In 2012, the Atlantic recordings of Rahsaan Roland Kirk were revisited with Spirits Up Above, a 22-track core sample meant to illuminate some of his brightest moments. It was not without precedent. The first such compilation ever to surface, a double-LP called The Art of Rahsaan Roland Kirk, came out in 1973. The Vibration Continues, which amounted to a memorial two-fer, appeared in 1978 just months after he passed away at the age of 41. Rhino's Does Your House Have Lions: The Rahsaan Roland Kirk Anthology was issued in ...
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In 2012, the Atlantic recordings of Rahsaan Roland Kirk were revisited with Spirits Up Above, a 22-track core sample meant to illuminate some of his brightest moments. It was not without precedent. The first such compilation ever to surface, a double-LP called The Art of Rahsaan Roland Kirk, came out in 1973. The Vibration Continues, which amounted to a memorial two-fer, appeared in 1978 just months after he passed away at the age of 41. Rhino's Does Your House Have Lions: The Rahsaan Roland Kirk Anthology was issued in 1993. Spirits Up Above, which has about a dozen tracks in common with the Rhino set, packs a taste or two from each of his 12 Atlantic albums, along with a cut from a posthumously produced thirteenth. That would be "Serenade to a Cuckoo," recorded live at the 1972 Montreux Jazz Festival and brought before the public years later on the Rhino/Atlantic CD I, Eye, Aye. By 2012, quite a number of direct reissues, reshuffled compilations, and previously unreleased marvels had begun to render the Rahsaan discography crowded enough that people not entirely familiar with his oeuvre could have reason to feel a bit overwhelmed. Spirits Up Above is recommended as an approachable overview in which intelligently chosen selections from Kirk's works are presented in relative near-chronological sequence. Given the stylistic and cultural changes that occurred across America during the years 1965-1976, this approach makes good sense when considering the work of an artist who responded to life on this earth with such passionate honesty.The first nine tracks in this collection pre-date Kirk's use of the name Rahsaan. They were drawn from the albums Here Comes the Whistleman (1965), The Inflated Tear (1967), Left and Right (1968), and Volunteered Slavery (1969). Note that during the years 1965-1967 Kirk also recorded for Mercury/Limelight and Verve. Additionally, he showed up on two Quincy Jones albums: the soundtrack to the motion picture "In the Heat of the Night (1967) and Walking in Space (1969). The name Rahsaan came to Kirk in a dream, just as years earlier he had dreamt a vision of playing three horns at once. The ambidextrous left-and-right-brained double-sax duet that begins with the Antonin Dvorak air "Going Home" laid directly over Les Brown's pop hit "Sentimental Journey" comes from the album that introduced the public to the name: Rahsaan, Rahsaan (1970). From here, the rest of the collection unfolds in a panoply of choice cuts. Several were extracted from the celebrated Natural Black Inventions: Root Strata (1971), and two albums that came out in 1972: the funky, soulful Blacknuss and A Meeting of the Times, which featured Duke Ellington's star vocalist Al Hibbler. Then there's a sort of surrealist interlude for flute, nose flute, and string ensemble from the album Prepare Thyself to Deal with a Miracle (1973). "Pedal Up" is the opening blast from Bright Moments, recorded live at the Keystone Korner in San Francisco's North Beach district in 1973. And there are smoother episodes from The Case of the Three Sided Dream in Audio Color (1975) and Other Folks' Music (1976). The live 1968 recording of "Freaks for the Festival" was pulled out of chronological sequence to serve as a sort of prelude to the funky electric "Freaks for the Festival" of 1975.Spirits up Above is a welcome addition to Rahsaan's gradually expanding posthumous discography. Its title track, which features the Roland Kirk Spirit Choir, comes from Volunteered Slavery, the album containing most of his quintet's dazzling performance at Newport 1968. In 2009, Collectables reissued a massive slab of Kirk's Atlantic and Warner recordings, jumbled together in two Only the Best Of boxed sets. This was somewhat sloppily done -- the worst blunder being the inclusion of Collectables' botched 1999 edition of A Meeting of the Times, which left out Rahsaan's joyous version of Duke Ellington's "Something 'Bout Believing" in order to squeeze in some totally...
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