Roland Kirk: Limelight/Verve Albums

Reprinted from http://jazzwax.com

With the exception of Sun Ra, few jazz artists were more visually arresting than Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Blind since age 2, Kirk wore dark glasses and often performed with multiple reed instruments hung around his neck or lodged in his mouth. The uninitiated automatically assumed Kirk's music wouldn't be easy to grasp or even likable. The funny thing about Kirk is that his music was always intelligible as well as gentle, whimsical, lyrical and engaging. All those instruments around his neck? He often played them in harmony to create the sound of a reed section.

Kirk's three albums for Limelight, recorded between 1964 and '65, and one for Verve in 1967 were superb examples of his puckish sense of humor, imagination and playing prowess. During this four-year period, Kirk explored his own compositions and began to interpret pop-rock. Jack Tracy, Limelight's producer, may have urged Kirk to give such songs a whirl out of necessity. When I interviewed Jack for my book, Why Jazz Happened, Jack talked about his struggles at Mercury during this period to remain relevant at a time when his bosses were demanding he go out and find four musicians with long hair. Limelight was a jazz subsidiary of Mercury but a flickering presence as the youth market grew increasingly dominant.

Now, Mosaic has released Roland Kirk: The Limelight/Verve Albums on four 180-gram vinyl LPs. What's fascinating about the set is that each of the albums is a singular expression that features a completely different mood and instrumental approach by Kirk. What we learn from this box is that Kirk always defied cliché, even when competing against his previous release. We also learn that the piano was fundamental to his improvisational choices, since Kirk always seems to be conversing directly with the person on keyboard. The sound of these remastered discs—the first Mosaic set to be pressed at Chad Kassem's Quality Record Pressings in Salina, Kansas—is warm, clear and detail-rich, with woody low notes and rounded highs.

Kirk's first album for Limelight was I Talk With the Spirits, recorded in September 1964 and produced by Bobby Scott, with Jack Tracy supervising. Here, Kirk plays flute, alto flute and African wooden flute and is backed by Horace Parlan, who adds a classy soulfulness to the session. Of particular note is Kirk's The Business Ain't Nothin' But the Blues, a slow, raucous work.

On Rip, Rig and Panic, the second Limelight release recorded in January 1965, Kirk's pianist was Jaki Byard, and the results are astonishing, like a flock of birds taking off for flight. They are joined by Richard Davis on bass and Elvin Jones on drums. No Tonic Pres—a tribute to Lester "Pres" Young lacks a tonic or key and takes a stroll on John Coltrane's turf. Another exhilarating listen is the loping Once in a While, on which Kirk plays tenor sax and manzello and stritch all at once, brilliantly tagging The Man That Got Away.

Slightly Latin from November 1965 was produced by Hal Mooney and embraces a few pop-rock hits of the day, including Walk on By, It's All in the Game and Lennon and McCartney's And I Love Her. Kirk's interpretation of the latter is one of the finest jazz interpretations of a Beatles hit. But the approach here is hardly the Latin of George Shearing's albums. The rhythm may be mildly Latin, but Kirk bends each song around his singular approach, turning radio hits into intricate sculptures without losing melody lines. Parlan is again on piano.

On Now Please Don't Cry, Beautiful Edith (Verve), recorded in May 1967, Kirk plays Hal David and Burt Bacharach's Alfiebut slyly adds Sonny Rollins' Alfie's Theme at the end, almost as a political dig, reminding listeners of Sonny's original composition for the film. On this album Kirk is backed by pianist Lonnie Liston Smith. Once again, Kirk plays multiple instruments for texture and harmony. One of the album's high point is Stompin Grounds, a skippy original.

I don't normally listen to vinyl. Most of my albums are in storage and the format just isn't as convenient as iTunes when I'm reporting and writing. For instance, while listening to the Kirk set yesterday, the phone rang and I kept trying to figure out why I couldn't pause the music on my computer. I quickly realized it was the turntable, so I leaned way over the desk, raised the tone arm and answered the cordless phone with the other hand. Despite the momentary inconvenience, my Pete Rose dive for the platter was still worth it given this box's sound.

JazzWax tracks: You'll find Roland Kirk: TheLimelight/Verve Albums (Mosaic), a four 180-gram LP set, here. You can sample tracks from the box there as well.

JazzWax clip: Here's Roland Kirk in 1967 playing My Ship, which he recorded on I Talk With the Spirits, and Creole Love Call...

Used with permission by Marc Myers

Roland Kirk....

Kirk was blinded soon after his birth, and was educated at Ohio State School for the Blind. He played saxophone and clarinet with a school band from the age of twelve, and by 1951 was leading his own group for dances and playing with other bands around the Ohio area. At sixteen he dreamed he was playing three instruments at once, and the next day went to a music shop and tried out all the reed instruments. He was taken to the basement to be shown "the scraps", and found two archaic saxophones which had been used in turn-of-the-century Spanish military bands, the stritch and the manzello; the first is a kind of straight alto sax, and the second looks a little like an alto, but sounds more like a soprano. Kirk took these and worked out a way of playing them simultaneously with the tenor sax, producing three-part harmonyby trick fingering. As there were often slight tuning discrepancies between the three instruments, the resulting sound could be harsh, almost with the characteristic of certain ethnic instruments, and this gave Kirk's music an added robustness. He also used sirens, whistles and other sounds to heighten the drama of his performances.
He made his first album in 1956, but it went virtually unnoticed. Then in 1960, through the help of Ramsey Lewis, he recorded for the Cadet label, and immediately caused controversy.People accused him of gimmmickry, and Kirk defended himself, saying that he did everything for a reason, and he heard sirens and things in his head when he played. He was, in fact, rooted very deeply in the whole jazz tradition, and knew all the early music, including thre work of Jelly Roll Morton (and Fats Waller) in which sirens, whistles, car horns and human voices had figured to brilliant effect. For Kirk, jazz was "black classical music", and he steeped in its wild, untamed spirit; in this he was "pure" - there were virtually no discernible influences from European classical music in his work.
In 1961 he worked with Charles Mingus for four months, playing on the album Oh Yeah and touring with him in California. His international reputation was burgeoning, and after his stint with Mingus he made his first trip to Europe, performing as soloist at the Essen jazz festival, West Germany. From 1963 he began a series of regular tours abroad with his own quartet, and played the first of several residencies at Ronnie Scott's club. For the rest of the 1960s and into the 1970s he led his group the Vibration Society in clubs, concerts and major festivals throughout the USA, Canada, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
In 1975, Kirk had a stroke which partially paralysed one side of his body. With tremendous courage he began performing again with one arm - an almost impossible handicap for a saxophonist - and he managed to tour internationally, play some festivals and appear on TV. In 1977 a second stroke caused his death.
Kirk was much loved, not only by his audiences but also by other musicians. He was unclassifiable: a completely original performer whose style carried in it the whole of jazz history from early New Orleans roots, through swing and bebop, to the abstraction of the 1960s and 1970s avant-garde. Throughout his career he recorded tributes to people he particularly loved, and they included Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Lester Young, Thelonious Monk, Sidney Bechet, Don Byas, Roy Haynes, Charles Mingus, Clifford Brown, Barney Bigard and John Coltrane. Yet he could be classified neither as a traditionalist nor as an avant-gardist; his music was always of the present, but contained the essence of past forms. Even in the 1990s his music does not sound dated - it sounds ever-present, beyond time. Playing one instrument - either tenor sax or the manzello - Kirk showed clearly that he was one of the great improvisers. He was an enthusiast who was always listening and learning, and he was generous in his encouragement of aspiring young musicians. He was a composer of memorable tunes: some of the better-known ones are "From Bechet, Byas and Fats", "No Tonic Pres", "Bright Moments", "Let Me Shake Your Tree", "The Inflated Tear".
J.E. Berendt said that Kirk had "all the wild untutored quality of a street musician coupled with the subtlety of a modern jazz musician", and Michael Ullman wrote: "Hearing him, one can almost feel that music, like the Lord in 'Shine On Me', can 'heal the sick and raise the dead'."

Roland Kirk 1961 - Summertime

Roland Kirk Quartet
Roland Kirk,stritch,manzello,ts,fl,siren
RenÈ Urtreger,p
Pierre Michelot,b
Kenny Clarke, dr
1961-April-17/19
Baden-Baden, Germany,
Stadthalle,
Jazz gehˆrt und gesehen