: "He wouldn't
let us back on stage!" Stubblefield grumbled. "He played for two and a
half-hours and the people were mesmerized. We were mad 'cause we couldn't
get back on to play. I don't know why I even bothered to wait around for
him to get off the bandstand. When he came in the dressing room we were
sitting there waiting, it was like he could see everybody or feel them.
How he knew I was in that dressing room, I don't know! He said, 'John,
How do you feel?' I said, 'I don't feel that well.' He could hear the anger
in my voice. I said, 'Rahsaan, with all due respect and sincerity, we were
under contract to play another set.' He just started laughin'. I said that
I didn't find it very funny. But he'd cut you up. I didn't know Rahsaan
was that competitive. I really don't think it stemmed from insecurity.
I talked with Mary Lou Williams the next day. I said, 'Rahsaan drove us
nuts! We had our fans there. [Harmonica legend] Sugar Blue played with
us that night. He was killin'!' Mary Lou said, 'That's been goin' on a
long time. Rahsaan has driven lots of people against the wall.'"
• Rahsaan Roland Kirk, who
would have been 80 this year, was a boundary-pushing virtuoso on
multiple wind instruments (sometimes at once). It certainly rubbed off
on Steve Turre, who apprenticed with Kirk in the 1970s. Turre has become
a monster player himself, and also specializes in multiple horns — both
the trombone and the conch shell.
Jazz Night In America follows Turre to Jazz at Lincoln Center, where he's assembled a monster lineup to celebrate one of his major influences.
Rahsaan Roland Kirk is one of the most singular,
thoroughly unique musicians – and characters – in the annals of 20th
century music. His story stands in vivid relief as one of triumph over
tragedy, laced with enormous wells of humor and pathos. Filmmaker Adam
Kahan has produced a remarkable documentary on Kirk, “The Case of the
Three-Sided Dream” and I was fortunate to catch a screening last spring
during the DC Film Festival. “The Case of the Three-Sided Dream” is
slated to be released on May 31, and I’ll let Adam tell you more about
that and his motivation for chronicling this one-of-a-kind figure.
We are about to make the film available commercially through Vimeo on
Demand (streaming and download, May 1), itunes (streaming and download,
May 31) and on DVD through Amazon in the fall. If you can mention that,
that would be great. Here is a link to Vimeo-
What motivated you to produce a documentary on Rahsaan Roland Kirk?
First and foremost, Rahsaan spoke to me on an emotional level. I knew nothing about jazz (liked music, but had a pretty limited view
– weaned on classic rock, moved on to punk rock, didn’t know much
more). I knew I wanted to get into jazz, so I decided to pick up a few
records at a garage sale (this was in San Francisco, 1989). I picked up a
Louis Armstrong record, one by Count Basie,
and The Best of Rahsaan Roland Kirk on Atlantic records. The record
just had a head shot of him on the cover, no visuals cuing the three
horns or anything else. I was in for a surprise… I still don’t think
I’ve listened to those other two records… I ended up playing that
Rahsaan record until the needle wore out the grooves. I had just broken
up with my girlfriend, had moved out, and was living alone in a dismal
apartment on the bad side of town. I just kept playing that record, and I
remember specifically – Lady’s Blues, which was a Rahsaan with strings
arrangement, with him on the flute. In a way, he got me through a rough
time. And I was hooked.
His music is so emotional, really comes from the guts and hits you in
that same place. Then on top of that, he has this super-human,
virtuosic ability as a player. Then, on top of that – when I started
reading about his life story, and all the obstacles he faced, and
overcame, well that’s when I decided to make the film. He is so rich on
so many levels – musically, visually, life story… Just so far beyond. A
film on Rahsaan seemed not only like a no-brainer, but a MUST.
I am still trying to get enough momentum up to do a bio-pic on
Rahsaan and do have a script (my momentum isn’t the problem actually, it
is the need for an executive producer and $$). That is a conversation
I’d still like to have with someone… As I am sure you know, his story is
just so rich, there is so much material there. It’s a field day for a
filmmaker/writer/producer.
How long did it take for this documentary project to be completed?
This project took a long time… It’s a little tricky to say. I actually
started in 1999 when I moved back to New York form France. I was talking
about Rahsaan to my friend Reed Anderson, and saying how someone should
make a film on him, and then my friend says – YOU should make a film on
him. So I opened a phone book (remember those?!) and found the phone
number for Joel Dorn -the legendary Atlantic Records producer and
Rahsaan’s partner in crime for so many years. (Joel’s liner notes were
also a huge inspiration for me to do this film.) Joel was a great guy
and very open and into the project. We did some interviews. He
introduced me to Dorthaan. He introduced me to Steve Turre.
John Kruth was just finishing his book on Rahsaan at the time and he
was gracious enough to share all of his Rahsaan contacts with me, so I
got to Ron Burton, Walter Perkins, Hilton Ruiz, and
then even [first wife] Edith Kirk and of course [son] Rory Kirk, and so
many more. It took me about 5 years to get a pretty much finished
version of the film done. But then it just sat on the shelf, largely
because I could not get funding to license all of the music and archival
material. Years passed (8 to be precise) and I picked it back up in
2012 and decided I had to push it through to finish. But after all that
time, the old interviews looked really dated and the production quality
was not good at all. They were really unacceptable from a visual quality
standpoint, and I think that is why the film in its original version
did not gain enough traction. So I decided to remake the film entirely. I
re-shot all the interviews, but the problem was – some of the people
had passed away, notably – Joel Dorn, Edith Kirk, Hilton Ruiz, Trudy Pitts, Frank Foster Walter Perkins
and Bruce Woody. So these people are not in the film! It was a tough
choice, but again, I felt (and still feel) that the film was not being
taken seriously because of the low-quality of these interviews, so I had
to take them out. I re-shot with all who were still around (Dorthaan,
Rory, Steve Turre, Ron Burton…) and the film started to have “legs” as
they say. I finished it in 2014. It took me two years to remake it (of
course then I knew exactly what the story was, what clips I wanted to
use, etc.) I should also mention that we will include Joel in the DVD
extras.
What was your process for putting this film together, from start to finish?
It really started with finding and engaging all of the people from
Rahsaan’s world, starting with Joel and then all of the others.
Simultaneously I had to unearth the archival footage of him. Now, on the
internet, it is pretty easy to find stuff. But when I started (again –
’99), it wasn’t so easy. So every new piece of footage was a jewel. I
also found some stuff that is still not on the internet and I don’t
think will ever be – it’s only in my film! Some really rare stuff like –
well for one – home movies that Dorthaan Kirk gave me, also a
post-stroke performance on Ken Kesey’s farm in 1977, and the biggie –
his performance on the Ed Sullivan show with an all star band… (you’ll
have to see the film to find out who… though I can tell you – one of the
guys in the clip starts with a Charles and ends with a Mingus… but
there are other giants with him on that date too…) Then it became about
putting the puzzle together. Also, I had some audio recordings of
Rahsaan talking on stage I wanted to use (because his stage persona was
such a big part of what he did). But I didn’t know what to do for these
segments for video, for what we would actually see in the film while we
hear Rahsaan talking. The obvious would have been (like most
documentaries) to do some slow pans into still pictures of Rahsaan, a la
Ken Burns, or every other filmmaker. But because Rahsaan was anything
but obvious, because he would never do the conventional, or what is
expected, or what was easy, I wanted the film to take the same approach.
So panning in to photos was out of the question. After much thought and
many unsuccessful ideas/tries, I found a great animator/artist, (named
Mans Swanberg) who really “got” Rahsaan. So we have these wonderful
cosmic animated passages in the film that he created (one reviewer
describes them as Fat Albert meets Yellow Submarine…) The rest was a lot
of editing, massaging… Above all – I wanted to show Rahsaan in the
film. So we include long passages of music and of him talking. After
all, he is the star of the show.
What new facets did you discover about Rahsaan as you were researching for this project?
I read a lot about Rahsaan. All the liner notes, the book by John Kruth,
another book by a French writer named Guy Cosson, and… there is a guy
name George Bonifacio… Joel Dorn connected me to him in the early
goings. George is the self-appointed (I believe) archivist for an
ambitious collection of Rahsaan stuff, so to speak – newspaper
clippings, dates, photos, recordings… He has a dense pile of articles on
Rahsaan that he made available to me. There are so many great stories
about Rahsaan that I discovered, and just could not get in the film
unfortunately. Things like – Rahsaan driving a car (yes he was blind and
drove a car), getting arrested for hijacking a plane (no he didn’t do
that, but was arrested as a suspect because someone thought he as going
to), Rahsaan breathing under water, and through his ears, his anger and
outrage about the way the musicians and his music (Jazz, what he called –
Black Classical Music) were treated in this country. So many things…
the practical joker side of him (he had one of those hand buzzers that
would shock you when you shook hands with him), and all the deep and
sincere love that his fellow musicians, family and friends had for him.
They really loved him. After making this film, I also realized that, at
the very core of his being, this man was a pure Blues musician.
Given what you learned about him throughout this process, did
your perception of Rahsaan Roland Kirk and his impact change at all
from start to finish?
My perception grew deeper, because Rahsaan was so very deep. And my
appreciation grew deeper. Impact is a tough one. He definitely had an
impact on what Joel Dorn called “a small core of lunatics”, but I still
think he is largely under appreciated, and not known nearly as widely as
he really should be. Knowledge of him and his legacy is always growing.
Is it enough? I don’t think so. I still think he has not gotten his
“just due” so to speak. Most or all of the people in the film agree. His
friend Mark Davis told me – “part of my image of fairness in the world,
was that Rahsaan was going to get the recognition he so deserved… [and
when that did not happen]… it was a message that – life sucks and it
doesn’t matter what you do, who you are…” Mark is not necessarily a
pessimistic guy, he is in fact a beautiful human being, but he, like
most of the people from the Rahsaan world, and certainly Rahsaan
himself, were really perplexed and deeply bothered by the fact that
Rahsaan did not achieve wider acclaim. Someone once mentioned Rahsaan
and Buddy Rich to Edith Kirk in the same breath, and
she responded – “Oh Buddy Rich, we can beat him any day!” I think she
was right! And then I think of all the recognition for some of the jazz
giants like Miles, Trane, Monk, Duke Ellington… these
guys are “A list” jazzers for sure. And their names are widely known
outside of jazz. Yes – they deserve to be at the top of the pile by all
means, but most of us (and now I’m talking about those in the Rahsaan
world, the small core of lunatics who Joel also described as “a box of
broken cookies”), we feel that Rahsaan should be there too. And he is
not.
Ultimately what impressions are you striving to convey to those who experience The Case of the Three-Sided Dream?
This is a guy not to be missed. Don’t fall asleep on this guy. He is a
beautiful, spiritual, unique individual with a one of a kind legacy. He
is someone you want to check out.
Racism, Blindness and Paralysis Could Not Stop the Unrelenting Rahsaan Roland Kirk
Multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk fought for
racial equality, for fair treatment of disabled persons, and for greater
appreciation of jazz.
(From "The Case of the Three Sided Dream," directed by Adam Kahan
/ Chuck Stewart)
Director Adam Kahan discusses his documentary, “The Case of the Three Sided Dream,”
about multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Kirk was not only a
musician but was also a fighter for racial equality and for fair
treatment of disabled persons (he was made blind as an infant by a
wrongly administered eye medication). He also started a political
movement to get more jazz, which he called Black Classical Music, on
television. At the apex of his career Rahsaan suffered a debilitating
stroke, which left half of his body paralyzed, yet he continued to play,
record and tour, with the use of only one hand, literally until the day
he died. “The Case of the Three Sided Dream” is playing July 26 at Rooftop Films Brookfield Place (formerly World Financial Center).
The film will be released world wide and will be a joint
release by Monoduo Films, Vimeo on Demand, Syndicado and Arthaus.
It will be available to stream and download on Vimeo On Demand May 1,
available on iTunes May 31 and on DVD this Fall. Further screenings are
also planned for later this year in New York, LA, Toronto and Europe.
"Y'know, Music is a beautiful thing.
When I'm reincarnated, I'm gonna come back as a musical note!
That way can't nobody capture me.
They can use the hell out of me
but ain't nothin' too much they can do to me.
They can mess me up. They can play the wrong note.
They can play a C, but they can't really destroy a C.
All it is, is a tone.
So I'm gonna come back as a note!"
— Rahsaan Roland Kirk
Yes yes . . . .
You know it's good to be in a place that feels like you're in your house, you
know?
Now, it's a beautiful thing, we're glad you people are assembled here with us
on this Saturday night . . .
You know what I mean? You don't feel like Saturday night people.
Some Saturday night people, that's the only night they get out and they act
like it.
You know like when you cage something up and when it gets out, they act like
it,
that's the way most Saturday night people act.
Now, we would like to think of some very beautiful Bright Moments. You know
what I mean?
Bright Moments . . . .
Bright Moments is like . . . eating your last pork chop in London, England,
because you ain't gonna get no more . . . cooked from home.
Bright Moments is like being with your favorite love and you're all sharing
the same ice cream dish.
And you get mad when she gets the last drop.
And you have to take her in your arms and get it the other way.
Bright Moments.
That's too heavy for most of you all because you all don't know about that kind
of love.
The love you all have been taught about is the love in those magazines.
And I am fortunate that I didn't have to look at magazines.
Bright Moments.
Bright Moments is like seeing something that you ain't ever seen in your life
and you don't have to see it but you know how it looks.
Bright Moments is like hearing some music that ain't nobody else heard, and
if they heard it they wouldn't even recognize that they heard it because they
been hearing it all their life but they nutted on it, so when you hear it and
you start popping your feet and jumping up and down they get mad because you're
enjoying yourself but those are bright moments that they can't share with you
because they don't know even how to go about listening to what you're listening
to and when you try to tell them about it they don't know a damn thing about
what you're talking about!
Is there any other Bright Moments before we proceed on?
Testify! . . . .
Bright Moments.
Bright Moments.
Bright Moments is like having brothers and sisters and sisterettes and brotherettes
like you all here listening to us.
Clickety clack . . . clickety clack
Bring that man's baby back.
Clickety clack . . . clickety clack
I want my spirit back.
Clickety clack
Bubble music being seen and heard on Saturday night
Blinding the eyes of ones that's supposed to see.
Bubble music, being played and showed, throughout America.
Clickety clack . . . clickety clack
Somebody's mind has got off the goddamn track.
Clickety clack . . . clickety clack
Won't somebody bring the Spirit back?
You didn't know about John Coltrane.
And the beautiful ballad he wrote—wait a minute—
And the beautiful ballad he wrote called "After the Rain".
You didn't know about Lady Day and all the dues that she had to pay.
The Beatles come into the country, they take all the bread,
while the police hittin' black and white folks upside their head.
Tom Jones and Humperdinck got everybody uptight.
They make people that can sing wanna get out and fight.
Clickety clack . . . clickety clack
What is this madness that Nixon has put upon us?
Clickety clack . . . clickety clack
Won't somebody bring the Spirit back?
Who will it be?
Who will it be?
It certainly won't be someone that says that they're free.
Clickety clack . . . clickety clack
Won't somebody bring the Spirit back?
Clickety clack . . . clickety clack . . . clickety clack
Now, a whole lotta things been bothering me, because a lot of people think
that things is cool.
People riding around in those cars and riding them airplanes, pocket full of
money and everybody think that things is cool.
Even old jive president—Accident I mean—would make you think that
things is cool.
But I’m here to tell all o’ y’all, and him, too, that we got a cross that we
must bear, and the cross gets awful heavy. Now there's the black cross, the green cross, the white cross, the double cross,
the criss-cross, and the lost cross.
And the cross gets awful heavy at different times, but one is supposed to keep
on going on and carrying the cross on his shoulder,
because you ain't supposed to let no cross cross you up.
You're supposed to let a cross help you get across.
And if you let a cross help you get across, you won't get crossed up but you'll
be on the cross 'cause you done got across on the cross.
So if you can remember this, you won't get lost on the cross while you're trying
to get across.
So we're just here to let you know about it.
I know that you knew already, 'cause y'all the hippest people in the world,
hip black and white.
But you still know that you got a cross you must deal with.
So when it crosses you up, go on and deal with it,
and leave it alone.
It's a joy to feel the sun upon me
The moon, the stars, they always seem so free Music that makes us cry
Love that money can’t buy
Let’s all search for the reason why Raindrops fall from the sky so small
Can’t you feel the birds sing their song? Everyone has a dream (Everyone has a dream)
Everything has a scheme (Everything has a scheme)
Let’s all search for the reason why Why . . . . oh why?
Why . . . . oh why? Everyone has a dream
Everything has a scheme
Let’s all search for the reason why Music that makes us cry
Love that money can’t buy
Let’s all search for the reason why Everyone has a dream
Everything has a scheme
Let’s all search for the reason why (Now) Music that makes us cry
Love that money can’t buy
Let’s all search for the reason why Why … why … why … why
Why … why … why! Note: The recordings these words are transcribed from may be packaged
in more than one way. For example, the albums Volunteered Slavery and
Blacknuss are available individually but have also been packaged together
in a CD called Left Hook, Right Cross. For more information about Rahsaan
Roland Kirk, this book is available: Kruth, John. Bright
Moments: The Life and Legacy of Rahsaan Roland Kirk. New York, NY: Welcome
Rain Publishers, 2000.
Samplings from the work-in-progress THE CASE OF THE THREE SIDED DREAM. A
documentary on the life, music and legacy of Rahsaan Roland Kirk.
Thanks for watching.rahsaanfilm.com/info@rahsaanfilm.com
THE MUSIC OF RAHSAAN ROLAND KIRK: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH MR. KIRK:
Rahsaan Roland Kirk -'The Case of the 3 Sided Dream in Audio Color’-- LP —Sides A and B:
Rahsaan Roland Kirk and John Cage - Sound?? (1967) [DVD quality]:
A film by Dick Fontaine.
- Roland Kirk in Concert - Collective Improvisation - Playing at the Zoo - Blues - "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square"
In this indispensable DVD, two of the most interesting films ever made modern experimental jazz are included. The first one, " Ornette Coleman Trio", presents Ornette Coleman's famous trio during their visit to Paris in 1966 in order to record the soundtrack of a very nutty-looking Belgium film called "Who's Crazy?".
Realized by Richard "Dick" Fontaine--who is considered to be one of the founding fathers of erotic gay cinema (with such famous titles as "The Days of Greek Gods") and that years later realized the full length film "Art Blakey: The Jazz Messenger"-. the film was made in three days and offers a portrait of the trio that becomes an "ironic essay in dignity in the face of insanity". Ornette, who in this era was one of the leaders of the Jazz Avant-garde movement, faced the challenge with his two fellow musicians by responding with passionate improvisations to the stimuli that reached him from the screen where the images are projected. A priceless testimony to the innovations which revolutionized the world of jazz in the sixties.
The second film, also directed by Fontaine, is a curious and original musical and cinematographic experiment. Its strange title, "Sound??", clearly indicates the objective of the work, which is merely to take advantage of the ideas of an innovative jazzman (Roland Kirk) in order to permit an Avant-garde contemporary (John Cage) to speculate with silence and with sound as two facets of the same reality.
Kirk appears in the film demonstrating his ability to play three saxophones simultaneously, incorporating at the same time recordings of birdsongs or his giving out whistles to the audience in order that they accompany him "in the key of w, if you please". Parallel to this, Cage talks about his concepts and prepares a piece "musical bicycle" with two of his collaborators at the Seville Theatre of London, introducing Kirk's music in an echo chamber in its search for the sound of silence. Two extraordinary examples of immortal Avant-gardism.
Rahsaan Roland Kirk - The Return Of The 5000 Lb. Man (Complete Album):
Rahsaan Roland Kirk-- 'Bright Moments’-- Full LP 1973:
A1. Introduction
2. Pedal Up 3. You'll Never Get To Heaven 4. Clickety Clack 5. Prelude To A Kiss 6. Talk (Electric Nose) 7. Fly Town Nose Blues B1. Talk (Bright Moments) 2. Bright Moments Song 3. Dem Red Beans And Rice 4. If I Loved You 5. Talk (Fats Waller) 6. Jitterbug Waltz 7.Second Line Jump Bass –
Henry Pearson Drums – Robert Shy Engineer – Biff Davies, Ed Barton, Jack Crymes Flute, Saxophone [Tenor], Flute [Nose] – Rahsaan Roland Kirk* Percussion – Joe Habao* Piano – Ron Burton Producer – Joel Dorn Synthesizer – Todd Barkan
Rahsaan Roland Kirk - "Volunteered Slavery”-- (1968) (Composition and arrangement by Rahsaan Roland Kirk):
℗ 1969 Atlantic Recording Corporation for the United States and WEA International Inc. for the world outside of the United States and Canada. Clarinet, Flute, Tenor Saxophone: Rahsaan Roland Kirk Drums: Robert Shy Percussion: Joe "Habao" Texidor Performance: Henry "Pete" Pearson Piano: Ron Burton Recording Engineer: Steph Sulke Composer: Rahsaan Roland Kirk Rahsaan Roland Kirk--"The Black and Crazy Blues":
Rahsaan Roland Kirk--"A Laugh for Rory":
From the LP 'The Inflated Tear' Clarinet, Flute, Horn, Tenor Saxophone: Rahsaan Roland Kirk Drums: Jimmy Hopps Piano: Ron Burton Recording Engineer: Paul Goodman Writer: Rahsaan Roland Kirk Rahsaan Roland Kirk - "The Inflated Tear”-- [Live in Prague, 1967] (Composition by Rahsaan Roland Kirk):
Live at the Fourth Mezinarodni Jazz Festival, Prague, October 19, 1967. Personnel:
Roland Kirk - multiple reeds Ron Burton -piano Steve Novosel - bass Jimmy Hopps - drums
Rahsaan Roland Kirk – 'Natural Black Inventions: Root Strata' Lp:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KO3WSmc5mY
Atlantic – SD 1578
A1 Something For Trane That Trane Could Have Said A2 Island Cry A3 Runnin' From The Trash A4 Day Dream A5 The Ragman And The Junkman Ran From The Businessman They Laughed And He Cried A6 Breath-A-Tron B1 Rahsaanica B2 Raped Voices B3 Haunted Feelings B4 Prelude Back Home B5 Dance Of The Lobes B6 Harder & Harder Spiritual B7 Black Root
Rahsaan Roland Kirk - "I Talk With The Spirits" Lp--1964: Limelight – LS 86008
Tracklist: A1 Serenade To Cuckoo A2a We'll Be Together Again A2b People From "Funny Girl" A3 A Quote From Clifford Brown A4 Trees A5 Fugue'n And Alludin' B1 The Business Ain't Nothin' But The Blues B2 I Talk With The Spirits B3 Ruined Castles B4 Django B5 My Ship From "Lady In The Dark" Roland Kirk - "Volunteered Slavery”-- Live Side B, Recorded At – Newport Jazz Festival,1968:
Tracklist:
Roland's Opening Remarks One Ton Ovation & Roland's Remarks A Tribute To John Coltrane Lush Life Afro-Blue Bessie's Blues Three For The Festival
Roland Kirk - "Rip, Rig & Panic” From "Rip, Rig & Panic" LP--(1965):
Roland Kirk - Tenor Saxophone, Stritch, Manzello, Flute, Siren, Oboe, Castanets Jaki Byard - Piano Richard Davis - Bass Elvin Jones - Drums "Rip means Rip Van Winkle (or Rest in Peace?); it's the way people, even musicians are. They're asleep. Rig means like rigor mortis. That's where a lot of peoples mind are. When they hear me doing things they didn't think I could do they panic in their minds."
--RAHSAAN ROLAND KIRK
Rahsaan Roland Kirk--“Blacknuss”—1972:
Roland Kirk - "The Inflated Tear":
"Blue rol”--Rahsaan Roland Kirk -live performance:
Rahsaan Roland Kirk - "Dorthaan's Walk”: Rahsaan Roland Kirk--"Portrait of those Beautiful Ladies”:
Rahsaan Roland Kirk - "Never Can Say Goodbye” (Composition by Clifton Davis; Arrangement by Rahsaan Roland Kirk):
Rahsaan Roland Kirk (August 7, 1935[2] – December 5, 1977) was an American jazzmulti-instrumentalist who played tenor saxophone, flute
and many other instruments. He was renowned for his onstage vitality,
during which virtuoso improvisation was accompanied by comic banter,
political ranting, and the ability to play several instruments
simultaneously.
Kirk was born Ronald Theodore Kirk[2] in Columbus, Ohio, where he lived in a neighborhood known as Flytown. He felt compelled by a dream to transpose two letters in his first name to make Roland. He became blind at an early age as a result of poor medical treatment.[3][page needed] In 1970, Kirk added "Rahsaan" to his name after hearing it in a dream.
Kirk's musical career spans from 1955 until his death in 1977. He
preferred to lead his own bands and rarely performed as a sideman,
although he did record with arranger Quincy Jones and drummer Roy Haynes and had notable stints with bassist Charles Mingus. One of his best-known recorded performances is the lead flute and solo on Jones' "Soul Bossa Nova", a 1964 hit song repopularized in the Austin Powers films (Jones 1964; McLeod et al. 1997).[citation needed]
Kirk was politically outspoken. During his concerts, between songs he often talked about topical issues, including black history and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. His monologues were often laced with satire and absurdist humor. According to comedian Jay Leno,
when Leno toured with Kirk as Kirk's opening act, Kirk would introduce
him by saying, "I want to introduce a young brother who knows the black
experience and knows all about the white devils .... Please welcome Jay
Leno!"[4]:109
In 1975, Kirk suffered a major stroke which led to partial paralysis
of one side of his body. He continued to perform and record, modifying
his instruments to enable him to play with one arm. At a live
performance at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in London he even managed to play two instruments, and carried on to tour internationally and to appear on television.[citation needed]
His playing was generally rooted in soul jazz or hard bop, but Kirk's knowledge of jazz history allowed him to draw from many elements of the music's past, from ragtime to swing and free jazz. Kirk also absorbed classical influences, and his artistry reflected elements of pop music by composers such as Smokey Robinson and Burt Bacharach, as well as Duke Ellington, John Coltrane and other jazz musicians. The live album Bright Moments (1973) is an example of one of his shows.
Kirk played and collected a number of musical instruments, mainly various saxophones, clarinets and flutes. His main instruments were tenor saxophone supplemented by other saxes, like two obscure saxophones: the stritch (a straight alto sax lacking the instrument's characteristic upturned bell) and a manzello (a modified saxello
soprano sax, with a larger, upturned bell). A number of his instruments
were exotic or homemade. Kirk modified instruments himself to
accommodate his simultaneous playing technique.
He typically appeared on stage with all three horns hanging around
his neck, and at times he would play a number of these horns at once,
harmonizing with himself, or sustain a note for lengthy durations by
using circular breathing.
He used the multiple horns to play true chords, essentially functioning
as a one-man saxophone section. Kirk insisted that he was only trying
to emulate the sounds he heard in his head. Even while playing two or
three saxophones at once, the music was intricate, powerful jazz with a
strong feel for the blues.
Kirk was also an influential flautist, including recorders. He employed several techniques that he developed himself. One technique was to sing or hum into the flute at the same time as playing. Another was to play the standard transverse flute at the same time as a nose flute. He played a variety of other instruments, like whistles, often kept a gong within reach, the clarinet, harmonica, English horn, and was a competent trumpeter.
He had unique approaches, using a saxophone mouthpiece on a trumpet. He
also used many non-musical devices, such as alarm clocks, sirens, or a
section of common garden hose (dubbed "the black mystery pipes"). His
studio recordings used tape-manipulated musique concrète and primitive electronic sounds before such things became commonplace.
Kirk was a major exponent of circular breathing.
Using this technique, he was not only able to sustain a single note for
an extended period; he could also play sixteenth-note runs of almost
unlimited length, and at high speeds. His circular breathing ability
enabled him to record "Concerto For Saxophone" on the Prepare Thyself to Deal With a Miracle
LP in one continuous take of about 20 minutes' playing with no
discernible "break" for inhaling. His long-time producer at Atlantic
Jazz, Joel Dorn, believed he should have received credit in The Guinness Book of World Records
for such feats (he was capable of playing continuously "without taking a
breath" for far longer than exhibited on that LP), but this never
happened.
The Case of the 3 Sided Dream in Audio Color
was a unique album in jazz and popular music recorded annals. It was a
two-LP set, with Side 4 apparently "blank", the label not indicating any
content. However, once word of "the secret message" got around among
Rahsaan's fans, one would find that about 12 minutes into Side 4
appeared the first of two telephone answering machine messages recorded
by Kirk, the second following soon thereafter (but separated by more
blank grooves). The surprise impact of these segments appearing on
"blank" Side 4 was lost on the CD reissue of this album.
He gleaned information on what was happening in the world via audio
media like radio and the sounds coming from TV sets. His later
recordings often incorporated his spoken commentaries on current events,
including Richard Nixon's involvement in the Watergate scandal. The 3-Sided Dream
album was a "concept album" which incorporated of "found" or
environmental sounds and tape loops, tapes being played backwards, etc.
Snippets of Billie Holiday
singing are also heard briefly. The album even confronts the rise of
influence of computers in society, as Rahsaan threatens to pull the plug
on the machine trying to tell him what to do.
Guitarist Jimi Hendrix "idolized" Kirk, and even hoped to collaborate with him one day.[6]
Frank Zappa
had been influenced by Kirk's music to a considerable extent early in
his career. In the liner notes to his 1966 debut album with The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!, Zappa cites Kirk as one of many in a lengthy list of personal musical influences.[7][better source needed] Kirk and Zappa performed live together at least once, at the 1969 Boston Globe Jazz Festival.[8]
David Jackson, of Van der Graaf Generator,
was also highly influenced by the style and technique of Kirk, and he
plays multiple saxophones simultaneously since at least 1969.[9]
T.J. Kirk was a San Francisco-based band named after the three
artists it tributed: Thelonious Monk, James Brown, and Rahsaan Roland
Kirk. Formed by eight-string guitarist Charlie Hunter as a side group to his own self-titled and San Francisco-based band, the band's other members include Scott Amendola, Will Bernard, and John Schott.[12]
http://www.allmusic.com/artist/p6898
"Genre: Jazz – Styles: Post-Bop, Avant-Garde Jazz, Modern Creative,
Soul Jazz, Mainstream Jazz, Jazz Instrument, Saxophone Jazz"
Kernfeld, Barry. "Kirk, Roland." The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, 2nd ed. Ed. Barry Kernfeld. Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online.
Retrieved on 2009-02-01. "The year of his birth has been widely given
as 1936, but his birth certificate gives 1935 and confirms Ronald, not
Roland."
Rebecca Goodman, Barrett J. Brunsman (2005). This Day In Ohio History. Emmis Books. p. 367. ISBN1578601916.
http://www.wnyc.org/story/rahsaan-roland-kirk/
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