_{These are the liner notes and tune list from the album, Kirk's Works, a collection of Roland Kirk's recordings, released by Mercury, EMS-2-411, the third in a series of webbed liner notes so that the words of Kirk and his admirers may be available as well as the sounds.}

Kirk's Works

This album has an axe to grind and a story to tell. It has been compiled from the nine albums and twenty-odd singles and unreleased performances which Rahsaan Roland Kirk recorded for the Mercury and Limelight labels between 1961 and 1965. Because of the axe-grinding and the story-telling it is a somewhat unrepresentative collection. As the album title suggests, the spotlight is on Kirk's original compositions; only the last three selections on side four were composed by others. Some balance is inherent in this approach, since many of Kirk's best-known performances have been based on standards or on the compositions of other jazzmen. But more importantly, the focus of this set is Kirk's work as a soloist, particularly on the tenor saxophone. Sides A and B consist of tenor showcases, and although side C is devoted to his flute, there are two more tenor solos on side D, along with solos on Kirk's smaller saxophones, the manzello and stritch.

The alert reader will have noticed that not one word has been said so far regarding Kirk's practice of plating two and three horns simultaneously, and this is where the axe-grinding comes in. It is true that this multi-horn work, originally dismissed as tasteless grandstanding, has long since been recognized as an artistically valid endeavor. In fact, many commentators have bent over backwards to lend legitimacy to Kirk's multi-horn technique, and Kirk has sometimes seemed bent on legitimizing it for himself by developing the ability to perform more and more complex horn parts simultaneously. By striving so energetically to remove the practice from the realm of novelty, the critics and perhaps Kirk have unwittingly inflated its importance. This collection seeks to redress the balance. Multi-horn passages are liberally sprinkled throughout its four sides, but the selections were chosen for their value as compositions and as vehicles for Kirk's improvising. Hopefully, the picture which emerges from the set will be that of a uniquely gifted musician, an innovator, and an eclectic who has projected his innate musicality through a variety of idioms without sacrificing his stylistic integrity.

Before discussing the music in more detail, it may be relevant to offer a brief biography. Kirk was born August 7, 1935 in Columbus, Ohio, and he has been blin since the age of two. When he was six he began his musical career by playing melodies on a garden hose. Soon he was playing the bugle at a summer camp where his parents acted as counselors, and soon after that he was playing trumpet in his high school band. But a doctor advised him to switch instruments because of the muscular strain that trumpet playing can cause, and so he took up clarinet and, later, saxophones.

Much has been made of the celebrated dream in which Kirk heard himself playing three instrument at once. He began looking for additional instruments soon after, and in the basement of a local music store he found his manzello and stritch--two obsolete saxophone hybrids. There is no reason to doubt the story, but it should be noted that playing several instruments simultaneously was a reasonably standard procedure during the minstrel and vaudeville era. Similarly, the circular breathing technique which Kirk uses--his cheeks puff in and out and he circulates air steadily in through his nose and out into his horns, so that he produces a continuous tone without having to stop for breath--was fairly widely known among the jazzmen of earlier eras. It would be interesting to find out whether it represents the survival in America of the circular breathing of West African soloists on the double-reed alghaita, an instrument with a timbre not unlike that of Kirk's manzello, but documentation is not likely to be forthcoming.

Kirk's genius was not that he invented the multiple horn and circular breathing technique out of thin air, but that he was able to integrate them into a forward-looking approach which moved out from its sources in the music of Sidney Bechet, Lester Young, and Don Byas, among others, into uncharted realms. He was not a trickster; he was an extraordinary musician who would have been impressive enough had he played nothing but the tenor. With the rest of his arsenal added he was sure to cause a stir. Word began filtering out of jam sessions in Louisville and Chicago about this extraordinary blind pied piper, and when he was 21 he made his first recording, for the Cincinnati-based King label. There were dates for Argo and Cadet in 1960 and 1961, but it was Mercury's release of the We Free Kings album at the beginning of 1962 which announced his arrival for all to hear. During the next four years he recorded in an astonishing variety of musical settings, from the quartets which performed on most of his sessions to dates with big bands, Latin percussion, and a choir. His playing ranged from the jazz mainstream of the day to the experimental idiom of the avant-garde, and although this album finds him taking a variety of approaches, his startling expansions of the range of contemporary jazz expression accounts for the most striking moments.