Rahsaan Roland Kirk - 'Pedal Up'

Although I never saw the man in concert, one of the most memorable musical experiences of my life was listening to a cassette copy of The Inflated Tear on a Walkman early one misty morning in the grounds of a priory in Hertfordshire. It was the title track in particular that affected me, the beautiful melody pierced with haunting heartfelt cries that I took to represent the medical accident Kirk suffered as a young child that blinded him for the rest of his life. But perhaps they were cries of exaltation, because – good luck, bad luck, who knows? – maybe being blind was the making of him as a musician.

It certainly seemed to make him susceptible to what he saw in dreams. He dreamt his first name, Rahsaan, for example; and, the stuff now of legend, he dreamt how he would appear and sound playing three instruments at once. Reputedly, he went out the very next day to a music shop and tried every reed instrument in the place before being taken into the basement, where he found two outmoded members of the saxophone family once used in Spanish military bands: an elongated straight alto called (probably by Kirk himself) a stritch, and a kind of slightly bent version of a soprano called a manzello. However they got their names, Kirk somehow worked out a way of playing them both simultaneously in conjunction with his main instrument, the tenor sax. He created a unique and unforgettable sound resembling a one-man horn section playing descant ever-so-slightly discordantly: just one of the facets that made him on one hand a true original while laying himself open on the other to inevitable slights of gimmickry.

Here he is playing 'Pedal Up', his perennial rousing crowd-pleaser that I first heard on the coruscating live album, Bright Moments, the title that John Kruth would give to his biography of Kirk. One reviewer on Amazon described the album's impact as 'like eating your last pork chop in London England cause you ain't gonna get no mo'...' Well, perhaps. Kirk, like Thelonious Monk, was an inveterate wearer of remarkable hats and here he wears a top hat (and tails): a man who never did anything by halves (apart from the second disc of his three-sided double album, The Case of the 3 Sided Dream in Audio Colour, that is). It's a headlong, breathless rush of ideas from start to finish. 'Breathless' being the operative word, as another of Kirk's 'tricks' was circular breathing. Apparently, the business of taking air in as you blow is not quite so difficult as one might imagine, but the trick that Kirk mastered was to make it so seamless as to stretch the drama of the anticipated breath almost to breaking point.

The 'black master of black classical music' is introduced at the 1975 DownBeat magazine show of their poll winners of 1975 by Q himself, Quincy Jones, soon to make his remarkable transition from musician and arranger to producer of Michael Jackson et al. Après Q, le déluge. I even exhorted my wife to watch what follows, because it is so extraordinary: a blind man in top hat and tails playing a tenor and a stritch simultaneously and seemingly in one breath. She avowed that she'd never seen anything like it in all her born days. Note the way at just under the two-minute mark, Kirk removes the stritch to solo on the tenor without missing the slightest beat and then proceeds to emulate Coltrane's 'sheets of sound' technique, even throwing in the briefest of quotes from 'My Favourite Things' at around 2 minutes and 30 seconds. Again, without missing a beat, he pops the stritch back in for the conclusion of his solo before turning away and leaving the floor to McCoy Tyner. It's just a brief solo from the pianist, another torrential creative force, but it gives a good idea of how he paced and complemented Coltrane in his pomp for the five or so years he was with the master. Kirk then picks up the baton again and signals the band to slow things down around the four-minute mark for a final, solo performance during which he gives us another of his party pieces: playing two different tunes at once on different instruments – first with the stritch in a kind of Middle Eastern drone role as he solos on the tenor and then, briefly, as he appears to play two different tunes at different speeds. As his breath finally gives out, he turns to face drummer Lenny White – and it's all over. Next up, it seems, is Chick Corea, with whom White and bassist Stanley Clarke played for several years in Return To Forever.

Rahsaan Roland Kirk was indeed a showman and a crowd pleaser, but he was far more than that. With his eyes wide shut, he could sit in with Charles Mingus, he could do Coltrane, he could do New Orleans classical jazz, he could do gospel and big ballads, and he could do pop tunes. An album like Blacknuss, for example, is full of radical transformations – of Motown (Marvin Gaye's 'What's Goin' On' and Smokey Robinson's 'My Girl'), disco ('Never Can Say Goodbye'), soft-rock (David Gates' 'Make It With You') and soul (his brilliant take on Bill Withers' 'Ain't No Sunshine', which typifies the breathy flute technique he developed that would influence Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull for one. There's a great performance of his 'Serenade To A Cuckoo' that also illustrates this technique while giving a glimpse of another innovation, his 'nose flute').

He had a particular affinity for Burt Bacharach and the only video that came close to my chosen one was this performance from 1969 of 'I Say A Little Prayer', a song more associated with Dionne Warwick and Aretha Franklin. It's another video that made me break out all over in goose bumps – for several reasons: for Kirk's and percussionist Joe Texidor's egregious hats; for Henry Pearson's hyperactive bass playing; for pianist Ron Burton's apparent calm among the musical mayhem; for the audience's sang froid in the face of the conflagration on stage (being 1969, maybe half of them were stoned). And was that an infinitesimal glimpse of Bill Wyman in the crowd when Kirk briefly plays all three of his saxes together?

One commentator suggests that Rahsaan Roland Kirk was the personification of the term 'life force'. Given the mistral of creativity that must have howled permanently through his cranium, it's maybe not so surprising that Kirk suffered a stroke in 1975 that paralysed half of his body. Given that it happened to a man who overcame childhood blindness to become such a one of a kind, it's maybe not so surprising that Kirk adapted his technique to play his instruments with one hand. He went on recording and touring until a second stroke carried him off in 1977. He was 41 years old, an age when many of us are just beginning to find our way in life. Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the multi-instrumentalist, dreamer and musical explorer, was extra-ordinary and un-classifiable. God keep you, Roland Kirk.

 

Milt Jackson & Bobby Hutcherson - 'Bags' Groove'

Any talk of 'jazz' and 'cool' has got to involve vibes in the discussion. I love the gentle tintinnabulation of the vibraphone. It's a beautiful if cumbersome instrument. That lovely resonant metallic ring has little in common with the plink of those toy xylophones that Santa once secreted in Christmas stockings. The vibes go particularly well with the Hammond B-3 organ and serve as an ideal complement to the piano and the electric guitar.

On the third and final occasion that I saw Roy Ayers, master of jazz-funk vibe-rations, he played a portable electronic, bonsai version of his customary Deagan vibraharp. It might have been more portable, but the sound of the former had nothing to do with that of the latter; the difference even more pronounced than that between the acoustic and the electric piano. So it has to be acoustic, but not necessarily metal: the West African balofon and the Colombian marimba are similarly rich and resonant, if generally alien to a jazz context.

Voted 'World's Best Vibist' in 1971, Bobby Hutcherson was one of the few vibraphone masters who also played the marimba. A regular of Blue Note sessions during the 1960s and '70s as both leader and sideman (with, for example, the even-more-regular guitarist, Grant Green, on the marvellous Idle Moments), his career with the label lasted longer than anyone other than Horace Silver. Most of his own sessions included the drummer Joe Chambers, who was a useful vibist himself. Apparently, the two of them were both arrested in New York's Central Park for possession of marijuana in 1967, the year of peace, love, dope and – one would hope – understanding. Despite recording mainly for Blue Note on the east coast, Hutcherson operated mainly on the west, the epicentre of cool jazz. Perhaps that's why he found his way into films like Round Midnight and They Shoot Horses, Don't They? I didn't spot him in either.

There's an abundance of great videos featuring Bobby Hutcherson on YouTube: so many that it renders choice a lottery. There is, for example, a fine rendition of one of his best-known numbers, a waltz written for his son Barry, 'Little B's Poem', that features flautist James Newton along with Miles Davis' rhythm section from his classic quintet of the '60s: Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams. Maybe because it's a waltz, it feels just a little academic. Despite the stellar line-up, I felt it failed to spark. A re-union with a regular collaborator, McCoy Tyner, on a splendid version of John Coltrane's 'Moment's Notice' almost swung it for me, despite Eric Harland's (mercifully brief) drum solo.

But then I watched Bobby in the company of organist Joey de Francesco, who thought of him as 'the greatest vibes player of all time.' They serve up a gently swinging, after-hours version of a theme from the TV series, Naked City, Billy May's 'Somewhere In The Night'. Great solos by Hutcherson and de Francesco, by tenor saxophonist Ron Blake and guitarist Ulf Wakenius, along with a fascinating glimpse into the innards of the Hammond B-3 (a truly unwieldy instrument that the great Jimmy Smith used to convey to gigs in a converted hearse). So it has just about everything you could wish for. But this picky individual found Byron Landham's snare drum a little overbearing, sounding a little too like he was beating a dustbin lid. Sometimes you just can't beat a pair of wire brushes.

So I thought: If there's anything better than a vibraphone, it's two vibraphones. Bobby Hutcherson's harmonic sophistication and effortless swing influenced such modern-day masters of the instrument as Stefon Harris and Joe Locke. There's a fabulous bout of duelling mallets with the latter on 'Old Folks', with the vibe-masters old and new trading solos in the way that Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray or Sonny Stitt and Eddie 'Lockjaw' Davis used to do when the tenor sax ruled the Royal Roost and all the other clubs. Bobby wields two mallets, while Joe uses the more pianistic four-mallet technique developed by Gary Burton, the other seminal vibraphonist of the '60s. He it was who introduced me as a teenager to vibes: on BBC2's Jazz Scene at the Ronnie Scott Club. Little did I realise that one day I might be interested to learn that Gary Burton's four-mallet grip would be known as the Burton grip.

There I would have happily left it had I not found that Bobby Hutcherson also played in concert – also at Jazz Baltica, the annual German festival on the Baltic coast, but eight years earlier – with the man whose recording of Monk's 'Bemsha Swing' with Miles Davis inspired him to take up the vibes as a twelve-year old. Milt Jackson was indisputably the leading exponent of the instrument in the '50s, an era when the instrument was bedevilled with technical problems if you wanted to play it in an alternative way to the Lionel Hampton school of bashing the hell out of it as a percussion instrument. 'Bags', as he was nicknamed (for the bags under his eyes), conquered the recalcitrant beast to become probably the most influential vibraphonist of them all. When he wasn't dressed up in a dinner jacket, playing the Modern Jazz Quartet's slightly rarefied brand of jazz in the company of Percy Heath, Connie Kay and the band's musical director, pianist John Lewis, Milt Jackson could swing like the bopper he basically was. Dating back to 1952, 'Bags' Groove' was one of his hardiest perennial favourites. Here, the two senior vibraphonists, both eschewing the supplementary mallets and the Burton grip, go head to head – and tie to tie – in a sophisticated, swinging cutting contest. No doubt, a vibraphonist could spot a winner and wax lyrical on the different styles and techniques on show. Suffice to say that they play as seamlessly in tandem as they segue smoothly from one to the other. It's a close call, but Bobby's ambitious tie just shades it over Milt's more sober number.

Both of these giants of their instruments started their long careers as innovators: Milt Jackson as one of the young bebop revolutionaries who challenged the orthodoxy of swing music; Bobby Hutcherson as one of the generation of freer 'new thing' musicians who put the cat among the pigeons of hard bop, so to speak. To return to organist Joey de Francesco's assessment, 'Milt Jackson was the guy, but Bobby took it to the next level. It's like Milt was Charlie Parker, and Bobby was John Coltrane.' If so, they both appear very happy in their dotage to go back to free-swinging basics.