Asbury Park Press
Don Lass : 12/11/1965

When Kirk exercises self control, as he does through most of this album, he is among the best of the modern jazz artists. For the uninitiated, Kirk plays five instruments, a feat in itself. Add to that the fact that he often plays two or three at once and you have a unique musician. Surprisingly, the seemingly vaudevillian tactics come off well. Kirk is a technically proficient flutiest and tenor saxophonist and handles the manzello, stritch, castanets, and siren well. On this LP his playing is particularly inspired and his accompanists are the best he has ever recorded with. The drummer, Elvin Jones, plays with blazing passion and introduces a greater polyrhythmic complexity behind Kirk while pianist Jaki Byard skillfully blends the modernistic lines with elements from the past, especially the “stride” techniques of the late James P. Johnson and Willie (The Lion) Smith. Bassist Richard Davis, who has played with Kirk on several occasions, creates buoyant, distinctive lines that often flow independently of the other instruments.

The opening track of the album, No Tonic Pres, is worth the price of admission alone. The reedman plays some aggressive tenor with Jones pushing relentlessly and Byard contributing a priceless solo that begins in a modern vein and suddenly becomes a stride vehicle without the rhythm section. Kirk’s siren, which harks of an old-time movie, brings the proceedings back to 1965 and everybody swings hard again. Byard’s recollections of the past crop up again in his accompaniment for From Bechet, Byas, and Fats. Kirk’s flute is impressive on Mystical Dream while his blues-tinged manzello is heard to advantage on Black Diamond. Two tracks, the title tune and Slippery, Hippery, Flippery, employ electronic sounds – actual sounds altered by electronic and mechanical manipulation. To me, it becomes a confused and aggravating sound and mars an otherwise outstanding performance.

—–

Boston Herald
Robert Taylor : 02/13/1966
Jazz Outgrows Old Limitations

Relations between jazz and symphonic music have changed. Once critics believed jazz would enrich the vocabulary of the ‘classical’ composer. Yet, while Ravel, Bernstein, Milhaud and diverse symphonists have declared the possibilities, trends ran in other directions. The influence of jazz upon symphonic writing is slight compared to the influence of the concert hall upon the ideas of jazzmen.

In short, the identify of jazz as a separate but equal genre seems nominal. Ellington shattered the style barrier; the generation of jazz musicians following him – talents such as John Lewis, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus – have more in common with Schoenberg and Boulez than with King Oliver. What happened in American jazz is not dissimilar to the art forms of every nation: the rise of the international style.

This is imperfectly understood, especially by critics who have their concepts neatly pigeonholed. For example, we find in Walter Wiora’s “The Four Ages of Music,” which Norton recently published, the following ludicrous passage on jazz, tucket into an otherwise sober dissertation:

“What fascinates us in the Negroes’ way of singing and playing is not only their racial characteristics but also those archaic and universally human traits that take penetrating effect through their joy in playing and their power of expression. These traits come through, childlike and warmly vital, in the automatism of rhythmic movements, the intensity of the play of gesture. Pleasure in physical equilibrium, relief in sheer mechanical release, toying with the comic and the grotesque, as long ago in the use of masks – all these elements in man’s essential nature are here thoroughly relished.”

Aside from its ridiculous racial assumptions – jazz resulted from cultural collisions, not from that happy child of nature stereotype, Uncle Tom and his banjo – this passage makes the point that jazz expresses the folklore of the subconscious. The point may have been valid 40 years ago; the status of the Negro and white jazz musician in society required indirect, latent, archetypal meanings. Furthermore, jazz’s implied overtones coincided with a period of national consciousness of artistic manifest destiny, when musicians like Aaron Copland and George Gershwin believed in the creation of a uniquely ‘American’ music, when the murals of Benton and Curry celebrated our past, when expatriated novelists reflected the isolation of American experience abroad.

Dixieland thus has a stronger American ‘feel’ than what came after. Evolution toward the jazz of today followed the pattern taking place in every form. Symphonic composers concluded music was music – not a nationalistic style. Abstract-expressionisms laid stress on the act of painting. Like concert hall expression, jazz, too, sought life-enhancing innovations in the formal organization of sound.

To develop, jazz borrowed from the vast, existing formal vocabulary of “classical” music. In 70 years or so, it had to go through the phases of western music during a thousand years; and while its own vocabulary was impressive, that of the Avant Garde symphonist was much greater.

Today the differences are chiefly those of means. While a reviewer’s professional concert-hall duties do not permit hearing much jazz, the most interesting artists, for me, such as Roland Kirk, occasionally galvanize one’s attention. On his latest album called Rip, Rig and Panic, Kirk deploys electronic modes, computer note cycles, the range of dramatic natural sound a la Varèse, in a highly inventive and beautiful way. Dimensions of silence, decibel levels and tensions between sharply articulated and flowing patterns have a bold, indigenous character. The images suggest many of the approaches of Stockhausen or Webern, but remain sui generis.

Jazz musicians have been doing this for years, of course. More and more it appears harder to distinguish them as ‘non’-symphonic. The old categories are breaking down – and in a way that Ravel and Milhaud could not have foreseen.

—–

HiFi Stereo Review
Nat Hentoff : February, 1966

Performance: Irrepressibly searching
Recording: Excellent
Stereo Quality : Very good

It has been impossible for some time now to dismiss Roland Kirk and his penchant for playing several instruments at the same time as a relic of vaudeville days. He is a serious (though often joyful) jazz musician with an endless curiosity that leads him to invent instruments, create new textural combinations, and otherwise explore the ways of broadening his expressivity. In this collection, for example, he works on two numbers with pre-recorded, electronically modified sounds. In another, the crash of glass in the studio is made part of the sound pattern. On two more, Kirk pays tribute to the jazz past while reshaping its materials into personal, contemporary statements.

He has never before on records had such resourceful support. Jones and Davis are two of the most imaginative of all jazz rhythm-section players, and Jaki Byard is especially well suited to Kirk because Byard incorporates the whole jazz heritage in his playing while also remaining open to new possibilities of sound and conception.

Kirk does not always succeed in his restless, ambitious quests. The use here, for example, of pre-recorded sounds is still rather rudimentary, and his solos sometimes substitute sheer gusto for striking inventiveness. But he infuses everything he does with such devotion to the act of music and with such vitality that he draws and holds attention. The notes by musician-critic Don Heckman are a model of lucid information – a combination of an interview with Kirk and analysis.

—–

Los Angeles Times
Leonard Feather : 11/06/1965

For the past 10 months there has been in the American marketplace a series of artifacts not quite like anything ever before known to the world of commerce. These strange objects, which are not saucershaped neither do they fly, are called Limelight Records.

The buyer of a Limelight LP becomes an investor in a whole complex of industries. First he gets a cover, invariably brilliant, beautiful or amusing in its art work; with it, a 12″ square transparent plastic sleeve that can be removed and used for collecting clothes pins and bobby pins; and a thick green envelope, easily convertible to use as a cover for one of your old 12-inch 78s to replace its disintegrated paper wrapper.

Then he picks up the album and finds that it is one of those fold-outs with all kinds of additional goodies in the centerpiece: three-dimensional cardboard structures that enable you to stand the album up so that your 3-year-old daughter can use the enclosed area for a doll house; liner notes that appear not on the usual single surface, but in the form of whole booklets, with many labor-of-love photos, paintings and sketches; and finally, surprise of surprises, in addition to all this, a phonograph record.

This week a package of seven new Limelights arrive in the mail. (We overprivileged reviewers don’t even know about the $4.98 mono or $5.98 stereo prices, because we never bought a record in our lives.) Normally one learns to expect two or three duds out of seven; here, incredibly, there wasn’t a lemon (or lime) in the bunch.

—

If only those wall-eyed cats at NARAS knew whereof they voted, at least six Grammies would go next year to Roland Kirk‘s new album Rip, Rig & Panic. This set is for the man who wants everything: avant-garde wailing, suddenly interrupted by 1925 stride piano; a glass crashing in mid-solo; electronic effects of the musique concrete variety; Kirk swinging wildly on everything from tenor sax and flute to stritch and manzello to castanets and siren.

I haven’t encountered a more diversified, more entertaining or more artistic album all year, and this has seemed a pretty long year at times.

—–

Wichita Eagle
Unknown : 11/14/1965

Record wrappings have come a long way from the plain brown sacks of yesteryear, but a new jazz collection just issued by Limelight is as modern as a space capsule and surely out-covers the near-nudes that grace some of today’s jackets.

The recording company calls them “dimensionally designed” albums and gives creation credit to Daniel Czubak.

The covers are a double fold, like those used for program notes on Broadway show albums, but rather than being used for printing, the interiors open to reveal almost three-dimensional art. The cut and fold technique is one frequently employed by greeting card designers and enables the albums to be displayed standing attractively open. Comprehensive notes on the music and artists are attached along one side.

Colors are brilliant and offbeat photographs and artwork are imaginative. Limelight promises “the unique effect achieved in this album brings new depth to the visual enjoyment of the discriminating record player,” and keeps its word.

In fact, they’re so handsome that the new owner will probably have to throw a party just to show them off.

Once the “discriminating record player” gets past the cover he’ll be even happier, especially if he’s a jazz fan.

—

Last, and least, of the four albums is Rip, Rig and Panic, by The Roland Kirk Quartet featuring Elvin Jones on drums.

Kirk plays tenor saxophone, manzello, stritch, castanets and siren to give an almost too-far-out sound to the group’s interpretation of Once In A While.

Kirk explains his title song this way: “Rip means Rip Van Winkle (or Rest in Peace?). It’s the way people, even musicians, are. They’re asleep. Rig means like rigor mortis. That’s where a lot of people’s minds are. When they hear me doing things they don’t think I could do they panic in their minds. They all say, ‘Well, I didn’t know this kind of thing could happen.’ Actually, I was doing some things like this when I was in Ohio, but I lost work because people didn’t want to hear this kind of thing.”

And it’s likely that many people still don’t and would rather RIP with the other five albums.

—–

Down Beat : 12/30/1965
Pete Welding : 5 stars

This album is a fantastic, exciting, colorful, passionate, many-sided set of performances that finds Kirk playing with almost brutal force in the company of three musicians of sufficient talent, imagination, and freedom (mental and emotional) to underline and enhance his music in the manner it cries out for.

If some of Kirk’s previous recordings suffered from the presence of sidemen who were either unsympathetic to, or intimidated by, his often flagrantly bizarre or unorthodox music-making, this is clearly not the case here. Byard, Davis, and Jones respond fully to the challenges of Kirk’s muse in a way that could not possibly be bettered.

Kirk is a musician of uncommon imagination and emotional persuasiveness. He is a passionately intense performer, and he brings this intensity and unflagging emotional thrust to bear on all his work, be it an up-tempo charger or lyrical ballad. Apparently he cannot play anything without animating it with passion and deep feeling.

Though there are a couple of feelingful ballad readings – Once in a While and Black Diamond – this collection, for the most part, is made up of powerful, explosive performances charged with tremendous energy and urgency. Kirk throws himself into these pieces with a near demoniac ferocity, and he swings so hard and relentlessly, with such brilliance and fire, that one expects that fire to be burned out at the end of each piece. But, no, there’s no letup whatever; comes the next number and Kirk comes charging back, shooting off sparks, igniting the others, burning as brightly as ever. It’s a tour de force, a splendid display of strength and emotional thrust.

No Tonic Pres – a tribute to Lester Young, one of Kirk’s major inspirations – contains a strong, booting tenor solo that occasionally makes allusion to that influence but is primarily cast in the harder – and bigger-toned tenor approach out of which Kirk normally works. Byard takes an incisively swinging stride-piano solo that is as blithe and zesty as it is well conceived.

Kirk virtually dominates the ballad Once in a While, and in his solo on this piece he plumbs the full range of his tenor – from top to bottom – while constructing an improvisation that is alternatively lyrical and and gutty. Toward the end of the piece he incorporates a series of high-pitched cries and, in fact, ends the performance with a straining, pathos-filled one.

One of the most interesting tracks in the set is From Bechet, Byas, and Fats, a daring and completely effective multifaceted performance in which Kirk and Byard pay their homage to some of jazz’ older statesmen – Sidney Bechet (acknowledged in Kirk’s soprano saxophone-like strich playing of the theme); Fats Waller (whose spirit is conjured up by Byard’s delightful stride playing interjections behind the theme); and tenor saxophonist Don Byas (a musician Kirk says exerted a great influence on him).

There is little more than a passing allegiance to Byas, however, in Kirk’s slashing solo on the number; the borrowings would seem to be more in the areas of sonority and phrasing effects than in any general approach to soloing. Kirk is playing himself and no one else. The notes just stream out in an undammed torrent that never lets up; the solo in in this respect a fantastic technical display sure enough, but one is impressed first and foremost by the powerful emotional intensity that prompts and directs the solo. The technique is merely a means to this end.

The Byard piano solo that follows (certainly an unenviable position) is stunning and forceful in its own way. The pianist makes a very effective use of contrast within his solo; the lines generated by his two hands move in opposite directions, with a cumulative effect like a crosstide.

There is a decidedly old-timey feel to the theme on this piece, which Kirk states on stritch with wonderful, sympathetic support from Byard, Davis and Jones. As has been mentioned, there is a suggestion of Fats Waller in the piano accompaniment; and in the final capitulation of the theme, after the solos, a touch of early Duke Ellington is suggested through the use of chimes against the melody line. All told, a marvelous performance.

Kirk’s one flute excursion in the album (the liner notes and credits omit any reference to his flute playing) occurs on the aptly named Mystical Dream, the theme of which is stated on all three of Kirk’s reeds. There is an aura of eerie suspension about the piece, especially in the chord voicing Kirk employs for the three horns. After Kirk’s brief, tasteful flute spot, Byard takes over for a well-developed, flowing solo in an appropriately reflective cast. The number is short; one would have wished it to continue a bit longer.

Another tour de force is the title tune. Quite a bit of tension is generated at the outset by Kirk’s and Davis’ free-play passage, suggesting as it does electronic music. The tension builds to a climax when a plate of glass is shattered, and then the piece moves into the serpentine ascending theme.

Again, Kirk takes off on an explosive, fire-eating, no-letup improvisation prodded by the deft, jabbing piano of Byard, who creates a virtual flying carpet of sound under Kirk’s feet, propelling him at great speed to great heights. Byard’s solo is cast in a similar vein, crackling with heat and tension, his lines moving in jagged spirals out from the center, crossing and recrossing. The patterns Byard develops in his solos reveal one of the most imaginative and quick – not to say witty – minds in jazz. He’s at the top of his game in this set.

Much the same is true of the closing Slippery, which is set against a barrage of electronic sounds; the men do not respond to the mechanically produced stimuli so much as they ride roughshod over them. Kirk is blazing with power and fire, and Byard, Davis, and Jones keep stoking the engine.

The manzello is heard to excellent advantage on Kirk’s 3/4 Black Diamond; he constructs a solo that is full of the alternation of heart and muscle that has characterized his powerful, personal music from the outset of his recording career.

So far, this is, in my opinion, the Roland Kirk album.

Kirk looks as if he’ll not only handily outdistance the furies that pursue him but will lead them a merry chase in the bargain. Get this set, by all means; it’s superb.

—–

Liner Notes by Don Heckman

Roland Kirk in action – stolid, deep in concentration, enveloped by a convoluted array of tubes, keys and straps – is an impressive sight. So impressive, in fact, that this image, which represents only one aspect of his musical personality, dominates the perception of many listeners. It is their loss; Kirk’s artistic achievements are not due to the simple fact that he plays several instruments at once – a feat that was not exactly uncommon in the days of vaudeville – but to the results he achieves.

“I’m trying to be a musician and represent all phases of music. Even the hippies say ‘What is that’ when I do my electronic stuff. They think that since I play two or three horns that I’m not doing anything. Since they don’t know what style of music I really represent they can’t pin me down.”

The trust is that Kirk’s style continues to evolve, often with remarkably original personal adaptations of complex contemporary music techniques. In this album, for example, two tracks include pre-recorded, electronically modified sounds. But even in the areas where one might expect predictable results – standards, blues, ballads, etc. – Kirk finds a way to make the material his own.

No Tonic Prez is a tribute to Lester Young. But Kirk doesn’t stop there; he adds a little more by writing a line that has no clear key resolution.

“The head doesn’t have a tonic (the layman might think I’m talking about a drink). It’s a riff that I heard Prez use and I extended the line to utilize all the horn, from top to bottom. I know Prez’s music so I’m able to extend myself on what he has done, instead of just trying to play his licks. Coltrane does Prez-type things on the horn but he extends them. People who just try to copy Prez lose it because they haven’t used themselves. I dig Jaki‘s solo here because he knows about all the stride stuff but he still plays modern.”

In From Bechet, Byas and Fats Kirk salutes other players he has admired, in this case, of course, soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet, tenor saxophonist Don Byas and the great pianist/organist/songwriter Fats Waller. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the track is the fidelity of Kirk’s tenor version of the Byas style, a version which uses many of the characteristics Byas devices – chromatic chord arpeggios, a woofing, barking sound that occasionally leaps up into high harmonics, and a strong emphasis on a four-beat-rhythm – but which remains, nonetheless, a completely personal Kirkian expression.

“This represents Sidney Bechet on manzello – not the way he would play it but with the force. The bass and piano are like Waller and the tenor like Don. 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.”

Electronic sounds are heard in Slippery, Hippery Flippery. They are what might technically be called musique concrete, that is, actual sounds which have been altered by electronic and mechanical manipulation. (Pure electronic music uses sounds which do not exist in nature and have been produced by oscillators, filters, etc.)

“Some of the sounds I made with my horn; the rhythm section was playing free. Some of the tape sounds I got around the house – wind chimes, my voice amplified, the baby hollering. I slowed down some of the sounds and played them all together. The head is written off a computer; I used the cycle of notes from a computer I once heard to make the line.”

The title has a special significance and reflects Kirk’s quixotic satirical bent.

“I call the music slippery; it represents slipperiness. ‘Flippery’ represents the ladies that hang out in the clubs and know more about the music than the musicians do. In another setting, like a discotheque, the chicks put jazz down. ‘Flippery’ also means fickle – like people who say different things depending on who they’re with.”

Black Diamond and Once in Awhile are straight-ahead blowing performances – the first in three, the second in four – that offer Kirk the opportunity to explore the resources of interesting harmonic cadences.

“I thought Black Diamond fit well with the manzello; it makes a nice change of mood. And I always wanted to play Once in a While; after I heard Clifford Brown do it, it just stuck in my mind.”

The second electronic piece has an equally fascinating title – Rip, Rig and Panic. This time, however, the sounds are deceptive, since the opening section, strikingly electronic in character, is actually produced by bassist Richard Davis. The first electronic sounds do not emerge until nearly the end of the piece. The crashing glass, however, was recorded in the studio, improvised – so to speak – as a part of the performance.

“When the glass breaks it reminds me of a time when I was about 17 and I used to sit in the hallway at home practicing those double and triple stops. It was the kind of hallway where there are decorations and stuff. Once when I played a certain harmonic a glass vase fell off the shelf. I don’t know if the wind cause it or I did but it stuck in my mind and I decided to do it in this piece. “The ending was done with an amplifier; I can shake it in a certain way to get those sounds. It was inspired by the music of Edgar Varèse.”

Once again, the title has special significance.

“Rip means Rip Van Winkle [or Rest in Peace?]. It’s the way people, even musicians, are. They’re asleep. Rig means like rigor mortis. That’s where a lot of people’s minds are. When they hear me doing things they didn’t think I could do they panic in their minds. They all say, ‘Well, I didn’t know this kind of thing could happen.’ Actually, I was doing some things like this when I was in Ohio, but I lost work because people didn’t want to hear this kind of thing.”

The last piece, Mystical Dreams, was motivated by a Kirk dream. (In an interview with Don DeMichael in Down Beat, Kirk traced his original decision to play more than one instrument at a time to a sound heard in an earlier dream.)

“I dreamt about the combination of oboe, stritch and tenor. The way I work out the combination is to first get the sound I hear in my mind. Then I work out the fingerings or I move the song to fit it.”

In the case of this particular combination of instruments, the problems are unusually acute; the embouchure for tenor and stritch is not exactly the most appropriate one for oboe. Kirk solves the problem so well that one is not really ware of just how difficult it was – a superb technical achievement.

The unusually consistent artistic level that prevails throughout this date is due – in addition to Kirk – to the exceptional accompaniment provided by the rhythm section. Elvin Jones, Kirk’s co-leader for this session, has changed the face of jazz drumming in a way that no player has done since the early days of Kenny Clarke. For the last few years, he has been closely associated with John Coltrane, evolving a synthesis rhythm and melody that has some similarities to the classical music of India. It is testimony to his great artistry that his approach to Kirk’s music is completely different, and is fully responsive to its special qualities. Jones aptly described his view of the accompanist’s and soloist’s respective role in a Down Beat panel discussion:

“What goes through my mind is my interpretation of the soloist’s interpretation of the particular composition, I try to keep that foremost in my mind, and as far as my solo, it’s an improvisation on that particular theme.”

Richard Davis seems quite literally to play anything, from Beethoven to contemporary concert music to brilliant spontaneous improvisations. When asked about the date, his enthusiasm for Kirk’s music was apparent:

“I enjoyed doing the album – especially the freedom Roland incorporated into it. I didn’t know what was going to happen until it happened.”

Jaki Byard has already influenced in one way or another nearly every young musician in Boston for at least the last decade. He, too, was enthusiastic about the session:

“It was a really inspiring date to me. I had a ball.” Kirk’s feeling about his musical associates is equally strong:

“I met Jaki a long time ago and always wanted to do a date with him. He really enhanced things because he knew how to build – take the roots and work them out of the avant garde. Elvin and Richard have just what any player wants.”

No one can speak more authoritatively about what the music is intended to say than the artist who brought it all together. A few final works, therefore, from Roland Kirk.

“Since my son’s been here with us I really know what freedom is. When he goes to the piano he gets the sound he hears. This album is my way of expressing freedom.”