Sound??

Rahsaan Roland Kirk, oil on canvas, 10x20"

Some of Dick Fontaine's recordings of Rahsaan Roland Kirk for his film Sound?? belong to my favorite tidbits I know of him. Partly because it comes with visuals, it's a film alright, Kirk seems to embody the spirit of the freedom of sound, where the film is about. The film is based on ideas of John Cage, and Cage himself narrates the film, but Cage himself is not able to liberate "sound" yet (in the movie at least,) and leaves it to Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Cage is as a narrator not the person you want to listen to, to become enlightened by new ideas about music. Cage, as a narrator, is one I skip over to get to the good parts in the movie, which belong to Kirk. Similarly, when Cage appears on a record with Sun Ra, another great visionary of free jazz, it is the side with Cage that remains in mint condition, whereas the Sun Ra side is worn down. John Cage is not a fan of recorded music, as music ought to be experienced as a time-piece, but even recordings are unique in the moment; an owl hooting from outside, a scratch on the record, another music recording coming from the room next-door, a different mood, all these random chance events add to the listening experience of the record, or film. When Cage exclaims: "Why don't they just shut up" in Sound??, I feel like he's talking to himself, talking over the "sounds" of Rahsaan Roland Kirk.
 

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Cover Image from Musique Proto-Indochinoise

Musique Proto-Indochinoise - Recueillie Chez Les Moïs Des Hauts Plateaux Du Viet-Nam is a record recorded in 1955 by Frantz Laforest: "Mission Ethnographique 1955 sur les Hauts Plateaux du Viet-Nam." Moïs or Montagnard (from la montangne—the mountain) is an umbrella term for several groups of indigenous people from the central highlands of Vietnam. The record does not specify between different groups. The woman represented here (and on the cover of the record) is most likely one of the main performers from the recordings by Laforest; she also appears on the back sleeve playing a jew's harp. In the image above she's playing a stringed bamboo instrument that I don't recognize from the descriptions of the songs, neither from instruments I've come across before. The top 100 song is performed on a "carillon hydraulique," a sort of bamboo organ. It's also possible that Laforest, who took the photo featured on the cover and back sleeve, posed a particularly cute indigenous woman with the instruments for the sake of increasing sales. Probably not, but the practice of employing cute women, stripping them above their waist, was very much standard procedure a half a century ago. The anthropologists paid extra for the the women, to reinforce the notion they were primitives, to strip. Years ago I swore not to use gratuitous nudity anymore for my Top 100 illustrations but recently a number of 50s and 60s racy photographs have functioned as a source for paintings. Another painting recently completed is of a woman from a group of women in a healing ceremony from an image by the famous Charles Duvelle, that appeared on the record Anthologie de le Musique du Tchad from 1966.

Moundang woman (Duvelle)