Collection: Rahsaan Roland Kirk

Roland Kirk discovered the manzello and stritch in a pawnshop as a teenager, two obscure saxophones that nobody in jazz was playing, and figured out how to reshape all three of his horns so he could finger them simultaneously while sustaining a drone on a third. The simultaneous multi-horn technique is what most people know about Kirk, and it is genuinely remarkable, but it can obscure the more important point: he was one of the most historically literate musicians in jazz, a man who kept Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington in regular rotation alongside Coltrane and the contemporary avant-garde, and believed all of it belonged to a single tradition he called "Black Classical Music." Born Ronald Theodore Kirk in Columbus, Ohio in 1935 and blind from the age of two, he was playing R&B on weekends with the Boyd Moore band at 15 before moving to Chicago and recording his debut under his own name in 1960. He added "Rahsaan" to his name in 1970 after hearing it in a dream, as he had previously rearranged the letters of his first name from "Ronald" to "Roland" after another. His Mercury years from 1961 to 1965, particularly "We Free Kings" (1961) and "Rip, Rig and Panic" (1965) with Jaki Byard, Richard Davis and Elvin Jones, represent some of the finest and most underrated jazz recorded in that period. His Atlantic catalogue, from "The Inflated Tear" (1967) through "Volunteered Slavery" (1969) and "Blacknuss" (1972), pushed further into soul, gospel and political terrain without losing any of the technical ambition. In November 1975 he suffered a massive stroke that paralysed his right side. He modified his instruments to play one-handed and kept performing until a second stroke killed him in Bloomington, Indiana, on December 5, 1977, aged 42.