Dig Deep: Rahsaan Roland Kirk – Left & Right – Atlantic (1969)

Rahsaan Roland Kirk – The Black Mystery Has Been Revealed / Expansions
Rahsaan Roland Kirk – Lady’s Blues
Rahsaan Roland Kirk – A Flower Is A Lovesome Thing

Here at Melting Pot, every August 7th, we celebrate Rahsaan Roland Kirk day! Rahsaan is the patron saint of this blog and one of my all-time favorite musicians and this year’s celebration brings with it a review and head’s up for the fantastic documentary directed by Adam Kahan on Rahsaan, called The Three-Sided Dream. So far, it’s been screened on a very limited basis at a few festivals around the country. When Melting Pot returns to the air on August 17th, I’ll be running an interview I did with Adam ahead of the screening here in LA for the Don’t Knock The Rock fest that Allison Anders curates. I’ll likely close the interview with a song from this 1969 album, “Lady’s Blues,” which according to Adam was the first song that he really “heard” from Rahsaan.

Left & Right is an interesting album. It’s one of the few that features Rahsaan with strings on most every track. The title, and the iconic cover photo, certainly reference the multiple sides of Rahsaan’s musicianship, as do the two sides of the album. The first side begins with a short call to arms from Rahsaan, titled the “Black Mystery Has Been Revealed,” which gives a bit of a preview of the direction Rahsaan would turn to on his later album Blacknuss. Most of the side is taken up with a long, seven-part piece called “Expansions,” which features the always brilliant Harp of Alice Coltrane.

Side two almost entirely features (aside from the aforementioned “Lady’s Blues” which Kirk wrote) covers of songs that are clearly inspirational to Rahsaan, including songs associated with Mingus (“I X Love”), Billy Strayhorn (“A Flower Is A Lovesome Thing”) and Quincy Jones (“Quintessence”). The inclusion of these songs, with the strings, acts as a real stark contrast to the more experimental “Expansions,” and gives another layer to the “Left & Right” metaphor with Rahsaan, something Adam & I talked about in our interview, the tension between pushing the music forward as an innovator and holding on to a sense of reverence of past traditions and styles. When I think of the criticism I’ve read of Rahsaan, it always seems like this dichotomy, described in the album’s notes as composer/entertainer, is the thing people who don’t dig him can’t wrap their head around. Rahsaan was many things and like the multiple instruments he often played, he was all these many things simultaneously. Which is precisely why we loved him so.

Bright Moments,

Michael

p.s. If you haven’t seen the film just yet, or even just the trailer for it, here it is. Once we run the interview with Adam, I’ll use that post to update about the status of the film and any scheduled screenings or (hopefully soon!) a release date to see it in theaters…the film is exactly what every fan of Rahsaan’s music could have hoped for: