Roland Kirk
Roland Kirk, aka Rahsaan Roland Kirk (Born: Ronald Theodore Kirk, August 7, 1936, Columbus, Ohio - Died: December 5, 1977, Bloomington, Indiana).
Roland Kirk is name-checked on the cover of "Freak Out!" (1966) under the heading These People Have Contributed Materially In Many Ways To Make Our Music What It Is. Please Do Not Hold It Against Them. He transposed the letters of his first name from Ronald to Roland, as a result of a dream, early in his career. Resulting from a further dream, he added Rahsaan to his title in 1970.
Zappa says of Kirk on a tour;
I met him backstage at the Boston Jazz Festival and asked him to play with us if he was interested in our music. Then, during our set, led by his attendant, he came up to the stage. As you know he's blind, but his body understood all of our signals. At one point everybody in the band was supposed to get down on their back and kick their feet in the air while they still keep playing. As soon as we got on our back, he also got his back. When we got up, he also got up. He grasped everything. He is an excellent musician. Three weeks later we played together again at the Florida Jazz Festival.
seminal album Rip, Rig & Panic
(Mercury 1965)
with tracks inspired by Edgard Varèse
Kirk was an exhilarating multi-reed playing jazz musician, sideman with Charles Mingus, and the leader of his own groups until suffering a stroke in 1975, after which he did play, but died of a second stroke in 1977. Arguably the most exciting saxophone soloist in jazz history, Kirk was a post-modernist before that term even existed. He played the continuum of jazz tradition as an instrument unto itself and felt little compunction about mixing and matching elements from the music's history, and his concoctions usually seemed natural, if not inevitable. Kirk was born with sight, but became blind at the age of two. Kirk's ability to play more than one wind-instrument at a time gave his music a distinctively intuitive edge, as he was effectively able to accompany himself. His renowned circular breathing technique also enabled him to sustain notes for unusually long periods.
His early work echoes Zappa's musical approach, for example, Kirk says on the sleeve-notes of his avante-gard jazz album Rip, Rig & Panic, "Some of the sounds I make with my horn; the rhythm section was playing free. Some of the tape sounds I got around the house - wind chimes, my voice amplified, the baby hollering. I slowed down some of the sounds and played them together. The head is written off a computer; I used the cycle of notes from a computer I once heard to make a line... the ending was done with an amplifier; I can shake it in a certain way to get those sounds. It was inspired by the music of Edgard Varèse."
He is also mentioned in "The Real Frank Zappa Book" (1989):
The first time we played with Rahsaan Roland Kirk was at the 1968 Boston Globe Jazz Festival. After his performance, when introduced to him backstage, I said I really liked what he was doing, and said that if he felt like joining us onstage during our set, he was more than welcome. In spite of his blindness, I believed we could accommodate whatever he wanted to do. We began our set, wending our atonal way toward a medley of 1950s-style honking saxophone numbers. During this fairly complicated, choreographed routine, Rahsaan, assisted by his helper (can't remember his name), decided to join in. In 1969, George Wein, impresario of the Newport Jazz Festival, decided it would be a tremendous idea to put the Mothers of Invention on a jazz tour of the East Coast. We wound up working in a package with Kirk, Duke Ellington and Gary Burton in Miami at the Jai Alai Fronton, and at another gig in South Carolina.
Notes
- Gigs featuring Kirk prior to 1970 would not have billed him as Rahsaan Roland Kirk, although this title is often used in retrospective accounts.
- more at Wikipedia: Rahsaan Roland Kirk
