We Free Kings (1961)
9 tracks, 37 minutes
Spotify • iTunes (well cheap!)
It’s Christmas in March, hurray! The second most happiest time of the year! But it’s okay if you don’t celebrate Christmarch – this album is an evergreen selection of rocking hard bop with a couple of sweet ballads here and there.
Rahsaan Roland Kirk (this album was released before he added the first bit) is most well-known for his ability to play multiple saxes at once. It’s impressive, and makes a really unique sound, but up until this album, it was regarded as a gimmick for him to hide behind while still wowing audiences. With We Free Kings, though, he proved that it was merely an extra string to his bow – his chops are in full evidence throughout this album.
Here he plays tenor sax, a modified soprano sax, a straight-bodied alto sax and flute. He solos with all of them at one point or other, but for me, it is his fluting that really stands out. His great innovation of vocalising into the flute while playing has since become the sound of jazz flute, and it’s demonstrated to great aplomb on ‘You Did It, You Did It,’ with bonus ecstatic yelps and barks, which usually has me yelping along in delight too.
On top of it all, though, is the title track. Yes, it based on the Christmas carol ‘We Three Kings,’ but Kirk’s version isn’t Christmassy at all – in fact, it just highlights how jazzy a piece that carol is, and what a shame it is that we’ve confined it to a single month of the year only (see also: ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,’ ‘The Holly and the Ivy,’ ‘The Coventry Carol’). Under Kirk’s direction, it starts mostly true to the version we all know, albeit with a wicked swing, played on flute. But then he switches to soprano where it slowly breaks down into some psychotic, almost-free jazz. It's quite fun to compare it to yesterday's album, actually. We get a little bit of a piano solo and some sax chords as a bit of a breather and return to the flute. The melody comes back, but it’s not quite recovered from the freak-out in the middle and sounds all the better for it. What an amazing track!
It’s quite amazing how anyone could have mistaken Rahsaan Roland Kirk for a pretender with a party trick. He was the real deal, and We Free Kings proves it. Just don’t try to play it at a Christmas party. I made that mistake: it doesn’t go down well.
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