Roland Kirk – Blacknuss (Pure Pleasure)

From the first bars of Bill Salter's bass and Rahsaan's flute passionately interpreting Bill Withers' "Ain't No Sunshine," you know this is no ordinary Kirk album (was there ever?). When the strings, electric piano, drums and Cornel Dupree's guitar join in through the back door, you can feel the lush soul groove Kirk brings to the fore here. When the tune fades just two and a half minutes later, the scream of Kirk's tenor saxophone rings through the intro to Marvin Gaye's "What's Goin' On," with a funk backdrop but no wink or irony - he means business.

With Richard Tee's drums, the strings building into a wall of tension in the background, and Charles McGhee's trumpet flinging the tension back at Kirk, all predictions and expectations are invalid - especially as the medley develops into "Mercy Mercy Me." By the time the musicians reach the end of the Isleys' "I Love You, Yes I Do," with the whistles, gongs, screams, soul croons, deep groove roar and greasy funk dripping from every sugary note, the record might be over because the world has already turned on its back and surrendered - but the album is only ten minutes old! "Blacknuss", like "The Inflated Tear", "Volunteered Slavery", "Rip, Rig And Panic" and "I Talk To The Spirits", is Kirk at his most visionary.

He took pop out of pop and made great black music out of it. He's taken the jazz world down a peg and made it feel its roots in the music of the people, and consequently made great jazz out of pop music, just as his forefathers did with Broadway show tunes. While the entire album shines like a big black sun, the other standouts are a deeply moving rendition of "My Girl" and a version of "The Old Rugged Cross" that takes it forever out of the hands of those white fundamentalists who replaced all the blood and sweat from within with cheap tin and collectible plates. In Kirk's version, mercy doesn't come cheap, though you can certainly be a poor person to receive it. Ladies and gentlemen, "Blacknuss" is as deep as a soul record can be, and as hot as a jazz record can rightfully call itself.