I Talk With The Spirits

The Musician

by Michael Zwerin

There is a story told of avant trumpeter Don Ellis being accosted backstage at Birdland, where he was appearing, by Miles Davis who gave Ellis roughly the following advice. "Man, why don't you stop shaking jars of marbles, rattling bones, burping, fluttering bedsheets, and start playing your horn?". Ellis, in his best Ivy League manner supposedly replied: "It's all music, Miles."

This concept of any sound being potentially a musical one has only lately been discovered in jazz, although Edgar Varese, George Antheil, John Cage, and others have been working with it for over a generation now. As it takes a painter's eye to transform an "ordinary" sunset into a work of art, a sensitive ear is required to make a typewriter noise or a dogbark, for instance, into what we term music. Roland Kirk has this quality ear.

Just as John Cage prepared the piano, Roland has "prepared" himself. He should be looked at, not as a multi-instrumentalist, but as a Kirkophone player. There couldn't possibly be another like him. He is "all music" as much as little boys are all snips, snails, and puppy dog tails. There is music emanating from his every pore.

He is a viual, as well as a musical experience. Three reed instruments, two of his own invention, hang from his neck. A whistle, a siren, a flute, a nose flute, and castanets are all attached to him in some manner. He plays all of these separately, in unison, in three part harmony, and lately, in counterpoint with himself.

This is not to overlook the fact that he can just plain blow as well as anybody today. As a matter of fact, it almost seems that the alternating between Kirkophone playing and blowing one horn like everybody else, is of basic importance in the pace of his music. His homophonic playing could be described as updated bebop, although it has been going furthur and further "out" recently. The tendancy towards freer playing has been more noticeable with the addition of new instruments to his line of inventions.

Pierre Boulez once said that, in his composing, he liked to "go forward rear first." Too often adventurous artists tend to get carried away with the extremes of their material, especially now when avantgardism is beginning to pay off in the marketplace. They push what can be sold quickest and at the highest price. In the sense that he plays in a basically traditional jazz style, Roland is going forward "rear first"; kind of waving at the past.

The more one listens to Roland the more extraordinary he seems. There are always new experiences for the listener. He has recently started flirting with playing Sentimental Journey and Going Home, from Dvorak's New World Symphony, at the same time on two separate horns. At the first attempt in public, he struggled pretty hard to get through it and it sounded rather shaky, even though the Tune List are rhythmically parallel a large part of the time. But a week later he was roaring through them confidently and was already beginning to work on two more complicated melodies.

Roland can be too easily passed off as a freak. This is, however, an extremely superficial judgement. One just has to listen to the notes he chooses in harmonizing with himself, for example. They aren't just any, or the easy, notes. The tension is consistent throughout indicating a selective and intelligent musical thought process. Also, he inserts short two-voiced unison passages within a tenor solo, not only with great thatrical flare, but also with a nice sense of form; selectively.

In addition, he can be a master of ceremonies with the best of them. Blind, covered with his cloak of sound-making objects, he speaks with a sophisticated humor revealing an attractively unselfconscious intelligence. He announces that he will play a tune on a schizophrenic saxophone, going on to explain that the first chorus will be with a reed, and the second without. (Without a reed, you say?!)

It would seem unlikely that the flute could be converted into an instrument in the percussion family. Roland manages this by a slap-tonguing and fingering the keys simultaneously, getting a sound kind of like tuned African drums. Then he switches to growls, grunts, groans, hums, "oh yeah's," and even plays the instrument conventionally, all in one solo. When the microphone isn't functioning properly, he has been known to complain to the club owner in between notes. He seems to be inventing a completely new orchestra right there in front of your eyes in that bar room.

That is what really makes him so strange and unreal: the fact that this inventivenell is displayed almost casually in saloons. (If he were white he might command more elegant surroundings, but let's not get into that now.)

What, no foundation grant? No university lab? No "seminar" or "workshop"? No, just Roland Kirk standing in the middle of all that booze and cigaret smoke promiscuously inventing a new musical world.