The Roland Kirk Quartet Featuring Elvin Jones - Rip, Rig And Panic (1987 Japanese Limelight Vinyl LP)

The Roland Kirk Quartet Featuring Elvin Jones - Rip, Rig And Panic | Vinyl LP - 1987 Japanese Limelight Reissue (SJ-19611, Nippon Phonogram)

Kirk explained the title in his liner notes and the explanation is characteristically direct. Rip is for Rip Van Winkle, because most people, musicians included, are asleep. Rig is for rigor mortis, which is where he thought a lot of minds were. Panic is what happened when those people heard him do things they had assumed were impossible. That is the record in three words. He plays tenor saxophone, manzello and stritch, sometimes together, along with flute, oboe, castanets and a siren, and he was blind from infancy and worked all of it out by ear. What separates this album from his other mid-1960s records is the company. Byard could play stride, bebop and free within a single chorus and had spent years in Charles Mingus's band learning to handle exactly this kind of unpredictability. Richard Davis was one of the most technically formidable bassists in New York. Elvin Jones was two months into a year that would also produce A Love Supreme's aftermath with Coltrane. 

"No Tonic Pres" opens with the most elegant thing here, a modal piece with a rhythmic pattern that Jones handles without ever making the difficulty audible. "Once in a While" is the one standard on side A. "From Bechet, Byas and Fats" runs six and a half minutes and reaches back through the tradition Kirk always insisted he was part of, whatever the avant-garde label suggested. From there the record moves steadily further out. The title track and "Mystical Dream" push Byard to match Kirk's intensity while Jones and Davis turn the rhythm around underneath him, and the tape effects and siren arrive without warning. "Slippery, Hippery, Flippery" closes the album on a bluesy, half-awake groove. The record's influence ran well past jazz: a Bristol post-punk group took the title as their name in 1980, and the album turns up repeatedly in accounts of what rock and funk musicians were listening to. This may be Kirk's greatest outing.

This is the 1987 Japanese pressing on Limelight SJ-19611, manufactured by Nippon Phonogram Co., Ltd.