Rahsaan Roland Kirk — The Case of the 3 Sided Dream in Audio Color
Qobuz reissue review (February 2021)
From the mid-’50s through the early ’60s, Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s multi-instrument dexterity was treated as a bit of a novelty. After all, here was a blind guy with three or four horns wrapped around his neck — some of which were exotic, modified variations like the manzello, a B-flat soprano sax, or the stritch, an E-flat alto sax — who switched between them seamlessly (or sometimes, playing them simultaneously). However, Kirk’s playing and compositional approach was never frivolous or goofy; in fact, it became more and more dense, daring, and mature as time went on. His work with the likes of Charles Mingus, Roy Haynes, and even John Cage eventually brought around many of his critics, and by the late ’60s, he had clearly carved out his own lane of dynamic, adventurous jazz that, by the time he signed to Atlantic Records in the early ’70s, had exploded into an avant-soul superhighway. Kirk’s ideas were voluminous and wide-ranging during this era, careening from deeply-felt experimental albums (Root Strata) to clear-eyed nostalgia (a swinging collaboration with ’40s crooner Al Hibbler) to mind-blowing feats of physical jazz prowess (he played the entirety of one album all in one breath).
The Case of the 3-Sided Dream is the both the culmination and the peak of those varying impulses: a concept album spread across three sides of a double album (side four was largely blank, apart from some recordings of Kirk on the telephone) designed not only to free him from his record contract but also to expand the possibilities of what a “jazz album” even was in the mid-’70s. This was, after all, the era in which “electric jazz” had abandoned its promise of revolution and instead settled for highly polished, soul-flecked fusion. The bold experiments of the free jazz scene had returned to the underground, and most of the titans of the ’50s and ’60s engaged in either misguided attempts to connect with commercial audiences or retro-minded purity contests. For Kirk to come out with an album featuring bonkers spoken-word interludes, rudimentary sampling, frenetic flute solos, musique concrète experiments, funk grooves, and multiple versions of various standards … well, it very explicitly positioned him as one of the few major jazz musicians of the era trying to keep the genre moving forward without sacrificing its sense of adventure or political and personal empowerment. It’s funky and fusion-y, sure, but it’s also incredibly idiosyncratic and experimental. The concept is densely inscrutable, but also completely literal — it is about a dream and thus, plays out like a dream sequence, bouncing around from idea to idea, returning to some repeatedly while abandoning others immediately. This is most obvious in Kirk’s approach to the standards; for instance, Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer” — a well-trod path if ever there was one — gets visited twice, once as a familiar, bluesy blowing session and then again as a psycho-latin-funk-freakout containing one of Kirk’s best flute solos. He takes a similar approach to “Lover Man” (recast here as “Portrait of Those Beautiful Ladies”), but by placing these warped touchstones next to his own pieces — weirdo groove explorations like the two-part “Freaks for the Festival” and absolutely experimental material like the Moondog-esque “Echoes of Primitive Ohio & Chili Dogs” — Kirk is evoking both the traditions and forward motion of jazz while also putting the listener in a sort of disoriented dream state. It’s a remarkable work indeed, and were he to not have suffered a debilitating stroke shortly after making it, one marvels at how much further he could have continued taking his ideas. © Jason Ferguson/Qobuz
