Rashaan Raps

"I'm here to tell all y'all
That we got a cross that we must bear
And the cross gets awful heavy at different times
But one is supposed to keep on going and carry the cross on your shoulder
'Cause you ain't supposed to let no cross cross you up
You supposed to let a cross help you get across
So when it crosses you up
Go on and deal with it
And leave it alone"
– Old Rugged Cross, Rahsaan Roland Kirk

Juan Rodriguez

Rahsaan's fingers are gingerly feeling their way across a beat-up silver horn resting on his lap. A piece is broken and the blind musician is putting it back together again. It's one of many instruments in his compact hotel room (that hadn't seen good days to begin with). They are everywhere, on chests of drawers, in suitcases, stuffed into bags, as befits the perennial winner of the miscellaneous instruments category in jazz polls everywhere. There are gleaming brass instruments and there are ones he gets given to him and the ones that comer from far-off places and there are the ones he builds himself, stuck together with masking tape, such as the Black Mystery Pipes, which, he writes, "are some pipes made by myself with a piece of bamboo and a yard long metal tube – two pipes are played simultaneously. The long tube is the drone tube which is in the key of G."

The room also contains a couple of suitcases with clothes spilling out of them, and a cassette tape player and portable phonograph that are entwined in a mass of wires leading to a socket in the wall near the foot of his bed. Rahsaan is a heavyset round dark brown man dressed in a black jump suit. He has silver rings on his fingers and wears dark bulbous shades. As a baby he was given too much medecine in his eyes for an infection by a careless nurse and he became blind. Rahsaan Roland Kirk is today one of the world's finest, and most unusual, jazz musicians. He plays more than two dozen instruments, and he gets as much work as any jazz musucian in America in this era of jazz-rock, and he hopes that by the time he gets to 60 he won't be living in hotel rooms anymore.

"I say New Orleans music, others call it Dixieland. I call it New Orleans music because this is what George Lewis and those people who played it called it. There was a time when I didn't know any better and called it Dixieland. When they played Sweet Georgia Brown they would play the melody. When bebop came in with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Monk, Charles Mingus, J.J. Johnson and others, they would take these melodies upon them. In other words, they would make a whole different melody.

"Gershwin wrote I Got Rhythm but the brothers, the bebop brothers, would take it and play a whole new melody off of it. In some respects they played I Got Rhythm better than Gershwin. They expanded upon the changes. So this is what Charlie Parker brought to the music – breaking up the melody – at that time it was free. Bird took the vibrato – I guess people would know what I mean by vibrato because Guy Lombardo made a whole lot of money playing that way, like when you hear the sound of the Royal Canadians. You can even hear the vibrato in Sydney Bechet's playing – Bird put that music on another level. To me, his music is just as free as what we play today. They played off the chords, whereas we play off the tones. When you play atonal today, you just play off of what you hear, more or less, which is good, but I still think you need foundations to do that.

"Bird was influenced by the people who were before him, he heard something from them and he expounded it in his way, instead of staying in that melody line. Bird and Dizzy were outstanding soloists by themselves, so was Louis Armstrong too 'cause he influenced all music. Fats Waller and Benny Carter and Duke Ellingrton were revolutionary too. Duke's suite was called Black, Brown and Beige; that was one of the first times the jazz waltz was played and one of the first times where the music was talking about black, brown and beige. When Duke said black, in those days many people were against him because people were still saying 'coloured.'

"Whatever I'm saying is what I feel. I'm saying what these people have given me. I would be able to talk like this to Duke. I would say, 'Mr. Ellington, when you said Black Brown and Beige, this is what you made me feel.' Now, maybe he wasn't even thinking that way but to me it was a revolutionary force back in them days.

Everyone has a dream
Everything has a scheme
Let's all search for the reason why

"I became interested in music when I was very young, in Columbus, Ohio. I didn't exactly start playing until I was about eight or nine, although when I was five or six years old I used to play on the water hose, and things like that, to build my lip up to play the bugle.

"I had been in and out of New York in the '50s, recording and going on the road with rhythm & blues groups, but I never worked in places like Birdland with my own group. Charles Mingus was the first professional international group that I worked for in New York. He was one of the people who believed in what I was doing musically. Other had some kind of hang-ups, like the two-horn playing was a gimmick, or me not being able to see they would have to take me on and off the bandstand. When Charlie Parker came up on the scene and changed the music, they said he was a freak, a noise-maker. Him and Dizzy Gillespie and Bud Powell and Monk and Mingus and, of the drummers, Max Roach and Roy Haynes. If anyone had ears at that time, they'd know that these people were playing.

"Any time you try to change anybody's way of thinking when they've been set in a certain little bag, you destroyin' the bag. So if I play two horns, I shouldn't be doing it, according to the critics, because Stan Getz wasn't playing two horns. So the first thing they say it's a gimmick, he's just trying to be different. They can't think of nuthin' else to say. People have hang-ups about people being blind, too. They say, 'He's got to be good 'cause he's blind, he's got to have extra perfect pitch.' Well, all that stuff don't necessarily have to be true, because music is a work. Anything takes work. A man could see and work to have perfect pitch and end up having it. Like, I don't have perfect pitch. So these are all myths that people have dwelt on for years.

"All my life I've always liked to listen to all kinds of music. That's been my goal. If I like it, I like it. If I don't, I won't play it. But it's too much for most people to try to dig everything because most people don't even dig themselves, so they can't dig anything else. I dig myself and I feel that myself is everything that I'm trying to be. I want myself to try to like anything that's going on musically, as long as it's good.

"I've seen it happen that if you were working up the street from another band on a Saturday night, maybe you and your trombone player would go to this other joint, walk in on their gig and play, and two of them would go down to your gig and play. I bear witness to it, and it was a good contrast. But these things don't happen anymore.

"Along with playin' music, I believe that people should be entertained, as long as it's not diverting too much from the music. I don't spin pop bottles on my head or anything. The music should be carried all over the club, all over the street. I think that when we come back in off the street, there should be people coming in with us. The music should be strong enough to get people who might be cruisin' in the car at night, maybe him and his old lady would get out and say, 'damn, lemme follow this cat back into the club.' The prices should be set so a man can do this comfortably. This is just a dream of mine but that's the way I think things should be 'cause I'm like that. If I hear a man on the street and if he's powerful enough with his music, I stop and listen to him. 'Cause it's interesting to hear music out in the air, unexpectedly. To me, it's intriguing. But people don't have imagination no more. It's like radio, it's a drag how people have taken the old-fashioned radio shows off the air. When the squeaking door came you had to use your imagination for that. People don't even imagine sex no more. They have to go to a movie to get their nut together, in order to make it with the old lady. And that's a drag. Without imagination, you don't have nuthin', man. Like when I used to sit for hours to hear Sonny Rollins on the radio from New York City, I just imagined. It didn't have to be true, whatever I imagined, but nobody could take it away from me.

"When Wes Montgomery played octave thing, it was sheer pain to stretch your fingers like that, pain. Now all you have to do is press a button to get that Wes Montgomery sound. It's pitiful that we have let our minds get so unimaginative that we fall for something like that. Every time I put two horns in my mouth to get a sound, every time Wes stretched his fingers like that to get his sound, we get a good feeling. And if I didn't have a horn, I could do something naturally with my hands and get a sound. That's just the way I feel about things.

"What most people don't realize is that John Coltrane went through all the music. He played with rhythm 'n' blues bands, he went through standard tunes. Consequently, when he came out of all they had gone through, he was free. Because when you go through so much, and when you see all the things you go through, you can't be nuthin' else but free. But you can't be free unless you've had to learn certain things. How can you say, 'I don't want to play this scale' if you've never had to buckle down and learn the scale? So 'Trane changed the music back around again, along with Charles Mingus, by using the modal way of playing, off of two or three chords. But the modal way of playing was nuthin' new either 'cause it's based on the chant. And Jelly Roll Morton used that system, too. It all goes back. Music is too vast to be just 'New.'

"They put Jimi Hendrix in a bag, they called him a pop artist, but Hendrix was a stone blues player. He worked with Little Richard and all the blues people but he got put down. So he went to England and recorded his message music and they called it a pop thing. He got stuck with that label. He never got to record what he wanted to record. He was a fantastic cat. Me and him played together at his house, if you could call it a house. For all the money they were supposed to be paying him, this man was living in a one or two room flat up over a beer joint. That was about two or three years ago, when they were swelling his posters out on the street. We were supposed to make a record together. He asked his managers to get the negotiations started but one time they said he was busy and then I was busy and they stalled around. But there were two people he wanted to record with: Miles Davis and myself.

"There are so many people who have contributed, musicians who should have monuments and streets named after them. People like Dean Dixon, black conductors, they had to go over to Europe and give up their citizenship to work. People like Paul Robeson. He's in Philadelphia dying. This man was one of the first black men to play Othello, he's sung in all kinds of languages, he's done so many things. When Charlie Chaplin comes back in [from exile], he gets a welcome and goes everywhere. He comes into New York City and a hundred miles away in Philadelphia, Paul Robeson is dying and the record company won't even re-release his records to make this man die happy …"

Montreal Star, May 13, 1972