The Kate: Karl Denson's Tiny Universe (Connecticut Public Television, American Public Television, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, February 13) I switched channels after the Winter Olympics telecast went on a half-hour hiatus to accommodate the all-important 11 p.m. news shows and put on KPBS for The Kate, the latest episode of the intriguing music show from the Katharine Hepburn Cultural Center in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, the late movie legend’s home town. I’ve compared this series to the local San Diego show Live at the Belly Up, which features similar club-sized attractions at the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach, but this one hails from the other end of the country. This time the featured attraction on The Kate was a band called Karl Denson’s Tiny Universe. Denson’s Web page lists the personnel as Karl Denson, alto sax, flute, and vocals; Ricio Fruge, trumpet, flugelhorn, and vocals; Ricky Giordano, guitar and vocals; Rashon Murph, keyboards (a Hammond B-3 organ, Rhodes electric piano, and assorted electronica); Parker McAllister, bass; and Alfred Jordan, drums. There were definitely two guitar players on the program and I don’t know who the other one was, but they did some quite good and interesting duels. One irony was that Karl Denson, an African-American alto saxophonist and flutist with a shaved head and white goatee beard (which will give you an idea of how old he is), talked a much better set than he played. He mentioned that his first exposure to music came from his parents, first Motown and then James Brown, and later he got into artists like Marvin Gaye (who was on Motown but pushed the limits of their formula until in 1970 he created his masterpiece, What’s Goin’ On?). Still later he acquired an interest in jazz via John Coltrane and especially Rahsaan Roland Kirk – and if you’ve never heard of Rahsaan Roland Kirk, get on YouTube and look him up right now. (A good sample of Kirk on the Ed Sullivan Show is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRO1W5twBes&list=RDjRO1W5twBes&start_radio=1.) Kirk was a blind reedman who was famous for playing up to five saxophones at once – one of his most stunning records was a cover of Duke Ellington’s “Creole Love Call” in which he reproduced Ellington’s entire sax section on his own and in real time. He mounted his horns, including such oddball sax variants as the manzello and the stritch, on a rack so he could move his mouth between them. Kirk also doubled on flute, as did Coltrane on his very last album (Expression, recorded in February and March 1967, just four months before Coltrane died), so Denson took up flute. He also said he realized that all the great jazz musicians had their roots in the blues, so he started listening to blues greats like Son House. Denson said he picked up on the fact that all the white British bands in the 1960’s had learned from the great African-American blues players.

He was in Lenny Kravitz’s original band until he left in 1993, and in 2014 he got a call from a blocked phone number that turned out to be Kravitz’s reaching out to him to ask if he’d be interested in doing a tour with a major British band. The major British band turned out to be The Rolling Stones. He’s also played with or opened for Stevie Winwood, The Allman Brothers, the late Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead, and George Clinton’s Parliament/Funkadelic combo. Denson recalled being asked how it felt to play before an audience of 65,000 at a Rolling Stones concert, and he said he was really playing for just four people: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ron Wood, and the late Charlie Watts. Denson said he was actually more comfortable playing in a club before an audience of 500 to 600 because then he’s playing his own music. Oddly, Denson talked a much better set than he played; in the hour-long time slot of The Kate, he did nine songs and all but one of them featured Denson’s singing, which isn’t bad but it’s a typical funk-soul rasp that got wearing after a while. Basically Karl Denson and Tiny Universe play the sort of funk-soul that was popular in the mid-1970’s and evolved (or devolved) into disco. They opened with a song called “Shake It Out” and then played an instrumental that defeated The Kate’s chyron writers but was the best thing in the show. Denson began it quietly and lyrically on the flute before he put it aside, picked up his alto sax, and turned up the tempo and volume. The instrumental featured solos by Denson, Fruge on flugelhorn, one of the two guitarists, Murph on the Hammond B-3 (the organ that Jimmy Smith popularized and made the go-to sound for jazz, pop, and rock organists), and McAllister on electric bass. Then Denson played a batch of good but pretty indistinguishable songs, all featuring his foghorn vocals, with generic titles like “I’m Your Biggest Fan,” “Change My Way,” “Time to Pray,” “Satisfied,” “Gossip,” and “Hang Me Out to Dry.” In between “Change My Way” and “Time to Pray” the band was heard playing a brief snatch of something called “Gnomes and Badgers” which Denson explained was a reference to the current American political situation and particularly the polarization between the Republican and Democratic political parties. That could have made for a more interesting song than any of the ones Denson actually sang on the show, but alas we were only allowed to hear it under the interview. (Playing musical selections under interviews, so it’s hard to hear or enjoy either, is one of my pet peeves about music documentaries, and blessedly the producers of Live at the Belly Up avoid it.) I enjoyed the music but with reservations, and I think my husband Charles put his finger on the problem when he said, “It’s too raucous for me in my current condition.” I could see his point; I could have used Denson playing a song or two that was slower, gentler, more jazzy, and one that used a different singer (his Web site lists Danielle Barker as a second vocalist but there weren’t hide nor hair of her on the show) or was an instrumental.