[TR24][OF] (Rahsaan) Roland Kirk - Left & Right - 1968/2011 (Post-Bop, Soul-Jazz)

Credits:
Bass – Vernon Martin
Bassoon – Daniel Jones (5)
Celesta – Roland Kirk
Drums – Jimmy Hopps
Flute – Roland Kirk
Harp – Alice Coltrane
Horns [Manzello] – Roland Kirk
Horns [Stritch] – Roland Kirk
Narrator – Roland Kirk
Percussion – Gerald Brown*, Warren Smith
Piano – Ron Burton
Piano [Thumb] – Roland Kirk
Producer – Joel Dorn
Saxophone – Pepper Adams, Roland Kirk
Trombone – Benny Powell, Dick Griffin
Trumpet – Richard Williams

Left & Right is an album by jazz multi-instrumentalist Roland Kirk. It was originally released on the Atlantic label in 1968 and features performances by Kirk with Jim Buffington, Julius Watkins, Frank Wess, Ron Burton, Vernon Martin and Roy Haynes with Warren Smith, Richard Williams, Dick Griffith, Benny Powell, Daniel Jones, Pepper Adams, Alice Coltrane, Jimmy Hopps and Gerald "Sonny" Brown featuring on an extended track and arrangements by Gil Fuller.
The title of this album, Left and Right, no doubt refers to the sides of Rahsaan Roland Kirk's brain, which were both heavily taxed in the composing, arranging, conducting, and playing of this recording. For starters, the band is huge – 17 players plus a 16-piece string section, all of it arranged and conducted by Kirk, a blind man. None of this would matter a damn if this weren't such a badass platter. Along with Kirk's usual crew of Ron Burton, Julius Watkins, Dick Griffin, Jimmy Hopps, and Gerald Brown, there are luminaries in the crowd including Alice Coltrane on harp, Pepper Adams on baritone saxophone, and no less than Roy Haynes helping out on the skins. What it all means is this: The man who surprised and outraged everybody on the scene – as well as blew most away – was at it again here in "Expansions," his wildly ambitious and swinging post-Coltrane suite, which has "Black Mystery Has Been Revealed" as its prelude. While there are other tracks on this record, this suite is its centerpiece and masterpiece – despite killer readings of Billy Strayhorn's "A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing" and "Quintessence." "Expansions" has Kirk putting his entire harmonic range on display, and all of the timbral extensions he used in his own playing are charted for a string section to articulate. There are subtleties, of course, which come off as merely tonal variations in extant harmony with the other instruments, but when they are juxtaposed against a portrayal of the entire history of jazz – from Jelly Roll Morton to the present day – then they become something else: the storytellers, the timbres, and the chromatic extensions that point in the right direction and get listeners to stop in the right places. This is an extreme for Rahsaan – extremely brilliant and thoroughly accessible.