In 1971 jazz multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, leading an all-star band that included bassist Charles Mingus, drummer Roy Haynes, and sax experimentalist Archie Shepp. The invitation grew out of the Jazz & People’s Movement, a Kirk-led effort to get more of what he called “black classical music” on TV and whose tactics included disrupting show tapings by tooting in whistles. The deal was for the band to do a nice, nonthreatening jazz take on Stevie Wonder’s smooth soul hit “Ma Cherie Amour.” But Kirk wasn’t about to declare simply getting on Ed Sullivan a victory, and when the lights went up the musicians rounded into the roiling polyrhythms of Mingus’s “Haitian Fight Song.”
That fiery performance is shown in full in The Case of the Three Sided Dream, a music documentary about Kirk that is showing at CIMMfest on Sunday, May 4 at 7:15PM. To director Adam Kahan, it captures something essential about his subject. “He was into knocking down obstacles,” Kahan told our media partner MusicFilmWeb.com in a recent interview, paraphrasing Kirk’s longtime producer, the late Joel Dorn. “And if there weren’t enough obstacles he would set some up so he could knock ‘em down.”
Rahsaan Roland Kirk was never shy of obstacles, or windmills to tilt at. Blind from infancy, he made sound his sight, picking up a dizzying variety of instruments. (Non-instruments too; he’d sometimes solo on the “black mystery pipes,” a section of garden hose.) He’d take the stage swathed in metal like a knight to the joust, saxophones and flutes and whistles dangling from his neck. His signature was playing two or three saxes at the same time, a technique he said came to him in a dream (as did his name; he was born Ronald Theodore Kirk). When his mouth wasn’t busy at his horns it was busy at the mic, regaling his audiences with political rants and comic monologues. After a stroke in 1975 left him paralyzed on one side, Kirk learned to play with one hand and kept on performing until the night two years later when a second stroke felled him at only 42.
It’s a remarkable story that’s relatively little known outside the jazz pantheon—one of several facets of the musician’s life and legacy that put the bite into Kahan. Bursting with musical and visual energy—the animations are a treat—Three Sided Dream, named for a 1975 Kirk album, is Kahan’s first feature after a series of short docs on other unorthodox artists like wood-panel painter Fred Tomaselli and photographer/provocateur Andres Serrano. Now the New York filmmaker is trying to put together a Kirk biopic with an unusual casting choice.
MFW: How did you come to Rahsaan Roland Kirk?
Adam Kahan: I stumbled on one of his records at a garage sale in San Francisco. At the time I was just scraping the edges of jazz. I didn’t know what to expect. I thought jazz, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, the obvious ones. But of course Rahsaan is the furthest from the obvious choice for anything you can have a preconceived notion about.
Adam Kahan
The liner notes on his records were always super insane, crazy, beautiful, wonderful stories written by Joel Dorn. Each thing I read about Rahsaan, the next thing was more incredible. When I moved back to New York in ’99—this documentary started a while ago, not in ’99 but shortly after—I was talking to a friend of mine about Rahsaan, and I was like, “Someone needs to make a documentary around him.” My friend was like, “Well, you should.” Back in those days there were phone books. I found Joel Dorn’s phone number, called him up. He was so accessible—“Sure, come over.” It snowballed, he hooked me up with Dorthaan [Kirk's widow], other musicians. He was a wonderful guy. He’s not in the finished documentary, but he was just a great guy and opened up tons of doors.
What spoke to you about Rahsaan, in terms of turning the key that made you want to make the film? Was it the music, or the larger-than-life personality?
Certainly I was hooked in by the music. It is a music doc. I struggled with it, you know—who wants to see a music doc about a jazz musician other than jazz fans? It has to be more narrative, blah blah blah. But it just kept coming back to, his legacy is the music. The music was the first thing that really hooked me in. But then it just kept getting sweeter. The more you learn about his life—all the obstacles he overcame, all the crazy shit he did, all the agendas. And what is more visually mind-blowing than looking at this guy playing three saxophones with his cheeks blown up like balloons? I just thought it was a home run.
He’s known, but he’s not Miles Davis. Was that some of the motivation for you as well, that he’s more of a cult-like figure?
For sure. For two reasons, that’s a motivation. One is because people who do know him, it’s incredible [to them] that he’s not better known or revered. He’s someone who slips through the cracks. So a) he deserves that exposure, and b) I think he’s more exciting than a Miles or an Armstrong or an Ellington. It’s exciting to expose him and his music and his legacy to a wider audience.
Why do you think he’s more exciting than those guys?
It has to do with how he falls through the cracks for a lot of people. Everything he did was rooted in blues, musically. He was a traditionalist. [Trombonist and Kirk sideman] Steve Turre says this a lot in the documentary, everyone says it, and if you look at his music it’s clear. New Orleans traditions, Dixieland, the history of jazz—he knew it. That’s where he was coming from musically. But he was out there. The way he delivered that was [by] moving that music forward. The traditionalists, the classic jazz guys—he doesn’t fit in that world, nor for fans of that music. But then you say, OK, he’s out there, but he’s not that out there. He’s not out there like an Anthony Braxton or an Albert Ayler. He’s not categorizable. Those are the types of people and stories and music that are way more interesting.
How he was viewed among his peers is pretty clear from that performance on The Ed Sullivan Show. He’s surrounded himself with this murderer’s row.
Everyone that I’ve spoken to confirms that. On that performance he bridges the avant-garde with the traditional, straight-ahead guys. You’ve got Charlie Parker’s drummer [Roy Haynes] playing with Archie Shepp.
He was viewed in some quarters as almost a novelty act because of the multi-instruments, playing the nose flute. How much do you think that truly rankled him, and does it still rankle the people who were around him?
That was a big deal for Rahsaan. Joel Dorn told me several times that made Rahsaan crazy. Because it wasn’t just playing the nose flute or three saxophones; it was, what are you doing with that? He’s actually making genuine music. He could have just been a tenor [sax] virtuoso and stopped there. He didn’t want to. As Joel Dorn said to me, he would want to blow people’s minds sonically. So he would play two saxophones, and he would play three saxophones, and when he didn’t get what he felt was the proper recognition for what he was doing, it would make him more crazy and he would do more stuff. He would get a gong onstage. He would smash a chair. The more people dismissed him as a gimmick, the more it made him strengthen his resolve to do more crazy shit.

Is that bound up in why in the film there are no critics or jazz historians? It struck me as unusual considering that part of your motivation is that this guy has been undervalued and is not given his due.
I think the jazz historians give him his due. During his time there were some critics who did not give him his due. They were certainly in the minority. He was revered and respected in jazz and won Downbeat music polls, repeatedly. I interviewed Phil Schaap from WKCR, he’s a big jazz DJ in New York and a big historian on jazz. I interviewed some other critics and writers. The reason they’re not there [is] I wanted to make an intimate film. I really wanted to keep it with only people who knew him—family, musicians. Sure, at some point I had fantasies of having Spike Lee narrate it, or Danny Glover, having the involvement of someone like that. I even approached those people. I met Danny Glover and tried to talk to him about the film, but he was kind of like, talk to the hand. But Danny or any of you guys, if you change your mind, I want to make a narrative film. If you want to executive produce that, we should talk. Dave Chappelle starring as Rahsaan.
So that’s your choice?
Yeah. If an executive producer/fairy godfather or mother can come out of the woodwork and help make this happen, I have the life rights, or I can, through Rahsaan’s wife and his son. We’re considerably tight.
Why Chappelle? Because he’s weird and unpredictable?
He going to bring all his charisma to the table, but Chappelle [also] is known as a high-integrity guy. He quit his TV show, making, I would imagine, millions—he just dropped it because creatively it wasn’t what he wanted to do anymore. Viewed from afar, where I sit, it seems like if he found a project he believed in, he would just jump on it. God, can you imagine him as Rahsaan? It would blow people’s minds. We already have Rahsaan, the visuals, his whole life story, and then you add Chappelle to the mix—I mean, I wanna see that film [laughs]. There’s other guys who could do it, sure, but if we’re dealing in fantasy, that’s my present fantasy.
It seems to me that you’re going for a very old school, analog look in the documentary. There’s all that distressed film that you use as a break in the archive footage. The animation has a very ’60s/’70s feel. Were you trying evoke the world that Rahsaan moved in with those choices?
I started making films on Super-8 film, and even though I was able to graduate to video, I still have super affinity for all that broken-film-leader, weird film damage. I love it. But secondly it goes back to making an intimate film. Dorthaan Kirk was kind enough to share with me all this home movie footage, and it’s amazing. It added to the idea that I wanted this to be a super personal film, and yeah, to keep it with the feel of the era. If I hadn’t had that [home movie] film I don’t think I would have created that artificially, but having that as one of the components, it was a natural choice to go there.
The animation, I thought, was like Yellow Submarine meets Fat Albert.
Oh, that’s awesome! That’s over audio that is from different CDs. There was no video, and I was like, how am I gonna treat this? I’m not going to do the Ken Burns slow pan into the still photo. That’s appropriate in some places but not for this film. I hunted around a lot and we tried a lot of stuff, and finally I was fortunate enough to meet up with this designer, Mans Swanberg, and he just nailed it.
The audio is one of the main routes into understanding Rahsaan’s sense of humor and his political consciousness, his sense of jazz having a political aspect.
Rahsaan had a bigger political agenda and talked a lot more about politics [than is] in the film. There’s just so much in what he wanted to say, had to say, and did. My only regrets are not being able to put more in the film. There’s a mythical meeting of him and Jimi Hendrix, which I believe really happened, in London. The story is that Hendrix showed up at one of Rahsaan’s gigs and they jammed together. Of course that audiotape is hidden under someone’s bed, supposedly. I was trying to get an animator to animate that story. [Kirk's pianist] Rahn Burton talks about someone recording it and the music was so hot it probably melted the recording.
What’s the album to introduce yourself to Rahsaan with?
Because his career was so varied—at the beginning he was a super straight-ahead jazz musician, black suit, bebop sound, and then of course he got into some really different waters—I think the best is to get a compilation. Joel Dorn put out a 2CD set, “Does Your House Have Lions”—it’s a great sampler of lots of different parts of his career. For me, if you don’t know Rahsaan, you go with that. “We Free Kings” is one of his early albums that’s just a mean blues album. It’s beautiful. “Blacknuss” is another super-cool album—soul-jazz with many Motown covers. His version of Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine” kills.
As people who see the doc will know, he did have a stroke at the end of his life. He played the last two years of his career half-paralyzed. He only had one arm to use, and he didn’t have the breath that he had before. But the recordings he did at the end of his life are my favorites, frankly, because he no longer had the capacity to do all the incredible physical feats he would normally do, so it was just left to guts. All his music was coming from his guts. It’s all feeling, and it’s some heavy shit.
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The Case of the Three Sided Dream screens Sunday, May 4 at 7:15PM.