RAHSAAN ROLAND KIRK — Prepare Thyself to Deal With a Miracle (review)

RAHSAAN ROLAND KIRK — Prepare Thyself to Deal With a Miracle album cover Album · 1973 · Avant-Garde Jazz Buy this album from MMA partners
3.5/5 ·
Rexorcist
Roland switches between more avant-garde pieces and more spiritual pieces. We get an incredible calm on Seasons right after an uneccesarily repetitive and somewhat lacking opener which feels experimental for the sake of it. This ars gratia artis behavior largely succeeds when atmosphere comes into place. But even though Seasons is an improvement over the opener, while the calm is beautiful, sometimes it can be a little too much, as if there's really not much diversification between each part of a song. So in the end our experience is mostly ups and downs. Celestial Bliss is a different track, using a little bit of funk to create a tribal and rustic feel, like listening to some friends play jazz around a campfire. It had its charm throughout the whole track.

The second half is made up of one 20-minute track: Saxophone Concerto, which is also divided into three connected sections. The first of these is Saxophone Miracle, which is hardly miraculous and more standard for avant-garde compositions. It's a nice beat but that's about it. In fact, it feels more like post-bop by complete accident. This is fixed after about six-and-a-half minutes when the music becomes more hypnotic and nocturnal on the second third, One Breath Beyond. Unfortunately, this section eventually just focuses on repitition for mood, and gets overdone. The third act, Dance of Revolution, brings out the free jazz and keeps things both serene and complex, bringing the epic to a good close.

Overall, the whole album was fairly well put together but still left me wanting. The first half gradually got better, but the second half wasn't as well-written as it could've been.
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