Nearly a quarter century after his death, Rahsaan Roland Kirk does not receive a fraction of the adulation routinely heaped upon Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington or even Charles Mingus.
Yet the man was a volcanic force in jazz, upending conventional notions of how the music was to be conceived and performed. From the late 1950s until his death in 1977, at age 41, Kirk continuously expanded the expressive reach of the art form. Whether punctuating his performances with sirens and whistles or blowing into three horns at once (thereby giving new meaning to the term “multi-instrumentalist”), Kirk scoffed at stylistic boundaries that stopped less intrepid players.
You could count on the fingers of one hand the number of reedists today who could do justice to Kirk’s outsized legacy. But one of them would have to be James Carter, a hitherto uneven player who may have found a new voice and raison d’etre in exploring Kirk’s music.
Though headed by the versatile trombonist Steve Turre, the Kirk tribute band that performed Friday night on the Ameritech Jazz at Symphony Center series ultimately hinged on Carter’s explosive reed work. Granted, the hard-charging, front-line contributions of trombonist Turre and saxophonist Gary Bartz enhanced the sonic luster and harmonic complexity of this music. The very fact that three players were required to evoke the sounds that Kirk achieved alone said a great deal about Kirk’s work.
Yet, in the end, Carter’s reed playing defined the heart and soul of this band.
Anyone who has followed Carter’s career may have been startled by the emotional abandon he showed throughout this performance. Though a virtuoso player by any measure, Carter in the past has demonstrated an inordinate fondness for technical gimmickry and other forms of musical ostentation.
Considering the stripped-down, blues-drenched, no-holds-barred quality of Kirk’s best music, Carter would not seem an obvious candidate to carry forth Kirk’s message. Certainly there is no place for slick and facile players in Kirk’s world.
Yet as Carter demonstrated with every blistering phrase and gravelly, guttural moan, his tenor saxophone may be ideally suited for articulating Kirk’s music.
For openers, the sheer size and intensity of Carter’s sound placed him in Kirk’s league as charismatic soloist. The young man’s lungs must be enormous, for he sounded as if a microphone had been implanted in each one.
Though Carter’s arsenal of pyrotechnics has sounded frivolous on previous occasions, this time the saxophonist’s bizarre sonic effects, outrageous screeches and pitiless howls hardly could have been better placed. Like Kirk himself, Carter played as if trying to blow more sound out of his horn than it was designed to produce.
Carter’s jagged lines, raspy tone, relentless crescendos and all-over-the-map harmonies ignited his solos in “Dorthaan’s Walk,” yet he sounded at least as persuasive in ensemble passages. With Buster Williams providing remarkably fat bass lines, drummer Lewis Nash articulating aggressive swing rhythms and pianist Mulgrew Miller providing plush chordal fills, this band attested to the majesty of Kirk’s music.
But there was more to recommend Carter’s work than mere volume and force. In “The Black and Crazy Blues,” Carter’s stunning, extended clarinet solo acknowledged two critical facets of Kirk’s playing: Its implacable search for new sounds and its unmistakable roots in the vernacular of early New Orleans jazz.
Surely the unabashedly wide vibrato and sweetly diatonic phrases with which Carter opened his solo pointed not only to the first chapter of jazz history but also to Kirk’s profound knowledge of it. Before long, Carter pushed into more adventurous territory, spinning a single melodic line (which hovered around a single pitch) for several minutes without pause.
More than just a stunt, however, this tour de force of “cyclical breathing,” as musicians call it, attested to the ferocity of expression Carter has attained in Kirk’s music. Carter never sounded better.
