The City After Midnight
Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s The Inflated Tear unexpectedly mirrors the nocturnal mood of Bernard Herrmann’s Taxi Driver score — a reminder that while eras fade, the feelings inside great music never do.
By Rafi Mercer
This morning I found myself deep inside Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s The Inflated Tear, and halfway through the title track something unexpected happened — the room shifted, the light changed, and suddenly I was back inside the opening sequence of Taxi Driver (1976). Not the plot, not the grit, but the atmosphere: that drifting brass, that soft, unsettled noir glow Bernard Herrmann painted across a sleepless New York. A city breathing heavy at 3am.
It’s remarkable how sound can tether two moments that never intended to meet. Kirk’s record arrived in 1968, Herrmann’s score eight years later, but spiritually they seem to share the same pavement. A horn line that carries more loneliness than aggression. A melody that doesn’t announce itself, but haunts its own space. A kind of slow-moving jazz melancholy that feels soaked in neon and rain.
What hit me today is how fresh both pieces of music still sound — even as the world they describe has vanished. The New York of Taxi Driver no longer exists; it has been renovated, remade, polished, and priced into a different story altogether. The city Kirk wrote from has also faded — the late-60s America of street-corner bands, spiritual jazz, political heat, and restless invention. But the music? Somehow the music feels more alive than the eras that birthed it.
Herrmann’s score was famously his last — he recorded it just hours before he died — and you can hear the weight of a lifetime inside those muted trumpets. Kirk’s playing on The Inflated Tear feels similarly autobiographical: tender, bruised, full of experience yet strangely gentle. That’s the thread that ties them. Not style. Not genre. Emotion. The willingness to be unguarded.
There’s a moment in Taxi Driver where the camera drifts across faces in Times Square, lights blurring against the taxi window, and the music feels almost compassionate. Not forgiving — just aware. The Inflated Tear carries the same awareness. It’s an album that knows pain but refuses to yield to it. It invites you closer rather than pushing you away.
We live in a world where images age quickly, but sound — the right kind of sound — doesn’t. I think that’s why the connection landed so sharply today. Kirk’s album didn’t remind me of the film. It reminded me of the feeling the film captured. The feeling of being awake when the rest of the world has surrendered to sleep. The feeling of moving alone through a city that doesn’t know your name. The feeling of seeing beauty in places you’re meant to overlook.
Maybe that’s the strange comfort of listening deeply: you start to hear echoes between things that shouldn’t touch. A jazz classic from 1968. A noir score from 1976. A morning in 2025. All held together by a single horn line that refuses to disappear.
Some moments in culture pass.
The mood they leave behind doesn’t.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters.
For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe, or click here to read more.
