Rahsaan Roland Kirk was many things, but let’s clear
one thing up first – he was a genius. There are those who would tell you that
because he sought to entertain as well as enlighten that his art is somehow
lesser than the intensely serious music of a John Coltrane, a Miles Davis, a
Cecil Taylor. But really, he’s in a line with Duke Ellington, with Charles
Mingus, with Louis Armstrong – not exactly bad company to keep. He was also a
remarkable jazz saxophonist (and player of other reeds as well), on a level
with any of the greats you’d care to name, often using two or three (or more)
horns simultaneously to create his own horn section. You can hear that right
off the bat here with “The Black and Crazy Blues,” or most spectacularly on the
title cut, where he contributes a gorgeous, tender solo interspersed with a
gripping, multi-horn fanfare. And if you want to check out one of his tricks of
technique that allowed him a unique approach to his soloing, listen to the extended
improvisational line he lays down on “Many Blessings.” He just doesn’t stop to
take a breath, because he uses a technique of circular breathing to draw in and
exhale air at the same time. It’s not the first time he does it here, but it
stands out here because the song is a more straightforward blowing tune. He’s
also a traditionalist. You can hear that here most readily in his elegant
reading of Duke Ellington’s “The Creole Love Song” and in the relatively
restrained quartet music that makes up the bulk of this album, which ranges
from light and lovely to the emotional intensity of “The Inflated Tear” itself.
But Rahsaan was also an
avant-gardist in the sense that he was always pushing boundaries to find new
ways to express himself; a surrealist joker always tweaking the noses of those
who thought he could or should do things one specific way; a vaudevillian who
knew how to elicit cheers of delight from audiences while still staying
musically interesting. And that’s where the second album here comes in. Atlantic
Records, Kirk’s musical home for many years, encouraged his experimental bent –
the producer of The Inflated Tear even reports being a little
disappointed when Kirk turned in the first album that didn’t showcase his
wilder, woollier side. But after a string of great (and mostly out of print)
releases for the label, Kirk fulfilled the experimental side of his destiny
with Natural Black Inventions: Root Strata. At first these two albums –
one of his nicest, cleanest, and best and one of his weirdest – seem to be
strange bedfellows, but after a few listens, even the oddness of the later
album just seems like Kirk’s quirks applied to a great set of songs, and the
underlying eccentricities of his personality shine through on the seemingly
“normal” earlier album. And what’s so weird about the second album? Well,
excepting some mostly percussive support from a couple friends, Kirk plays
every single instrument – and he’s credited with 18 plus “bird sounds”
(including the “black mystery pipes” which he describes as “a piece of bamboo
and a yard long metal tube – two pipes are played simultaneously.”) – by
himself, live in the studio, without overdubs. It must have been the most
amazing one-man-band show ever seen, and the fact that he actually made a
terrific, albeit odd, album out of it just goes back again to show the level at
which his genius operated. Mostly he’s recording his own tunes, again working
the serious, the funny, the surreal, and the sentimental right alongside each
other, and again he uses Duke Ellington as a touchstone, employing another
non-percussive instrument (a piano) for the only time on the record, and
creating a gorgeous duet that contextualizes the rest of Kirk’s songs on the
album within a larger continuum of jazz and other black music and culture, one
in which he’s not the sideshow figure he’s sometimes made out to be, but one of
the true giants of the music.
The Inflated Tear is
certainly the place to start with Kirk – it’s one of his best recorded, best
conceived and loveliest album, but time has shown that even if Natural Black
Inventions: Root Strata sold poorly in its first run, Rahsaan Roland Kirk
was absolutely right in his conception, and created a really brilliant work
there, even if it leaves some listeners in the dust. They’ll catch up one day.
- Patrick Brown
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