Rahsaan Roland Kirk (1936-1977) could play a variety of wind instruments simultaneously (including the tenor sax, flute, clarinet, and his modified saxes he called the “manzello” and “stritch”) with great skill and expressiveness. He also perfected circular breathing to the point where he once blew continuously for over two hours. Moreover, he was a post-modernist before the concept even existed, a master not of a single style, but of the entire continuum of jazz, from New Orleans to bop to avant-garde to free, as well as blues, R&B, pop, funk and soul; and he mixed and matched those styles at will to create his own incandescent Esperanto.
These accomplishments alone would seem worthy enough to grant this blind savant instant access to jazz immortality, but the sheer extremity of his musicianship and personality—wildly subversive, freakishly funky—scared people away.
The current CD reissue era, however, has greatly enhanced Kirk’s cult following. A 10-CD Verve box of his complete Mercury recordings in the early sixties, for example, documents some of his best straight ahead playing, but it’s his surreal work during the last decade of his life which truly defines Kirk as one of the greatest eccentric geniuses jazz has ever known. The recent outpouring of reissues on 32 Jazz help bring that era into sharper focus.
The double CD set Left Hook, Right Cross is a pairing of two albums, Volunteered Slavery (originally released in 1969) and Blacknuss (originally released in 1972), which fit together well because they are Kirk’s two most overt attempts to court commercial success. On Blacknuss, he interprets mostly pop/soul hits of the day, such as “What’s Going On,” “Never Can Say Goodbye” and “Take Me Girl, I’m Ready.” Most of the 11 tracks are short and predominantly melodic, so they may serve as a starting point for Kirk neophytes with pop sensibilities. But be warned: Kirk’s unearthly persona is keenly felt throughout. There are scrabbling nose-flute solos—with the most lovely sputtering, grunting, spitting and shouting you are likely to ever hear—on “Ain’t No Sunshine,” “My Girl” and “Which Way Is It Going.” On “One Nation,” someone named Princess Patience Burton vocally harmonizes with Kirk’s tenor in some kind of acid-trip, nonsense dialect that sounds vaguely Asian.
The majestic highlight, is “Old Rugged Cross,” which starts with Kirk’s marvelous, Baptist-goes-bop sermon (“Don’t get crossed up on the cross when you’re trying to get across”). Then Kirk picks up his many saxes and blows a successively faster, gospel-fueled treatise (joined by drums, bass, organ and wah-wah guitar along the way)—without pausing for breath for five minutes—until he climaxes sounding like the entire P-Funk horn section had just found religion.
On Volunteered Slavery, Kirk also visits pop territory, such as Stevie Wonder’s “My Cherie Amour” and Burt Bacharach’s “I Say A Little Prayer.” The latter, dedicated to the then recently assassinated Martin Luther King (“They shot him down to the ground,” shouts Kirk in the intro), segues brilliantly into Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” and “To Dream The Impossible Dream.” But it’s the second half of Slavery, recorded live at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1968, featuring the searing original “One Ton,” and mind-blowing “A Tribute to John Coltrane” (whom Kirk worked with for a period), that makes this disc the more memorable of the set.
There are better Kirk records out there, such as Bright Moments, a live 1973 set (reissued by Rhino in ’93) that shows Kirk at his wild, inflamed best, but Left Hook, Right Cross is an appealing package, mainly because it captures Kirk’s ability to absorb popular styles of his era, deconstruct them, and spit them back out in a subversive, visionary fashion.
