Bright Moments: The Life & Legacy of Rahsaan Roland Kirk

Rahssan Roland Kirk was one of the most unique and colorful creators in music. Such imagination. Such a creative individual. He was awesome, at the top of my list. Quincy Jones

One of the great eccentrics of jazz finally gets a biography, albeit a sloppy one. Even in a music that has produced its share of offbeat personalities, Roland Kirk was truly one-of-a-kind. Blind almost from birth, Kirk mastered a seemingly endless array of instruments, playing not only conventional jazz staples like flute and tenor sax but also saxophone forerunners like the manzello and the stritch, the oboe, dozens of homemade concoctions of his own devising like the nose flute and the surulophone, and a raft of percussion. Even more spectacularly, he frequently played three horns at a time. But despite his sideshow reputation, Kirk was not merely a circus act; he was a serious, talented musician whose sidemen included the best bop and hard-bop players, a musician good enough to play with the demanding Charles Mingus. Musician/journalist Kruth retells Kirk's story through the words of his friends, wife, and fellow musicians. In addition, he was granted access to Kirk's tape-recorded reminiscences for an unfinished autobiography. Regrettably, Kruth eschews all but the most rudimentary chronology, preferring to organize the book as a series of riffs within a hit-or-miss thematic framework. He has spoken not only to nearly everyone who ever played with Kirk but to anyone who ever saw him, met him, or heard one of his records. The result is a rambling, disorganized, and ultimately dull excursion in which Kruth uses every word of every interview he ever conducted, whether it illuminates his subject or not. The raw material for a biography of a persistently underrated jazzman is here; it awaits an author. Reads like a 400-page magazine profile, with all the problems that description suggests. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Kruth brings a musician's appreciation to Kirk's genius, rendering life to a biography of a man who was larger than life. For insight into a man whose talent was often underappreciated because of the excesses of his stage performances, Kruth interviewed Kirk's contemporaries--Quincy Jones, Yusef Lateef, Sonny Rollins. Kirk, blind since childhood, brought a particular sensitivity to what he preferred to call black classical music rather than jazz. His competitive instincts, coupled with a voracious appetite for food and other excesses of the time, rendered Kirk a big, blind black man, unapologetic and outspoken. Kirk recognized and resented the disparate treatment between the creators of the music and the popular imitators who benefited from the art form. Kruth commands the uninitiated reader to explore Kirk's muse, and those more familiar with the man to revisit Kirk's adventures through sound. Freed by his death from the distractions of his persona and stage performances, Kirk's bright moments--the music he played without bounds or limitations--shine through. Vernon Ford

Kruth, a musician and journalist, has written the first full-length biography of multi-instrumental jazz icon Kirk (1936-77). Using dozens of interviews and a just-unearthed audio autobiography narrated by Kirk, Kruth traces Kirk's life from his childhood in Columbus, OH, to his mid-career vocal black-power stance, to his debilitating stroke and premature death in the mid-1970s. Throughout, Kruth highlights Kirk's pioneering efforts--such as his reintroduction of the stritch and manzello saxophones and his innovative circular breathing that enabled him to play several instruments simultaneously. Though he sometimes overstates Kirk's admittedly prodigious talents, Kruth offers a revealing biography that captures a complex jazz artist. He portrays Kirk as an original steeped in tradition, open to all types of sound but critical of rock'n'roll, a jolly prankster who humiliated his audiences, and a serious jazz player who destroyed chairs as part of his stage act. This engaging biography about an often-neglected talent will be welcomed by general readers as well as jazz scholars.
-David P. Szatmary, Univ. of Washington, Seattle
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.