Rahsaan Roland Kirk

b. 7 August 1936, Columbus, Ohio, USA, d. 5 December 1977, Bloomington, Indiana

A frequent winner of the 'miscellaneous' category in jazz polls of the sixties and seventies, Kirk was an important innovator. He introduced a new style of flute-playing as well as originating a method of playing two or three reed instruments simultane ously.

Accidently blinded as a small child, he took up tenor sax and flute, playing in R & B groups before in 1951 discovering the strich and manzello (woodwind instruments equivalent to alto and soprano saxophones). Bydeveloping a circular-breathing method, Kirk could play these instruments simultaneously, often with a sax in addition.

In the late fifties he played with the equally extroverted Charles Mingus, contributing to the memorable 'Hog Calling Blues' on Mingus Oh Yeah (1961). In the same year Kirk made the highly acclaimed We Free Kings (Atlantic). With Hank Jones on piano, the album demonstrated Kirk's combination of humming and breathy playing that made his flute style a key influence on such later performers as Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson. The multi-instrumental technique was explored on Rip Rig and Panic (1965), whose title was used by a British eighties post-punk b and which included Don Cherry's daughter Neneh.

In 1968 Kirk released Don't Cry Beautiful Edith with pianist Lonnie Smith and The Inflated Tear, an album inspired by his childhood responses to blindness. Throughout his career Kirk also recorded tributes to jazz masters of the past, including Billie Holiday and Lester Young. Politically minded, he cut Volunteered Slavery with his Vibration Society in 1970, the year in which he helped to form the New York Collective of Black Artists and the Jazz and People's Movement which undertook highly vocal protests at the lack of black musicians on American primetime television shows.

Leading his own small groups, Kirk toured frequently in the sixties and seventies and was reunited with Mingus for a 1974 Carnegie Hall concert. He suffered a seere stroke in 1975 but returned to tour Europe, playing one-handed, before a second stroke killed him.