Rahsaan Roland Kirk: Vibrations In The Village: Live At The Village Gate

Thankfully, fans of classic jazz rarely have long to wait before another wonderful, previously unreleased treasure drops from the indefatigable producer Zev Feldman and the folks at Resonance Records. A pair of live releases by multi-instrumentalist, showman, and musical conjuror Rahsaan Roland Kirk join the limited-edition vinyl lineup for Record Store Day's Black Friday 2025 event, with a standard CD release one week later. Seek & Listen: Live At The Penthouse (Resonance Records, 2025) documents 1967 performances, while Vibrations In The Village: Live At The Village Gate (Resonance Records, 2025), the focus here, was recorded for a never-completed documentary film on November 26 and 27, 1963 at Art D'Lugoff's storied New York City club.

Sixty years later, the original recording engineer approached a knowledgeable friend about what he should do with the long-dormant tapes. Word made it to Feldman, and with the help of Rahsaan's widow Dorthaan Kirk, musicians James Carter, Steve Turre, Chico Freeman, and Kirk producer Joel Dorn's son Adam, one of Resonance's beautifully-packaged discoveries was brought to life. The audio, which varies somewhat across the set but never fails to vividly capture Kirk's work, has been resurrected by The Mastering Lab's Matthew Lutthans and pressed on 180-gram vinyl by Quebec's Le Vinyalist plant.

In 1963, Kirk's profile was continuing to rise. After one-off LPs for King, Argo, and Prestige Records, Kirk signed with Mercury Records and within 18 months had recorded We Free Kings (1962), Domino (1962), and Reeds & Deeds (1963) for his new label. As a sideman, he had also just contributed to the all-time classics Oh Yeah (Atlantic, 1962) by Charles Mingus (that album's "Ecclusiastics" is performed here), Roy Haynes' Out Of The Afternoon (Impulse!, 1962), and the Quincy Jones project Big Band Bossa Nova (Mercury, 1962). It is not surprising, then, that a filmmaker (whose name has been lost to time) was interested in shooting his November 1963 sets at The Village Gate. Kirk brought to the club Henry Grimes (who had also appeared on the Haynes LP) on bass, Sonny Brown on drums, and Horace Parlan on piano, with Melvin Rhyne or Jane Getz sitting in at the keyboard on a couple of tunes each. Just days after President Kennedy's assassination in Dallas, Rahsaan brings some much-needed "bright moments" to what sounds like a small but appreciative crowd.

Right from the off, Kirk amazes by doing Kirk things: playing two or more horns at once, either in harmony or with one creating a bagpipe-like drone; switching from one horn to another phrase to phrase, as if he is trading licks with himself; singing, talking, and screaming through the flute; punctuating the end of solos with his siren whistle; and inserting cheeky quotations (with Christmas approaching, "Deck The Halls" makes a cameo). To call these things "gimmicks" is to cheapen them and the incredible musicianship and technique behind them, particularly when one recalls that Kirk was sightless from birth. These things might very well have gotten listeners to sit up and take notice, but once they had, they were treated with lovely ballad playing ("Laura," "Falling In Love With Love"), deep blues ("Jump Up And Down-Fast," "Blues Minor at the Gate"), beautifully interpreted standards ("All The Things You Are"), and bracing originals ("Three For The Festival").

Grimes and Brown make for an exciting, driving rhythm section, and the pianists all acquit themselves nicely, Rhyne in particular delighting the leader, who interrupts his own multi-reed solo on "Blues Minor at the Gate" to yell "Play it, Melvin!" Kirk had recently purchased an oboe to go with his tenor, manzello (a modified Bb soprano), stritch (a straight alto), and flute, and enthusiastically (if not quite in tune!) plays his new toy on a track titled, appropriately, "Oboe Blues." "Laura" provides a particularly nice feature for Kirk's flute playing, with a quotation of fiddle tune "The Irish Washerwoman" and a swinging double-time midsection. It all makes for an endearingly varied set that gives a fly-on-the-wall view of what was, after all, just a typical Tuesday-Wednesday club date in Greenwich Village for a jazz man on the go.

In trombonist Turre's wonderful liner note story of how, as a teenager, he became a friend and band member of Kirk's, he sums it up his perfectly: "I got from Rahsaan the idea that jazz music in particular is something that brings all people together. If your spirit was right, he was there for you."

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