Picture a 1960s jazz club where a musician lifts three saxophones strapped around his neck, puts all three mouthpieces in his mouth, and blows a perfectly harmonized chord, with a gong, a nose flute, an alarm clock and a section of garden hose within reach. This episode explains why Rahsaan Roland Kirk was not a novelty act but one of the most serious and inventive synthesizers of music who ever lived. Born Ronald Theodore Kirk in Columbus, Ohio, in 1935, he lost his sight at two, attended the Ohio State School for the Blind, and by 15 was playing R&B gigs with Boyd Moore and experimenting with two horns at once, to the astonishment of veterans like Hank Crawford.

The hosts walk through the engineering behind his tenor, stritch and manzello, the re-worked key mechanisms that let one finger close pads across multiple horns, the circular  ...