Rahsaan Roland Kirk – Conversation
Rahsaan Roland Kirk – Freaks For The Festival
Rahsaan Roland Kirk – Portrait Of Those Beautiful Ladies
Rahsaan Roland Kirk – Dream/Portrait Of Those Beautiful Ladies
Rahsaan Roland Kirk – Side 4 Secret Conversation
{With this I’ll be formally taking a hiatus from the blog until probably the end of August. I’m going to be doing some traveling and then getting ready for the beginning of the Fall semester at Long Beach. When I come back, both here and on the radio, I’ll have stories to tell and (hopefully) some great records to share with you. I’ll see you (or more accurately you’ll hear me) on August 28th when I return to the KPFK airwaves…until then, Bright Moments!}
Today would have been Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s 80th birthday, and since he IS the patron saint of Melting Pot, we always celebrate this day with a look at one his albums. In this case it’s one of his most distinctive albums, released 40 years ago (just like me!), The Case Of The Three-Sided Dream In Audio Color. This album was the follow up to Bright Moments and much of the energy from that live album finds it’s way here. The album in many ways is a concept album, connected together by interludes that seem to be connected to Rahsaan’s dreams.
Dreams were very important to Rahsaan, it’s said that he came up with the idea to play multiple instruments at once because of his dreams, and his name “Rahsaan,” came to him in a dream. Aside from the opening “Conversation” where Rahsaan is commanded to dream, the dreams themselves are audio collages mixing in a variety of sounds from trains to horses to Billie Holiday’s voice. The fact that many of these sounds repeat again and again throughout the record also connects to a clear theme for Rahsaan, in his music more broadly, but perhaps never more fully explored than on this album, the cyclical though timeless nature of music. Over the three sides of music, Rahsaan & the Vibration Society perform different versions of the same tracks, almost appearing in reverse/mirrored order. There are two versions of “Freaks For The Festival,” “Bye Bye Blackbird,” “Portait of Those Beautiful Ladies,” “The Entertainer” as well as versions of “High Heel Sneakers” and “Echoes Of Primitive Ohio and Chili Dogs.” With so much material you might think the album would get redundant, but the additional versions support and augment the dreamlike quality of the album, reminiscent of the feeling you may have when you awake from a dream and fall back to sleep into the same dream, yet things have shifted in slight ways.
The really distinctive thing about this album is the fourth side. Though the record itself says that grooves were added to the fourth side solely to protect people’s audio equipment who might have forgotten that this was a three sided album, there is something to be heard on that fourth side. It’s not something that is really easy to see when you look at the wax and so I’m sure that a lot of people might have missed Rahsaan’s message. It’s possible that I only would have realized that something was there because I first heard this album on CD, which recreated that fourth side through a hidden track.
“Hey Rahsaan, do you have a message for the people who will be listening to the part of the record that no one will be listening to?”
{Speaking in tongues}…In that, we all know that there will never be peace, I would like to say Bright Moments and joy through the universe to all the very beautiful people that might take time out to paste their ears to this very beautiful spinning piece of material that is in their presence…Bright Moments and joy, because we know that the whole thing of peace has passed us all by, but serenity and joy through the land…Bright Moments {more speaking in tongues}.”
It always makes me smile that Rahsaan and company came up with that idea and I’m sure it must have tripped people out when they discovered it for the first time. I like to think that Rahsaan’s spirit is still smiling every time someone puts needle to that part of the album to this day.
Bright Moments!
Michael