 Roland Kirk On I Talk With the Spirits, Roland Kirk (yet to add "Rahsaan" to his name) plays only flute, alto flute, and African wood flute, and only one at a time, even. This marks the album as one of the more straightforward in his discography, but straightforward Roland Kirk is still quite a bit off-kilter compared to, say, straightforward Zoot Sims. The album reflects that sound that a lot of people think of when they think of "jazz" – the breezy drums, piano, and bass, capped off by the soothing flute sounding sophisticated and sexy. For flute enthusiasts this album is a must-have, as it features the ever forward-thinking Kirk playing with a fairly straight-ahead 1964 combo (Horace Parlan on piano, Michael Fleming on bass, Walter Perkins on drums, and Bobby Moses here and there on vibes), but playing the flute in a fairly 1971 kind of way. Kirk makes the instrument growl, purr, yelp, and scream in between some of the coolest melodically-conceived solos you can bend your mind around. He teeters between standard playing and wackiness throughout (a surprisingly large amount of speaking through the mouthpiece occurs, for example), but the overall feel is very cool 60s jazz, just south of the avant-garde but still hugely crowd-pleasing. The big hit off the album is the opener, Kirk's original version of his "Serenade to a Cuckoo," which features Crystal-Joy Albert on vocals doubling Kirk's truly koo-koo melodies. It's a classic, deservedly remembered as one of Kirk's most timeless creations. The rest is just as captivating and quite diverse stylistically, including a tongue-in-cheek baroque fragment called "Fugue'n' and Alludin" as well as a trademark Kirk blues ("The Business Ain't Nothin' but the Blues," another absolute classic) and a couple of standards ("We'll Be Together Again" and "My Ship"). The title track even gets into a somewhat Japanese-sounding vibe not unlike Tony Scott's Music For Zen Meditation, though not quite so meditative. "Ruined Castles" takes on an almost medieval approach, resulting in another memorable performance. Kirk seems to have more focus on this album than on a lot of his later releases, finding some freedom in the limitation of a single instrument rather than his standard "three horns at a time" deal. He demonstrates himself as a virtuostic soloist on this disc, rather than the amazingly unique but hard-to-categorize one-man-band he is known for being. I Talk With the Spirits is sort of like those early art-student sketches by Picasso where you can see that the artist was fully capable of creating perfectly realistic, amazing portraits completely apart from the supposed "gimmickry" that made his name. With Kirk's later Atlantic albums, it's sort of easy to say, "Well, anyone could learn how to blow three horns at once, it's just a gimmick," but on this disc Kirk's talent and creativity is an inarguable fact. It's a great disc that offers a lot of insight into Kirk's musical personality, and furthermore, it's just some great goddamn jazz.
Review by Mary Pylon |