I Talk With The Spirits

the selections:

Roland says that the theme of I Talk With The Spirits came to him one Sunday while on his way to a rehersal. Its inspiration and feeling is devotional. The theme is sounded twice by flute, wordless voice, and vibes out of strict tempo separated by Kirk's solo cadenza. The ending finds Walter Perkins applying his mallets to a West Indian steel drum. The affecting melody of the theme struck me as having the character to a Japanese song, but Roland disclaimed any Oriental association and added that it was composed before his tour in that country last summer.

For Serenade To A Cuckoo, a typically Kirkian bit of humorous swing, Roland produced a clock with cuckoo in working order from his bag of musical oddities. The wooden bird, Kirk informed us, was given to him by two young boys who advised him als o that every musician ought to have one. Roland adds that the cuckoo has a habit of popping out of his door to peep his song unexpectedly during practice or rehersal at the Kirk appartment--and this is what gave him the idea for the tune.

The bird has his say on the introduction and the quartet is off on a medium-tempoed swinger with a 32-bar (two 16-bar sections) chorus in a minor key. Roland uses a North African hollow wooden flute on the lead chorus only--a dark-toned native instrume nt given him by Bill Keck and singer-arranger Dave Lambert--and returns to the conventional C-flute for his improvised solo. Parlan has a good contribution and the rhythm section gets a gliding, unified beat going here. After the "out" chorus the cuckoo h as the final word.

The throaty and mellow alto flute is the only solo instrument heard on the ballad medley. Roland lyricizes on We'll Be Together Again, the standard by singer Frankie Laine and his former accompanist, the late Carl Fischer, and "flute-talks" a fe w words of the lyric in the bridge. A half-chorus of the Barbra Streisand hit, People, serves as an interlude before the last half of Together Again and takes Kirk to a solo coda employing his vocalized flute technique.

The brief and pretty fragment, Ruined Castles, is Roland's interpretation of a folk tune he heard during last summer's tour of Japan. He plays it on C-flute with accompaniment of a music box from Japan.

That musty and fern-covered old baritone solo, Trees, is next dusted off by the full quartet and given new life in a bright 6/8 jazz treatment. Roland's strong lead and improvisation carries the first half of the performance, and Parlan's piano is given a chorus-and-a-half in which to sway the foliage. (Note Perkins' resourceful backing work here.) Roland sketches in the lead on the last half-chorus and emerges from the woods with a set of retard tags.

Kirk's own Fugin' and Alludin' [sic] is another duet, this time combining his flute with Bobby Moses' vibes. It is a short statement of a theme more or less in fugal form. Roland explains that this is not an attempt to play something "classical, " but merely his impression of a theme (his own) that could very well be derived from a "classical" source. The laughter and Perkins' comment, "That was nice," heard at the end of the take were left in. That touch of authenticity is rather refreshi ng, I think, because it invariably gets itself edited out of most recordings. It might be added here, too, that this is an unusually honest representation of a jazz recording date. No splicing or doctoring of the tapes was done, no editing out of the extr amusical sounds of Kirk and his men in the act of making jazz.

Django, of course, is pianist-composer John Lewis' tribute to the renowned Belgian-gypsy guitarist Jean Baptiste Reinhardt. Roland plays the first theme out of tempo, a minor-keyed melancholy melody, accompanied only by Parlan's celeste. Kirk's flute and foot then stomps the full rhythm section into the second section of the piece, the jazz theme, and the quartet swings with a fine beat. Kirk's improvisation, urgent and bustling, gives way to a short solo by Parlan, now back on piano. At the end of Parlan's outing the rhythm switches to 6/8 time for the restatement of the first theme, distinctly unmelancholy this time around.

Though Kurt Weill's lovely My Ship brings us back to ballad land, in Kirk's version it is very much a jazz ballad. Roland's opening chorus is lyrical and respects the melody, but his second chorus gives this interpretation its jazz charac ter. He double-times restlessy, and flute-vocalizes, blowing some wild winds into the ships's sails. Twenty-four bars of flute improvisation carries through the bridge, after which Roland restates the melody and adds some thirds (playing two notes at once ), capping it all by telling us whose ship we've been aboard.

Kirk's own A Quote From Clifford Brown is the all-stops-out up-tempoed stomper of the session. It's a fast blues, using one of that lamented and magnificently gifted young trumpeter's favorite melodic figures as its "line." Note too that the har monic structure used on the "lead" choruses is considerably more complex thatn the basic blues "changes," or harmonies, one generally hears, even in modern jazz. Those chords played by Parlan after the piano and drums join the flute and bass on the openin g chorus, and again on the closing "lead," are set up in a fairly strict rhythmic arrangement that is as much a part of the "tune" as the melody itself.

After a hard-driving improvisation by Roland gets us into some straight down-the-middle "blowing," Parlan has several choruses in which to demonstrate that he is one of the best of the blues-oriented modern jazz pianists.

Following Parlan's solo, drummer Perkins does something I hadn't heard before. He plays a series of rhythmic variations over Fleming's walking bass using only his top cymbal, beating it with the stick in one hand while holding it tightly with the other so that it emits a choked, clanking sound. This inspires Roland to take up a set of four-bar exchanges with Perkins, the flute thudding away like some exotic addition to the percussion battery and Walter responding in kind on that clutched cymbal. The th eme is repeated and Kirk closes this tribute to Clifford with a spoken message.

From the swift, romping Quote the quartet brings us even closer to jazz basics with a slow, earthy blues. Parlan's down-home-drenched opening chorus sets the mood, and Roland dominates the rest of this performance. The first eight bars of the "l ead" chorus are played in stop-time, after which Kirk sings and talks his C-flute through an improvisation that leads the quartet back to home base--and the conclusion of a first-class jazz recording.

The extraordinary variety of material Roland employs here--particularly the original compostitions which range from the elegiac Spirits and the near-classical exercise Fugin' to the "low-down"Business Ain't Nothin' and a roaring Quote from Clifford Brown--demonstrates once again within the compass of two LP sides this remarkable musician's versatility and receptivity to every kind of musical stimulus.

But the significant thing is, I think, that Kirk does what all the best jazzmen have always done--he makes all this diverse music a medium for his personal expression, whether it be a jazz original or a Japanese Folk song.