TALES OF LOHR: IF YOU DIG RAHSAAN ROLAND KIRK...
Thoughts on a modern saxophone outlier; plus, "Factory Roll Call" Geld(zahler)s the lily
IF YOU DIG… is a bi-monthly feature at TALES OF LOHR, spotlighting a current jazz artist whose style, influences, and vibe are sure to appeal to fans of old-school jazz cats that the music of these modern-day masters evokes.
If You Dig RAHSAAN ROLAND KIRK…
Perhaps no major artist in jazz has run a greater risk of being dismissed by posterity as a mere novelty act than Rahsaan Roland Kirk (1935-1977). In live performance, the Columbus, Ohio-born multi-instrumentalist cut the kind of figure one would expect to see from a Venice Beach busker. Supplemented by a wild gaggle of whistles, bells, and other quick-hit sonic gewgaws, Kirk would frequently wow his crowds by simultaneously playing a tenor saxophone along with two far less well-known mongrel members of the reed family, manzello (a modified soprano saxophone) and stritch (a straightened version of an alto sax). He was also known to play clarinet, flutes (of both the standard mouth and nose-operated varieties), keyboards, and various percussion instruments. Combine these polyglot instrumental antics with his regularly wacky stage banter, and Kirk threatens to degenerate in the public imagination into nothing but a brash carnival attraction.
But throughout the course of his brief life and career, Kirk defeated this potential dismissal through both his indisputable virtuosity on all of his instruments, and through a bracing, outspoken political commitment fully in tune with the tenor of late-’60s and early-’70s American Black radical culture. Kirk regularly cut that comedy-tinged performance chatter with penetrating insights on African-American issues of the day and broader political concerns (including excoriating commentary on Richard Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate break-in), and he was unhesitant about referencing the sins of “white devils” in both tongue-in-cheek and deadly earnest fashion in his pronouncements. His music itself, drawing on elements of free jazz, hard bop, soul and pop songcraft, and both Eastern instrumentation and Western classical composition, represented its own form of militant assertion of a place at the world music table for African-American sounds and conceptions.
Even a 1975 stroke that left Kirk partially paralyzed on one side could not silence him; he would modify his instruments to allow his playing them with his one fully usable arm, and was still capable, in live performance, of playing two horns at once. Sadly, his health never entirely recovered from this setback, and a second stroke felled him two years later, at only 42 years of age. But even with his blindness, Kirk’s vision and influence has persisted, with contemporary musicians from Derek Trucks to Paul Weller to Björk praising his work and performing his compositions in concert and on recordings. If nothing else, Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s legacy is a shining testament to the wonders that can ensue when a truly creative spirit fully embraces the weird.
…Then You’ll Dig JON IRABAGON
Few contemporary reedmen since Kirk’s passing have embraced that weird with the conviction and confidence, not to mention with such sterling musical results, as saxophonist Jon Irabagon. A Chicago native of Filipino descent, Irabagon first focused on the alto saxophone in his studies at the Manhattan School of Music and later at Juilliard. Two years after arriving in New York City, Irabagon joined Mostly Other People Do the Killing, an iconoclastically exploratory band fronted by bassist Moppa Elliott. The group has released eleven LPs, including such suitably outré offerings as Mauch Chunk (2014), a musical tribute to the Pennsylvania town rechristened Jim Thorpe in honor of the Olympic athlete, and 2014’s Blue, a much-debated note-for-note “cover” of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue on which Irabagon apes both John Coltrane’s tenor saxophone and Cannonball Adderley’s alto horn.
Irabagon has proven equally hard to pin down in his offerings as a bandleader and solo artist. His victory in the 2008 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition included a cash prize that partially subsidized additional study with Roscoe Mitchell, an avant-garde saxophonist and composer known for regularly recording and performing as a solo, unaccompanied instrumentalist. Borrowing this concept from the playbook of both Mitchell and prolific alto soloist Anthony Braxton, Irabagon has released several solo reed recordings, including 2021’s Bird with Streams, recorded during COVID’s shelter-in-place early days, and the bracingly experimental Inaction Is an Action (2015), an LP played entirely on the little-used sopranino saxophone. These discs were both released on Irabagon’s own label, Irrabagast Records, which he primarily uses to put out just this sort of free-spirited, less commercially obvious recording. Irabagon has made a practice of balancing releases such as these with more straightforward “mainstream” offerings; the sopranino record, for instance, came out the same year as Behind the Sky, an outstanding “straight jazz” quartet recording featuring a trio of guest features by trumpeter / flugelhornist Tom Harrell.
Irabagon’s fluent instrumental flair and intense genre-spanning musical adaptability has made him a valued sideman for such heralded fellow artists as drummer Rudy Royston, guitarist Mary Halvorson, and trumpeter Dave Douglas. He has also performed with pop singer-songwriter Billy Joel and the late proto-punk rock giant Lou Reed. Following in the footsteps of Kirk’s proud standard-bearing for Black heritage and culture, Irabagon received, in 2014, the Philippine Presidential Award, the highest civilian honor the nation bestows on a Filipino abroad for advancing the positive profile of Filipino-descended peoples worldwide.
To Get You Started… I had thought about easing you into Irabagon’s musical world in gentle fashion, with one of the ear-pleasing tracks from Behind the Sky or from 2009’s The Observer, his Monk-competition-prize Concord Records debut, which finds him fronting a standout sextet featuring trumpeter Nicholas Payton and pianist Kenny Barron. But in keeping with Kirk’s boundary-pushing gestalt, I’m throwing you into the deep end instead. Here’s “Acrobat,” from 2015’s Inaction is an Action. Irabagon’s solo sopranino sax evokes the sprightly steps of the titular tumbler, when it’s not conjuring the squalls of an air raid siren, the blats of a severely congested elephant, or a more standard-issue jazz horn caught in the blades of a grain thresher. It’s a wild five-minute-and-11-second ride. I don’t know what you’ll think of it. But I am confident Rahsaan Roland Kirk would approve.
FACTORY ROLL CALL
HENRY GELDZAHLER (1935-1994)
When Andy Warhol finished shooting the ten rolls of black-and-white 16mm film that would comprise the eight-hour-and-five-minute bulk of his experimental film epic Empire, he found himself with two rolls of unused stock left over, as well as an additional day with his rented Auricon camera, which, it being Sunday, didn’t have to be returned to the rental facility until the following day. So, with these tools at his disposal, Warhol seized the opportunity to create what might be his greatest feat of cinematic portraiture, an extended study of a heavyset, sunglasses-wearing man, sprawled on the Silver Factory’s famous curved maroon couch, slowly smoking down a cigar as he grows increasingly uneasy and discombobulated by the camera’s unwavering glare. The resultant film bears the name of its subject. It is known, simply, as Henry Geldzahler.
A friend and creative advisor to Warhol, and one of the shapers of the 20th-century New York cultural and artistic scene, Geldzahler was a native of Antwerp, Belgium, his family migrating to the U.S. in 1940, in the wake of Nazi persecution of Jews like Geldzahler’s family (and LGBTQ individuals, like Geldzahler himself would mature into). Geldzahler graduated from Yale in 1957 and began studies for a doctorate in art history at Harvard, but withdrew from the school in 1960. That same year, Geldzahler joined the staff of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, eventually becoming curator for American art and, later, the museum’s first-ever curator of 20th century art.
Geldzahler’s role, and its accompanying prominence in the New York arts community, brought him into the orbit of many of the city’s major and burgeoning artists. Some of these creatives became genuine friends, including the British-born David Hockney and, most significantly, Warhol. Geldzahler and the Pop artist were regular social companions throughout the 1960s, and Geldzahler also partnered with Warhol for many of the latter’s beloved marathon phone conversations. Geldzahler would claim credit for inspiring several of Warhol’s major silkscreen series. Allegedly advising Warhol that it was time to insert “a little death” into his then rather sunny Pop art, Geldzahler professed his coaxing of Warhol into creating the now heralded Death and Disaster series. Then, reversing course, Geldzahler supposedly suggested that it was time to breathe a little light back into those grim canvases and, showing Warhol an image of hibiscus blossoms from Modern Photographer Magazine, gave rise to the Flowers, one of Warhol’s most commercially successful serialized works. Geldzahler was also the subject of several of Warhol’s film works; in addition to the long portrait film, Geldzahler appears in a more standard-length Factory-shot Screen Test, as well as the slice-of-life Henry in Bathroom, where we watch the curator perform his daily toilette, smoldering cigar ever at the ready. Geldzahler and Warhol also accompanied one another to Truman Capote’s legendary Black and White Ball, held at the Plaza Hotel in 1966; Warhol joked to Geldzahler that the two were the least famous people at the star-studded soiree.
Geldzahler’s relationship with Warhol was not without its pitfalls. The same year as Capote’s bash, the two men had a falling out over Geldzahler’s failure to include Warhol among the American artists selected for the Venice Biennale, for which Geldzahler served as United States commissioner. But Warhol was definitely among the 43 artists whose works featured in “New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970,” the seminal 1969 Met exhibition curated by Geldzahler. The highly celebrated exhibition, mounted in honor of the museum’s centennial, was the Met’s first to focus solely on contemporary art. Geldzahler was a popular portrait subject of artists besides Warhol, with Hockney, Frank Stella, Alice Neel, and sculptors George Segal and Marisol likewise interpreting the curator’s distinctive visage and physique.
Geldzahler also briefly served as the first director of the visual arts program for the National Endowment for the Arts, and, upon leaving the Met in 1978, Mayor Ed Koch appointed him New York City’s Commissioner of Cultural Affairs. Throughout the remainder of his life, in addition to his consistent work on behalf of AIDS-related causes and charities, Geldzahler still wrote regularly on art (including a book on Warhol’s ‘70s and ‘80s portraits published in 1993) and curated exhibitions for P.S. 1, the Dia Art Foundation, and other major arts institutions.
Geldzahler died of liver cancer in 1994, at the age of 59. Tributes include a name-check in “Forever Changed,” a track on the Lou Reed-John Cale Warhol memorial album Songs for Drella (1990), and Peter Rosen’s 2006 documentary on Geldzahler’s life and career, Who Gets to Call It Art?
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