He was our mentor at the Keystone Korner in San Francisco, where i was a week in week out customer in 1975 and became an employee in '76, working there until '81 when i moved to N.Y.C. He recorded his masterpiece Bright Moments there, live in 1975. The owner of the club, Todd Barkan, now the Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center in Manhattan grew up in Bexley, Ohio.....a little place surrounded by Columbus where Ohio State University is. Rahsaan was also from Columbus and had befriended Todd when Todd was 14.....took him on the road, and when they were once in Austrailia on a T.V. show, and Rah was asked to see what he could do with a Didgeridoo (native instrument of the indigenous peoples), he began to blow, none stop, and continued right through the commercials and on and on and on until he decided he'd warmed it up. Rahsaan was world famous for having special abilities, often playing tenor sax, stritch and manzello, simultaneously. When they asked him how he he could possibly hold a note that long, he said. "I do not do circular breathing.....I do not do rotational breathing.......I am the wind."
One TON, and It Aint Gonna Get No Lighter.
