This is a drawing in Polychromos pencils on black paper, with the stave rendered in metallic acrylic inks. The reference photograph for the drawing of Rahsaan Roland Kirk was used with the kind permission of the photographer Lee Santa  http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/lee-santa.html?tab=artworkgalleries&artworkgalleryid=39256&page=3

The title of the picture is taken from a song by Roland Kirk from his album of the same name. I am a great lover of the music, without an ounce of musical ability, so I was in a quandary as to how to find the musical notation for the tune of the title line. I contacted someone I knew would be familiar with the piece and asked if he knew where I could pick up a score. Better than that, he put on the cd, listened carefully, and dashed off the notation on a scrap of paper. That man was the magnificent Billy Jenkins http://www.billyjenkins.com/ to whom big thanks are due. Please buy his cd’s to show my appreciation. I have them already.

The lady in the picture is my mother, at the age of around sixteen, right in the middle of the second world war, with all her life in front of her, seeing it all held back by the privations of history. It is the story of countless thousands who found their education and the forward progress of their lives being ruined by the times they were born into. She loved her jazz, although Roland Kirk did not feature in her repertoire of enthusiasms. We had an awkward relationship, if I may understate things to such an extent, but in this picture I wanted to give her opportunities she probably felt she had missed in her life. I fashioned her into the horn of the saxophone, in metallic pencils, so that she might sing or cry to her heart’s content. Serious thing. Her name was Edith.

Roland Kirk was a personal hero, whose passing in 1977 moved me to pen a poem. Never one to worry about embarrassing  myself by making overblown juvenilia public, I present it here, for the first time released from the box it has languished in for the last 38 years:

The Song of Roland

The song of Roland still sounds out

in a low-drawn howl;

like the wail of wolves, and the wolves’ wives shout

or a haunted yowl

that drifts nowhere on the still wind’s breath;

the bayed white moon

bays back obeisance for one man’s death

that came too soon

and one by one the wolves slide back

in the deep blank night

to draw down blinds of classical black

over his last fight.

yet the song of Roland still sounds out

with a long-drawn yowl;

and through the wail of wolves his horn still shouts

as a haunting howl.