Jazz: Finding the Lost Chord

The man on the stand looks like a portable museum of musical instru ments. Dangling from his neck is a manzello, a quasi saxophone that forgot to grow up, and a stritch, which resembles a dented blunderbuss and hangs well below his knees. The third instrument is more familiar; it is a tenor sax, and stuffed into its bell is a flute. The musician rocks back and forth on his feet as if uncertain how to begin. Then he makes his decision. He puts all three big horns in his mouth at once, and blows like a whale. What spouts forth sometimes sounds like a bagpipers’ band skirling The Campbells Are Coming. But most often the sounds belong uniquely to their maker, Roland Kirk, who meshes a thrumming beat, a fer tile imagination and an impish humor to achieve an exciting union of the pa gan and the modern spirit — as if Pan were suddenly found piping merrily in a rush-hour subway.

Frontiers of Sound. Since he is both a Negro and blind, Kirk is conditioned to frustration, but he resents any suggestion that he is a musical freak. And his tautly phrased solos on individual instruments at Manhattan’s cavernous Village Gate last week refuted any illusion that he is a gimmicky stunt man. A pair of Down Beat awards by inter national jazz critics in the past two years attest his achievement.

Kirk, now just over 30, has spent much of his life pursuing a kind of mys tical lost chord. His quest began at 19, in his native Columbus, Ohio, where he literally dreamed of playing two horns at the same time and was entranced by what he heard in his mind’s ear. After an antique dealer turned up the manzello, which approximates the soprano sax, and the stritch, which is close to an alto sax, Kirk began practicing what he had dreamed. Since then he has blown his horns all over Europe and the U.S.; he is a dauntless explorer of the frontiers of sound, a man who simply wants to play as much music as any one man can. A devotee of Brazilian Composer Villa-Lobos, the twelve-tone pioneer Arnold Schoenberg and Bassist Charlie Mingus, Kirk plays modern jazz but rejects the label. “People classify modern as being cool and not wanting to sweat,” he says.

Sweat & Showmanship. Behind his dark glasses and glittering arsenal of horns, goateed Kirk sweats aplenty, with instinctive showmanship and passion. When the steam is up, he is likely to blow a shrill Tarzan victory call on a siren-whistle that could be mistaken for a hunting horn. He delights in the unexpected. In the middle of a flute solo, he will pop a child’s plastic song flute into his right nostril and trill out a brief duet. For a performer who took up the flute only three years ago, Kirk plays it with astonishing virtuosity. He can begin with a slow, throaty, lyrical blues, punctuate the piece with jagged staccato yelps of outrage, and then tap the stops with his fingers like a woodpecker beating out a rat-tat-tat.

All sound is musical Braille to Kirk. “The buzz of a doorbell is a note,” he says; “the clunk of an ash tray on a table, that’s percussion. I was riding in a taxi and the driver blew his horn. ‘Man, you just made some music,’ I told him.” Whatever the taxi driver thought, Roland Kirk had found another lost chord.