Jazz

The biggest bargain in music comes to the Jazz Workshop on 733 Boylston St. this weekend. He's Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the blind jazz musician who plays, not one, but three horns at once.

Kirk's history is one of the strangest of all musicians. He fell victim to hospital malpractice at the age of two--"I think a nurse put too much medicine in my eyes, and my mother didn't find out about it until it was too late"--and he has been blind to everything except lights and darks and his own dreams for three decades. But dreams have been enough of an inspiration for this bizarre musician.

Kirk, who started his musical career playing a water hose, once had a strange dream about 20 years ago. He saw himself playing three horns. He recognized one immediately, the tenor sax, his native instrument.

But the other two horns, the mazello, a kind of soprano sax, and the stritch, an alto variety, were instruments that Kirk was to name and create.

The dreams have meant a lot to Kirk's career (he even found his first name "Rahsaan" in one of them) and he has stuck by three horn proposition ever since.

"A lot of people ask me 'can't you express yourself on one horn? Well I could play the tenor but I wouldn't be satisfied," Kirk says now.

The wayward musician recorded his first album in the Midwest where he was billed as "The Walking Blind Man," Kirk is now popular on both coasts.

He'll be giving shows nightly at 8:30 and 11 p.m.

Duke Ellington's favorite guitarist Kenny Burrell checks in to Sandy's Jazz Revival for the whole week finishing this Saturday. Burrell is a traditionalist--a club guitarist on a higher plane.

The conclusion of Boston Sackbut (trombone) Week is upon us. There is still time tonight to catch some great original trombone recitals. The music will be at 1140 Boylston St., in town.

There's jazz at Brandy's on 1110 Comm. Ave. Roomful of Blues, which had a successful engagement at Sandy's last weekend will no doubt repeat that performance.

Gratuitous plug dept.: There's a great group out of Philadelphia, called the Visitors (featuring Earl and Carl Grubbs) that have an excellent series of albums. The Grubbs are musical cousins of Coltrane and come near to duplicating his sheets of sound style.

Also worth looking into: A rediscovery worth undertaking is the purchase of those early Wayne Shorter albums, the ones with Herbie Hancock on piano. Particularly pleasing are Night Dreamer and Speak No Evil.