Rahsaan Roland Kirk live on two coasts

There's widespread consensus that Shohei Ohtani’s performance in Game 4 of the 2025 National League Championship Series was the greatest in baseball history: at the plate, 3 for 3 with three home runs; on the mound, six innings with 10 strikeouts and only 2 hits allowed.

- BY ANDREY HENKIN

That defines double threat.Almost seven decades earlier, jazz's original triple threat made his first record—Triple Threat—for the King label: Roland Kirk, just a month past his 21st birthday and blind since infancy, played three different horns, sometimes simultaneously and not as a mere novelty. Later he added flute, clarinet, oboe, English horn, bagpipes, nose flute, siren, flexatone, other instruments, circular breathing, multiphonics, and spirited sermonizing to his arsenal.

These days, Kirk is much less visible than many of his contemporaries. One reason is that since his death from a stroke in 1977 at age 42, only a few live dates have been released, many on suspect European labels, and reissues have been few. So it is a mitzvah that for Record Store Day 2025—the 69th anniversary of that first recording and the year Kirk would have turned 90—Resonance Records has released not one but two archival recordings, providing fodder for reappraisal. The two sets are based on performances four years and some 2800 miles apart: November 26-27, 1963, at the Village Gate in New York City and September 8 and 15, 1967, at The Penthouse in Seattle. Both sets—Vibrations in the Village: Live at the Village Gate and