(Rahsaan) Roland Kirk - The Inflated Tear (1968)

Rahsaan Roland Kirk said: "When I die, I want them to play 'The Black and Crazy Blues'. I want to be cremated, put in a bag of pot, and I want beautiful people to smoke me and hope they get something out of it."

Whatever you say, Rahsaan. This album remains the collector of some of the most beautiful jazz songs ever recorded, and it's definitely one of my favorite jazz albums. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it's the most underrated jazz album of all time. Roland Kirk, who later added the name "Rahsaan," was known as a sideshow early on, an "act" rather than a musician: a man who played three strange looking reed instruments simultaneously, hummed into a flute, maybe punctuated  a solo with a whistle more likely to be found at a child's birthday party than Carnegie Hall - and, he was blind. But the idiotic castigating from the critics, targeted at his unorthodox approach, eventually wore off, and soon people discovered he was one of the great innovators and creative geniuses in jazz of his time - and he proved that all without sacrificing his approach. On The Inflated Tear, so named after the condition that caused him to become fully blind (from only partially before) when a nurse overdosed him on eye medication, these are his credits:

Roland Kirk - tenor sax, manzello, stritch, clarinet, flute, whistle, English horn or flexafone

If you're wondering, a manzello and a stritch are two variations on a saxophone, with slightly altered bodies, which create slightly different tones. On his first major album, from back when he was considered practically a sideshow, "Introducing Roland Kirk," his line is similar - tenor sax, manzello, stritch, and whistle.

This, his magnum opus, is almost like a sprawling, yet concentrated jazz history that doesn't begin to approach mere nostalgia - it still remains and sounds fully contemporary. Here's the best way I've found to describe it: It's you dreaming of you having a dream tomorrow about the day before the real dream. Does that make sense? He's looking at the past, but there's a definite purposeful distance from it - he isn't the past, knows he isn't, but nevertheless wants to pay homage to it. He quotes New Orleans-esque funeral marches, early bebop, he even covers Ellington's "Creole Love Calls," and, at times, it seems like he's quoting himself. Picturing "The Black and Crazy Blues," the first track from this album, being played at his funeral doesn't bring up sadness - it's the one that sounds like a funeral march, but it's hardly mournful. It has a kind of remote optimism, or at the very least, a surreal sense of humor - a sense of comfort in sadness.

Sadly, Rahsaan Roland Kirk's death was not accompanied with any of the sense of muted optimism, any sense of comfort in its time and place, that is inferred from "The Black and Crazy Blues" - he died in 1977 of a stroke at age 42.