Características
From the first bars of Bill Salter's bass and Rahsaan's flute's passionate rendition of Bill Withers' "Ain't No Sunshine", you know this is no ordinary Kirk album (was there ever?). When strings, electric piano, drums and Cornel Dupree's guitar enter through the back door, you can feel the lush soul groove that Kirk brings to the fore here. When the melody fades away just two and a half minutes later, Kirk's tenor sax screams through the intro to Marvin Gaye's "What's Goin' On", with a funk backdrop but no wink or irony - he means it.
When the melody fades away just two and a half minutes later, Kirk's tenor sax screams through the intro of Marvin Gaye's "What's Goin' On", with a funky backdrop, but without any wink or irony - he means it. With Richard Tee's drums, the strings building a wall of tension in the background and Charles McGhee's trumpet throwing the tension back at Kirk, all predictions and expectations are shattered - especially when 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 its whistles, gongs, screams, soul crooning, deep groove roar and greasy funk dripping from every saccharine note, the record could be over as 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 the pop out of pop and made great black music out of it. He took the jazz world down a peg so that it could feel its roots in the music of the people, making great jazz out of pop music, just as his forebears did with Broadway show tunes.
While the whole album shines like a big black sun, the other highlights 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 have replaced all the blood and sweat from the inside with cheap tin and collectors' plates. In Kirk's version, mercy doesn't come cheap, even if you have to be poor to get it. Ladies and gentlemen, "Blacknuss" is as deep as a soul record can be and as hot as a jazz record has a right to be.
Rahsaan Roland Kirk (ts, fl, manzello, stritch, whistle, gong, voc); Dick Griffin (tb); Charles McGhee (tp); Billy Butler (g); Richard Tee (p); Mickey Turner (org); Henry Pearson (b); Bernard Purdie, Khalil Mhdri (dr); Arthur Jenkins (cga, perc); and others.
Side One
1. Ain't No Sunshine
2. What's Going On
Mercy Mercy me (The Ecology)
3. I Love You Yes I Do
4. Take Me Girl, I'm Ready
5. My Girl
6. Which Way Is It Going
7. One Nation
Side Two
1. I Never Can Say Goodbye
2. Old Rugged Cross
3. Make It With You
4. Blacknuss