There's plenty of excellent Roland Kirk on records over the past eight or ten years, but none any better than this latest one, Volunteered Slavery.

Because Roland Kirk is blind, and because he often plays two or three saxophones at once (tenor, plus two more or less home-made numbers, the stritch and the manzello), and because he plays with such fantastic energy and emotion, there is sometimes a tendency to regard him as some sort of wiggy freak.

He is some kind of wiggy freak, but that's only a small part of the book on Kirk. He is also one of the absolute best jazz musicians in the world, as good as the best on all the axes he plays. And another thing Roland's got (that is deplorably missing, by and large, on the current jazz scene) is humor—an amazing sense of humor in everything he does: crazy shouts and screams, spacey timewarps, insane cross-references in the midst of solo flights to ancient Broadway melodies and blues and, in fact, the whole 20th century sweep of American popular music.

The title track starts out with Kirk, on tenor saxophone, serving up this delicious, simmering melody, with only a tambourine for accompaniment, and then, bam—up jumps this stomping, roaring soul rhythm section, with a snarling trombone funking it up even more. Presently Kirk is singing—the whole band is singing this repeated riff—and Kirk is shouting: "Women, women—" he exclaims "—if you want to be free, you got to spend all day in bed with me!" That's what volunteered slavery means. And then the whole thing steams up into the nastiest tenor saxophone since Big Jay McNeely—complete with a quote from "Hey Jude."

Probably the most remarkable cut is "One Ton," despite Kirk's apology to the 1968 Newport Jazz Festival audience, before whom it was performed live. ("We started off to a slow start," apologizes Kirk, "because ... I'd been smokin' a little too much—I was totally blind when I came out here.") "One Ton" may well be Kirk's most amazing recorded performance. It's a medium blues, during which Kirk gets off this long, long flute(s) solo, on regular flute, nose flute (played via the nostrils) and siren. It is an indescribably African event, full of ominous tidings and outpourings of the most phenomenal joy and energy, wherein Kirk howls, Kirk screams, Kirk snorts and sings counterpoint along with his flute, keeping, at times, two independent musical trains of thought going at once, Kirk blows nose flute (managing to tell his nose, "C'mon nose, take care of it" between breaths), and finally brings it all to a climax with a ferocious blast on his siren.

Followers of Roland Kirk know what he does, but you never heard him do it like this. Ever. (RS 53)

JOHN BURKS