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Our audio excerpts starts at the beginning of the track with the entrance of the melody and goes into the bridge before fading out. For this recording, Rahsaan performed his lovely ballad in a slow swing 2-feel. It sounds just as beautiful as a slower 2-feel ballad. Rahsaan ends his recording with a cadenza. His set up for the cadenza is indicated in all lead sheets, and the very end of his cadenza is also indicated, leading to a final chord.
If you're not familiar with Rahsaan, you might think the melody instrument on the recording is an alto sax. It's a variant of the alto sax, but has its own name (a stritch). The stritch is an straight (curveless) alto saxophone without the upturned bell. On this track, Rahsaan plays only stritch. This is the same instrument that he plays in his three-horns-at-once combination with tenor sax and manzello, as on Between The 4th And 5th Step from this same album, while on Get In The Basement (also from the same album), he only plays tenor sax.
With a stritch dangling below his knees, manzello and tenor sax hanging from his neck and a hodgepodge of various homemade instruments, Roland Kirk was a surreal, innovative and inspiring saxophonist who was intensely serious about music. Born in Columbus, Ohio, he became blind at an early age. Taking up an assortment of instruments early on, he began playing tenor sax professionally in R&B bands by the age of 15. Infatuated by the manzello (saxello soprano) and stritch (straight alto saxophone), he reshaped the saxes so he could play all three simultaneously, evident in his first recording in 1956, "Triple Threat." By 1960 he had incorporated the siren whistle into his solos, and by 1963 had mastered circular breathing. Even while playing two or three saxophones at once, Kirk's music was powerful jazz with a strong feel for the blues. Read more...
