Boogie Woogie String Along For Real Rahsaan Roland Kirk & Al Hibbler

• 1 Boogie-Woogie String Along For Real 08:52
• 2 I Loves You Porgy 01:52
• 3 Make Me A Pallet On The Floor 07:16
• 4 Hey Babebips 05:07
• 5 In A Mellow Tone 06:15
• 6 Summertime 01:40
• 7 Dorthaan's Walk 07:11
• 8 Watergate Blues 06:36
• Total Runtime 44:49

Info zu Boogie Woogie String Along For Real

The final album Rahsaan Roland Kirk ever recorded remains one of his finest. Post-stroke, Kirk struggled with his conception of the music he was trying to make. Boogie-Woogie String Along for Real is the payoff. The title track features strings playing distended harmonics over his blowing and the backing of a guttersnipe rhythm section and a full-blown horn section -- including a very young trombonist named Steve Turre -- behind him. From here, Kirk works veritable magic with the material of the age, swimming deeply in the blues that Gershwin didn't know he had in &'I Loves You Porgy,' getting an aging Tiny Grimes to wail his guitar-playing ass off on &'Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor,' and then flowing elegantly on Ellington's &'In a Mellow Tone' and Gershwin's &'Summertime.' It's almost too much to bear as the emotions come falling from the horn and the rhythm section tries to keep them balanced, but the heartbreak and joy are everywhere. When Kirk closes the disc with his own stomping hard-swing R&B of &'Dorthaan's Walk' (dedicated to his wife) and takes it out with Percy Heath's &'Watergate Blues,' he closes the circle. With Hilton Ruiz playing a deep-grooved Latin funk against Kirk's harmonica and alto, Heath playing cello, and Turre opening up a huge space of feeling behind the front line as Sonny Brown and Phil Bowler keep it all in check on drums and bass respectively, Kirk sums it all up in his alto solo. There is so much sadness, betrayal, pain, and resolve in his lines that the rules of Western music no longer apply. The all-inclusive vision Kirk has of a music embraces all emotions and attitudes and leaves no one outside the door. This is Kirk's Black Classical Music, and it is fully realized on this final track and album. (Thom Jurek, Rovi)

'This is the last album Rahsaan recorded, a classic example of his dedication to BLACK CLASSICAL MUSIC, and another link in his chain of his music. Those of you who have heard him know that he did not use the term 'jazz.' He always listened to all aspects of music and explored all areas in his recordings, not just his yunes, as is demonstrated on this album.' (Doorthaan Kirk)

Rahsaan Roland Kirk, flute, harmonica, clarinet, manzello, tenor saxophone, lyricon, kalimba
Cornell Dupree, guitar
Tiny Grimes, guitar
Billy Butler, guitar
Percy Heath, cello
Kermit Moore, cello
Steve Turre, trombone
Howard Johnson, tuba
Sammy Price, piano
William S. Fischer, electric piano & synthesizer
Trudy Pitts, organ
Hilton Ruiz, keyboards
Richard Tee, keyboards
Phil Bowler, bass
Arvell Shaw, bass
Milton Suggs, bass
Mattathias Pearson, bass
Sonny Brown, drums
Walter Perkins, drums
Tony Waters, percussion

Digitally remastered.

Roland Kirk
7 August 1936, Columbus, Ohio, USA, d. 5 December 1977, Bloomington, Indiana, USA. Originally named ‘Ronald’, Kirk changed it to ‘Roland’ and added ‘Rahsaan’ after a dream visitation by spirits who ‘told him to’. Blinded soon after his birth, Kirk became one of the most prodigious multi-instrumentalists to work in jazz, with a career that spanned R&B, bop and the ‘New Thing’ jazz style. According to Joe Goldberg’s sleeve notes for Kirk’s Work (1961), Kirk took up trumpet at the age of nine after hearing the bugle boy at a summer camp where his parents acted as counsellors. He played trumpet in the school band, but a doctor advised against the strain trumpet playing imposes on the eyes. At the Ohio State School for the Blind, he took up saxophone and clarinet from 1948. By 1951 he was well known as a player and was leading his own dance band in the locality. Kirk’s ability to play three instruments simultaneously gained him notoriety. Looking through the ‘scraps’ in the basement of a music store, Kirk found two horns believed to have been put together from different instruments, but which possibly dated from late nineteenth-century Spanish military bands. The manzello was basically an alto saxophone with a ‘large, fat, ungainly’ bell. The strich resembled ‘a larger, more cumbersome soprano’. He found a method of playing both, plus his tenor, producing a wild, untempered ‘ethnic’ sound ideal for late-60s radical jazz. He also soloed on all three separately and added flute, siren and clavietta (similar to the melodica used by Augustus Pablo and the Gang Of Four) to his armoury. With all three horns strung around his neck, and sporting dark glasses and a battered top hat, Kirk made quite a spectacle.

The real point was that, although he loved to dally with simple R&B and ballads, he could unleash break-neck solos that sounded like a bridge between bebop dexterity and avant garde ‘outness’. His debut for a properly distributed label - recorded for Cadet Records in Chicago in June 1960 at the behest of Ramsey Lewis - provoked controversy, some deriding the three-horn-trick as a gimmick, others applauding the fire of his playing. In 1961, he joined the Charles Mingus Workshop for four months, toured California and played on Oh Yeah! He also played the Essen Jazz Festival in Germany. In 1963, he began the first of several historic residencies at Ronnie Scott’s club in London. Despite later guest recordings with Jaki Byard (who had played on his Rip Rig & Panic) and Mingus (at the 1974 Carnegie Hall concert), Kirk’s main focus of activity was his own group, the Vibration Society, with whom he toured the world until he suffered his first stroke in November 1975, which paralysed his right side. With characteristic single-mindedness, he taught himself to play with his left hand only and started touring again. A second stroke in 1977 caused his death.

Long before the 80s ‘consolidation’ period for jazz, Kirk presented a music fully cognizant of black American music, from Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong on through Duke Ellington and John Coltrane; he also paid tribute to the gospel and soul heritage, notably on Blacknuss, which featured songs by Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson and Bill Withers. Several of his tunes - ‘The Inflated Tear’, ‘Bright Moments’, ‘Let Me Shake Your Tree’, ‘No Tonic Pres’ - have become jazz standards. His recorded legacy is uneven, but it contains some of the most fiery and exciting music to be heard. Source: The Encyclopedia of Popular Music by Colin Larkin.

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