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 breathing that powered them, and the flute-humming technique that made him the most significant jazz flute innovator after Eric Dolphy. They cover his black mystery pipes and live musique concrete, his insistence on the term black classical music, his sharp political stage banter and the story of Jay Leno as his opening act, the hidden answering-machine audio on The Case of the Three-Sided Dream in Audio Color, the dreams that gave him his name, and the 1975 stroke after which he rebuilt his instruments to play one-handed until a second stroke took him in 1977 at 42.

• Why he refused to hire two extra saxophonists instead of playing three horns himself
• How Columbus threw him out of a club for being too difficult and later declared a day in his honor
• Circular breathing, human bagpipes, and the physical stamina behind the sound
• Tchaikovsky, Saint-Saens, Smokey Robinson and Burt Bacharach in the same set
• His influence on Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson and Bjork