_{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

The opening selection, Meeting On Termini's Corner, is from a September, 1962 session which found Kirk in the company of the brilliant pianist Andrew Hill. The saxophonist's stop-start theme sets up a challenging series of intervalic relationships, and when Hill digs into them he sounds momentarily like a more aggressive Lennie Tristano. The broiling, emotive tenor solo makes fairly extensive use of multiphonics on the horn, achieved through overblowing. This sort of playing was rooted in the work of rhythm-and-blues saxophonists, and Kirk was not inexperienced in this idiom, but his use of the technique in an advanced jazz context must have sounded startling in 1962.

Between The Fourth And The Fifth Step, recorded in June, 1963, makes even more abundant use of multiphonics, proving that Kirk did not have to employ more than one horn to achieve chordal effects. The swirling, multinoted climax of his solo suggests the sort of playing John Coltrane was just then introducing to the jazz public. As for the compositin itself and ist ambivalent rhythmic feeling, Kirk explained in the notes to the album from which it is excerpted that he was attempting to mediate between 4/4 and 5/4 time. "I don't think it gets entirely into either," he added.

Song Of The Countrymen is a brooding, bittersweet mood piece with a strong opening theme and a conclusion which sounds like a village brass band on a rainy day. During the arranged portions, Kirk's one-man horn ensemble is pitted against and then voiced with the trumpet and trombone of Virgil Jones and Tom McIntosh. The tenor solo is mainstream Kirk in excellent form, with a flurrying conclusion. Notice that all the solos contribute to the composition's overall mood. This is real jazz writing, not just the bracketing of solos with a theme, it is somewhat reminiscent of the work of the great jazz composer who employed Kirk during the early 1960's, Charles Mingus.

Raouf features brass and a vocal choir conducted by Coleridge Perkisson and is a most unusual entry in the Kirk discography. Under his tenor solo, with its busy lower register rumbling and sudden high shrieks, the choir sings syllables, sighs in a carefully out-of-synch manner, producing a delightfully complex vocal texture, and subsides into long, held notes, sounding not unlike a string section. Latin percussion furnishes the tune's propulsion. The unusual blend of elements is brought off with aplomb. This was Kirk's final session for Mercury/Limelight, and he had grown into a stunningly resourceful composer.

The next four selections are from Rip, Rig, and Panic, the amazing quartet album recorded January 13, 1965 with the amazing rhythm section of Jaki Byard, Richard Davis, and Elvin Jones. Spurred by the individual and collective talents of this trio, Kirk turned in one of his finest recorded performances, and these four tenor pieces were the finest of the lot.

No Tonic Pres does not refer to drinking. It invokes the spirit of Lester Young in its relaxed blowing section, and Byard calls up the late swing era which was Young's heyday with his marvellous stride piano. But the composition which frames this improvising is a chromatic whiplash of a line which seems to have no tonic, that is, no key center. Nevertheless, Kirk maintained it was based on a riff he heard Young (the Pres) use. The next tune, From Bechet, Byas, And Fats, is also a tribute. Kirk told album annotator Don Heckman, "This represents Sidney Bechet on manzello--not the way he would play it but with the force. The bass and piano are like (Fats) Waller and the tenor like Don (Byas). I'm not trying to play any of their stuff note for note; it's the groove they put me in--the way they inspire me for what I want to write and play.