Did I already tell you that I loved Rahsaan Roland Kirk ? Well I do. Like Mingus, he played a dirty kind of jazz, something from the guts that simply cannot be accused of any form of intellectualism. I own quite a few of his albums, but my favourite are the early Atlantic ones, especially The Inflated Tear and Volunteered Slavery. On the latter album, there's a crazy version of I Say a Little Prayer (a song made famous by Aretha), given a much heavier political meaning by Kirk than the original probably intended.
Kirk was an atypical musician in more ways than one. While his main instrument was the tenor sax, he played all kinds of strange contraptions, mostly built by him and never used by anyone else, included the fabled stritch (a modified alto sax), and the manzello (a modified soprano sax), but also the flute, the nose flute and various weird and crazy noise-making contraptions. He often played two or three of his instruments simultaneously, harmonizing his own lines.
Probably what I find the most endearing in Kirk's playing is that it's deliberately imprecise, it flirts around the beat in ways that are unique to Kirk - and sometimes pushed jazz critics then and now to accuse him of being a novelty act. To say that us, to me, ignoring the urgency and often poignancy of his music. If only jazz wasn't riddled with some many intellectuals, we could actually talk about music once in a while ;-)
I don't think you'll ever be convinced, but I can assure you that if you take a close look on the history of jazz, you'll see nothing but a hedonistic music, which starts as a dancing music, expressing joy, going to the expression of freedom and the deepest feelings of the musician.
I can't see any intellectualism here, all these harmonic experiments have only one aim : getting closer to freedom. At the end of the journey, they found out that the trickiest harmony was the chromatic one, pretty much no harmony at all... What would be less intellectual ?
Posted by: Seagull | October 20, 2007 at 12:28 PM