Roland

It's hard to fathom today, but Roland Kirk was considered a gimmick for much of his early career. For sure, the man was a cagey character, which certainly didn't help his reputation. People were bemused by the way he played multiple horns simultaneously, including some horns that he invented himself. His style wasn't easy to pin down, either, so fluent was he in every jazz idiom.

This three-CD box set, in producer and then label Boss' weirdly wired brain, encompasses two different sides of Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Discs one and two represent sporadic live recordings of Kirk from 1962 to 1972, all of them previously unreleased and issued courtesy of a Kirk collector named George Bonafacio. These two discs contain Kirk classics such as "Domino," "Blacknuss," and an excerpt from "Three for the Festival," as well as singular Kirk interpretations of "I Say a Little Prayer," "Freddie Freeloader," "Lester Leaps In," "Giant Steps," "Sister Sadie," and more. These two discs are chock-full of stellar performances that are well-recorded despite being fan tapes. The musicians on these dates range from bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pederson to Hilton Ruiz, Jerome Cooper, Tete Montoliu, and many others…

This is one of the maddest Roland Kirk albums of all time - and it's also one of the hardest to find! The title says "Slightly Latin", but it's more of a mixed-up Now Sound/Bacharach-ish blend of orchestrations and voices, plus Exotica tinges, with Roland playing some very off-kilter reed solos on flute and various saxes. The sound is incredible, and the arrangements are incredibly strange - and the album sounds like nothing that Kirk (or anyone else) has ever done. Highlights include "Shaky Money", "Safari", "Ebrauos", "Raouf", "Juarez", and a wild version of "Walk On By". The whole thing's wild, though, and it never lets up for a minute! More "out" than "easy", and a real treasure that's the kind of reissue we like to get behind!

Whether or not the four individual albums packaged with in Aces Back to Back are among Rahsaan Roland Kirk's finest is of no consequence. The fact that they have been assembled in a package that offers the listener a sense of Kirk's development and continuity is the issue here. And in this way, Aces Back to Back is a supreme collection. The four albums included - Left & Right, Rahsaan Rahsaan, Prepare Thyself to Deal With a Miracle, and Other Folks Music - date from 1968 to 1976 and chart dimensional growth of Kirk's completely original music. There's the outsider wizardry of Left & Right that melds the innovations of John Coltrane and Scott Joplin across an entire range of highly experimental yet wonderfully human music. Guests included Roy Haynes, Alice Coltrane, Julius Watkins, and many others in a band that ranged from a quartet to a full orchestra…

Joe Roland was a talented but now long-forgotten vibraphonist whose boppish style sometimes sounds similar to Milt Jackson. He recorded as a leader for Rainbow (two numbers in 1949), Savoy (in 1950 and 1954), and six selections for Sesco from 1953-1954, but was best-known for his period as a member of the George Shearing Quintet. This album was the vibist's final set as a leader. The music is quite worthwhile, mainstream bop of the period. Roland alternates standards with a few originals, including "Stairway to the Steinway" and "Goodbye Bird" (for Charlie Parker, who had died five days earlier). A worthwhile reissue.