A sonic exploration and tonal analysis of contemporary creative music in a myriad of improvisational/composed settings, textures, and expressions.
Welcome to Sound Projections
I'm your host Kofi Natambu. This online magazine features the very best in contemporary creative music in this creative timezone NOW (the one we're living in) as well as that of the historical past. The purpose is to openly explore, examine, investigate, reflect on, studiously critique, and take opulent pleasure in the sonic and aural dimensions of human experience known and identified to us as MUSIC. I'm also interested in critically examining the wide range of ideas and opinions that govern our commodified notions of the production, consumption, marketing, and commercial exchange of organized sound(s) which largely define and thereby (over)determine our present relationships to music in the general political economy and culture.
Thus this magazine will strive to critically question and go beyond the conventional imposed notions
and categories of what constitutes the generic and stylistic definitions of ‘Jazz’, ‘classical music’, ‘Blues.’
'Rhythm and Blues’, ‘Rock and Roll’, ‘Pop’, ‘Funk’, ‘Hip Hop’, etc. in order to search for what individual
artists and ensembles do cretively to challenge and transform our ingrained ideas and attitudes of what
music is and could be.
So please join me in this ongoing visceral, investigative, and cerebral quest to explore, enjoy, and pay
homage to the endlessly creative and uniquely magisterial dimensions of MUSIC in all of its guises and expressive identities.
Saturday, April 7, 2018
Pharoah Sanders (b. October 13, 1940): Legendary, iconic, and innovative musician, composer, arranger, ensemble leader, producer, and teacher
Pharoah Sanders possesses one of the most distinctive tenor saxophone sounds in jazz. Harmonically rich and heavy with overtones, Sanders' sound can be as raw and abrasive as it is possible for a saxophonist to produce. Yet, Sanders
is highly regarded to the point of reverence by a great many jazz fans.
Although he made his name with expressionistic, nearly anarchic free
jazz in John Coltrane's late ensembles of the mid-'60s, Sanders' later music is guided by more graceful concerns. In the free-time, ultra-dense cauldron that was Coltrane's last artistic stand, Sanders relied heavily on the non-specific pitches and timbral distortions pioneered by Albert Ayler and further developed by Coltrane himself. The hallmarks of Sanders' playing at that time were naked aggression and unrestrained passion. In the years after Coltrane's death, however, Sanders
explored other, somewhat gentler and perhaps more cerebral avenues --
without, it should be added, sacrificing any of the intensity that
defined his work as an apprentice to Coltrane.
Pharoah Sanders (a corruption of his given name, Ferrell Sanders)
was born into a musical family. Both his mother and father taught
music, his mother privately and his father in public schools. Sanders'
first instrument was the clarinet, but he switched to tenor sax as a
high school student, under the influence of his band director, Jimmy
Cannon. Cannon also exposed Sanders to jazz for the first time. Sanders' early favorites included Harold Land, James Moody, Sonny Rollins, Charlie Parker, and John Coltrane. As a teenager, he played blues gigs for ten and 15 dollars a night around Little Rock, backing such blues greats as Bobby "Blue" Bland and Junior Parker. After high school, Sanders
moved to Oakland, CA, where he lived with relatives. He attended
Oakland Junior College, studying art and music. Known in the San
Francisco Bay Area as "Little Rock," Sanders
soon began playing bebop, rhythm & blues, and free jazz with many
of the region's finest musicians, including fellow saxophonists Dewey Redman and Sonny Simmons, as well as pianist Ed Kelly and drummer Smiley Winters. In 1961, Sanders moved to New York, where he struggled. Unable to make a living with his music, Sanders
took to pawning his horn, working non-musical jobs, and sometimes
sleeping on the subway. During this period he played with a number of
free jazz luminaries, including Sun Ra, Don Cherry, and Billy Higgins. Sanders formed his first group in 1963, with pianist John Hicks (with whom he would continue to play off-and-on into the '90s), bassist Wilbur Ware, and drummer Higgins. The group played an engagement at New York's Village Gate. A member of the audience was John Coltrane, who apparently liked what he heard. In late 1964, Coltrane asked Sanders to sit in with his band. By the next year, Sanders was playing regularly with the Coltrane group, although he was never made an official member of the band. Coltrane's ensembles with Sanders were some of the most controversial in the history of jazz. Their music, as represented by the group's recordings -- Om, Live at the Village Vanguard Again, and Live in Seattle
among them -- represents a near total desertion of traditional jazz
concepts, like swing and functional harmony, in favor of a teeming,
irregularly structured, organic mixture of sound for sound's sake.
Strength was a necessity in that band, and as Coltrane realized, Sanders had it in abundance.
Sanders made his first record as a leader in 1964 for the ESP label. After John Coltrane's death in 1967, Sanders worked briefly with his widow, Alice Coltrane. From the late '60s, he worked primarily as a leader of his own ensembles. From 1966-1971, Sanders released several albums on Impulse, including Tauhid (1966), Karma (1969), Black Unity (1971), and Thembi (1971). In the mid-'70s, Sanders recorded his most commercial effort, Love Will Find a Way
(Arista, 1977); it turned out to be a brief detour. From the late '70s
until 1987, he recorded for the small independent label Theresa. From
1987, Sanders recorded for the Evidence and Timeless labels. The former bought Theresa records in 1991 and subsequently re-released Sanders' output for that company. In 1995, Sanders made his first major-label album in many years, Message From Home (produced by Bill Laswell for Verve). The two followed that one up in 1999 with Save Our Children. In 2000, Sanders released Spirits -- a multi-ethnic live suite with Hamid Drake and Adam Rudolph. In the decades after his first recordings with Coltrane, Sanders
developed into a more well-rounded artist, capable of playing
convincingly in a variety of contexts, from free to mainstream. Some of
his best work is his most accessible. As a mature artist, Sanders discovered a hard-edged lyricism that has served him well.
In 2015, Sanders was granted an NEA Jazz Master Award, along with Gary Burton, Wendy Oxenhorn, and Archie Shepp. It is North America's highest award for the genre.
"I just want a band and keep them working, people that I like and who I
think a lot of. Once my band is happy, then I am happy."
As a preface, I have been a devotee of Pharoah Sanders (Ferrell
Sanders) since I first heard the now legendary John Coltrane recording, Meditations. From Meditations, I came to the storied Ascension session and that furthered my interest to Live in Japan
(includes an almost hour long version of "My Favorite Things"), for my
two cents, the most unappreciated and critically misunderstood album in
Trane's discography. That spawned my purchase of Sanders' Karma, which gave way to Black Unity. For a period, Sanders was on Verve and recorded two sessions produced by the often-maligned Bill Laswell, Message from Home and Save Our Children. Kora superhero Foday Musa Suso appears on Message from Home and Save Our Children
still makes its way into my CD player. That was a handful of years ago
and apart from a featured guest role here and a Catalina's concert there
(although Sanders did record Spirits for Adam Rudolph's
label), Sanders remained silent, out of the public eye, and more
importantly, out of the public ear. Void of a recording contract and
having just played a mediocre week at Catalina's, Sanders spoke about
his absence and the pitfalls of falling in the cracks of the preverbal
American pop culture mantra, as always, brought to you without
commercial interruptions, unedited and in his own words.All About Jazz: How is your health?
Pharoah Sanders: I feel OK. I'm trying to keep up, keep my health together. So far, I've had no problems.
FJ: I ask because when I saw you last week at Catalina's, you did a good imitation of Miles Davis circa We Want Miles (1981), when much of the playing was done by his band.
PS:
That was maybe this week, but I had problems, my own reasons. I am
using another drummer. I am trying to check him out. I am trying to
check everybody out. I am trying to see if that is the kind of thing
that I really want to do. The drummer, that is the first time that I
have ever worked with him. He is a drummer that Billy Higgins really
spent a lot of time with. He has been playing since he was about two or
three years old, since he was a little baby. I thought I would try and
use him. I usually use Ralph Penland when I work down there. I just
wanted to try out somebody different. I am interested in doing some
things with some bigger companies, but nobody has really approached me.
Verve had approached me, but when they started laying off people.
FJ: This was pre-Tommy LiPuma.
PS:
Oh, yeah. He don't want to have anything to do with me. He said that
somebody said that I don't like white people or something. I heard that
and I couldn't believe that. I don't know if somebody is trying to do
something to me. I don't know what it is. There is a lot of lies going
around.
FJ: Whoa, what kind of horseshit is that?
PS:
I think somebody was trying to get a record session, a record date and
they had been playing for a number of years, a tenor player, and he
called me and told me that. I think the person at Verve now used to be
with GRP or something, but they send me things. He was very cool and
nice to me and we were talking about doing something. Later on, Verve,
Polygram, they were changing over and before he got in there, I was
supposed to be signing with Verve, a big contract, and never did happen
because they changed all the personnel. He felt like my music wouldn't
go over. I guess I played different stuff and it was not consistent as
jazz or whatever. I don't know if that was the problem or not and then I
heard this and somebody said that he said that he heard that I didn't
like white people. That made me feel so bad that I didn't feel like
doing nothing for a long time. Then I decided that maybe I should try to
do something on my own and then go to the big company. That might be
where it is at.
FJ: Are you being passed
over because you don't fit the mold? You are admittedly reticent and in
this age of hype and promos, you are not doing yourself any favors.
PS:
Their whole image or how they feel right now, because there are some
different kind of people up there now, that is why I would rather do my
own thing because I know what I want to do and I can do a little by
little until I get it to where I want it to be and then I will go to
them and if not, I will just sell it myself, little by little.
FJ: Ironic, since Impulse!, a Verve label, was built on the sessions you did with Coltrane and you own bands.
PS:
At that time, when I was making those albums, I was trying to do both
kinds of things, play in and out. I was working a little bit with John
Coltrane and at the same time, I always had my own band at the same
time. I was trying to work both bands and try to figure out what I
wanted to do. It kept me moving, but right now, I feel like I want to do
some other things, things that I haven't done like I haven't made an
album with all blues. There is a whole lot of things that I want to do. I
am not going to wait until a company calls me to do them. I will just
go ahead and do it and then deal with the big guys later.
FJ:
Just a few years ago, you gave equal time to the soprano saxophone and
the tenor. I noticed lately, the soprano saxophone has disappeared from
your sessions.
PS: Well, I have had my
problems with the soprano. I always felt that I didn't have a good sound
on my soprano and I was waiting, trying to find a righteous mouthpiece
that I could play that I really like. It was a problem for me, playing
soprano and then switching to tenor. Most of the time, you find me
playing soprano on albums and things and not in person. So I had
problems taking my instruments on the plane. I got tired of them
hassling me and so I stopped bringing my soprano. I just bring my tenor.
But now, I am thinking that maybe I should bring all of them. I just
need to get a case made for them to go underneath because the plane gets
full, it doesn't matter once you are on the plane. It is not their
fault. I just have to do something about it and I don't like to make
problems for me. I just need to find somebody to make me a case that I
can put up underneath. I just haven't got around to it. That is all that
is. I just haven't got around to getting somebody to make me a metal
case or something.
FJ: You have received your share of Coltrane questions.
PS:
They always do. A lot of times, they don't know that we talked just
like anybody else. We'd ask how we were doing. It wasn't no big thing.
There wasn't anything concerning about the music. It was just general
conversation. He treated me just the way he treated anybody. I didn't
talk that much and John, he didn't talk that much.
FJ: I would have liked to be a fly on the wall for that conversation, or lack there of.
PS:
(Laughing) I would sit right next to him and not say a word and
wouldn't think about saying nothing and he would sit and never say
anything either. He was just one of those kind of people. He is very,
very quite. It seemed like when he picked up his horn, it was a whole
different story then. Then I would listen (laughing). I would definitely
listen. I remember one time, he gave me a rhythm thing to practice on
and that was really helpful to me. That was really telling me something,
rather than just what he had written down. The rhythm he gave me was
something that we were musically involved with and something he wanted
me to do. When he gave it to me, he just gave it to me. He didn't say
nothing. He would just do things. He never said nothing or explained
nothing. He just would do it and that was it. You were on your own. You
had to be very independent being around John. Then I started buying
drumsticks and started working on my rhythm a little bit more. Maybe he
saw something in me and thought that I should practice my rhythm instead
of running around with my horn. That is how I looked at it. Maybe he
was trying to tell me something and I better go and practice on my
rhythm (laughing).
FJ: Have you lost the fire and brimstone in your playing from those days?
PS:
I don't know. Sometimes, things get very unseen to the public. You
might see me working with the band right now, but I am working with this
band right now because I had to break up another band that I was with
because of personal problems. You just can't have that when you are
playing. You have to have guys that are straight. I may have lost a lot
by looking at it that way. Before, I think I had like John Hicks and
Idris (Muhammad) and some personal problem happened that don't have
anything to do with no music. I said that I was tired of it now and I
have to find somebody that is going to do it now and be on time for the
gigs and don't give me any problems. I don't want nobody on my gig drunk
or doing some other drugs or whatever it may be. I've been knowing
William Henderson for a long time, since 1959. I knew William before I
met John Hicks. I met William in Oakland, California. He is a very clean
person, vegetarian and all. I can really use that around me. I find
that in California, I can't find guys that have enough energy. They play
a little bit and that's about it. They play less. If I start a tune and
then the pianist has to solo, I am looking to everybody to get to a
certain climate and then I come back in while the energy is up high.
Somehow that doesn't happen. Since I have been working with
these guys, it never has happened, so I guess guys like to play their
little solo and that is it and then the next guy plays his solo and that
is it. In New York, by me living there so long, guys are into more
energy. We play much longer and that makes me want to play longer. If
you build the intensity up to where I can come in on that energy, that
is what I want. Then you would see me playing for a long time. If I have
to do it all by myself, then it is not working right. I look at it that
the whole band is like one big solo. I like to build. If nobody is
building with me, then there is no sense in me trying to play because
that is not creative. You never get a lot of creativity out of me
because I am not pushed to do it. Nobody is looking at the energy. They
are all looking at the piece of music and this guy is soloing and they
already have it all figured out. I could play the whole set by myself
and I am giving them a chance to play and be heard and they don't take
advantage of that and do something with it, then it is not going
anywhere. That is why I am not getting enough work because I would like
to work all the time. Nobody really calls me. Ever since I have been
playing, I never worked every month. I will work this month and then I
am off two months. That is the way it has been going. I don't know why,
but I guess that is just the way it is.
FJ: How do you survive?
PS:
I've been getting publishing royalties and stuff like that. I have just
been lucky. They come in at the right time. Sometimes they don't, but I
am not wealthy or anything like that. I just love to work. I would
rather work three hundred and something days out of the year. I would
rather be working. They don't know. I love playing. Then I can really
get my music together. If I don't do that, then my chops go down and
stuff goes down. If I can get some good musicians together and have a
good rhythm section, I can keep them working. I have a lot of
problems out in California trying to find drummers and bass players. The
bass players, they don't create. A lot of them I know, they just play a
little solo. I am not so used to that kind of playing. Drummers can't
play on time. Their time is bad. I just don't know what to do. Then when
I go to New York City, I find some good drummers or good bass players
to work with. I miss New York period and the musicians. Everybody around
here is very casual and very social, but no energy. I want somebody to
come to the gig and they are ready to hit. They are ready to play. Let's
go and hit. Energy and then would play one tune for the whole set.
Music can get involved where energy takes you to different places. You
know that too. If I don't go there, I don't really feel like I have
given the people enough. I am not a person who can get on the bandstand
and play a million tunes for a set. I want to play as long as I have my
horn, a long, long time, where one tune could be for the whole set. A
lot of times, after a piano solo, the bassist thinks he should solo and I
feel like the drummer should solo and the bass take the solo after the
drummer and the bass can solo and he can take us in another direction.
I remember a bassist that I used and he was always like this. He would
take the band different places and he is doing some other things and
that is Stanley Clarke. He always played and his energy would be so high
that when he played his solo, he would go on and do what he wanted to
do and then he would start something else. We would play one tune and
after his solo, we would do some other thing. It keeps on moving and I
never got tired of that. I wish I could get that back again. It is hard
to try and tell a bassist to play a little longer or get into some other
rhythms or different times or something. Make me do something.
FJ: Would life have been better for Pharoah Sanders if you remained in New York?
PS:
Well, I lived in New York in the Nineties. Well, if I went on and
signed a contract when they asked me to and I waited about a whole year
before I even thought about signing a contract. I should have went on
and signed it then before the new owner. That is my fault. The record
companies don't know you. They know of you, but they are more into pop. I
don't know. I think right now, I would rather do my own thing. I can go
ahead and finish it and then put it out there. If one company is not
interested, I can move on to another. I would like to make a record with
straight ahead things, some things that I wanted to do for a long time.
It would not be commercial. There would be some things that I felt I
hadn't finished from a long time ago. It is just a matter of finding the
right musicians. Most of the time, when you find the right musicians,
they are working with somebody else or they are very expensive to use
and I can't afford to use them. It bothers me. I remember when some of
the musicians weren't making a lot of money and now they are very, very
popular and well known. I don't know how I can use them anymore. I do
the best I can. A lot of the agencies don't get good paying jobs so I
have to make things work some kind of way. I would rather work in
Europe. It is better money. What I have been getting now is people want
to use me in different bands. They want to use me as a guest. I would
rather use my own band. The money is OK, but I don't want to make a
whole lot of money. I just want a band and keep them working, people
that I like and who I think a lot of. Once my band is happy, then I am
happy.
FJ: And the future?
PS:
Just a while ago, just a few months ago, I got a call to work in the
Jazz Bakery. I am looking at October to go in there for the first time. I
want to get a bassist from back in New York and a drummer. That is
going to be costly, so maybe I can get a bassist.
FJ: Call Roberto Miranda.
PS: I have never heard of him.
FJ: Roberto has the vocabulary of Mingus and the get up of Henry Grimes.
PS:
See, it is funny, the guys from here that I work with, they don't tell
me about nobody around here. Nobody tells me what is going on around
here. I don't go out unless I am working. A few guys tell me to check
this guy out and he ends up being a bassist that somebody else is close
to everyday and that is their buddy and I don't like dealing with stuff
like that. I have problems with stuff like that. I want the best there
is around here.
FJ: Roberto is the best in LA.
PS:
I definitely want his number. He has that kind of energy. I like that.
That makes me feel good. It is not about them coming in to make money. I
would just love to find somebody who really wants to play. Give me some
inspiration. Let's play. Let's go and hit. If he wants to, he can pick
up his bass and come to the frontline. He don't have to be in the
background. I just need more energy. I want cats that play with me to
have multiple talents. I can deal with it and go in all kinds of
different directions. If I can't find them here, I am going to send for
somebody. I have to keep going. I have to.
With
Ayler's statement about jazz's so-called "New Thing," the metaphor was
cast. Of course John Coltrane – the giant of the tenor saxophone who
brought Eastern thought to bear on his own music – was deemed the father. It was ‘Trane who gave his blessing to the next generation of players: Archie Shepp,
Marion Brown, John Tchicai, Dewey Johnson, Pharoah Sanders, Albert
Ayler and more before Coltrane left his earthly body in 1967. And it was
Ayler who best embodied the fiery cast of free jazz, burning bright
only to burn out, dragged out of the East River at the age of 34.
Yet
as he nears his 75th year, Sanders’ body of work does not enjoy nearly
the same reverence, awe and praise as the others in the holy trinity of
spiritual jazz. Coltrane continues to be the subject of colossal box
sets and deluxe reissues, Ayler has had every scrap of recorded music
culled and collected, while Sanders’ oeuvre stands in disarray. His
eleven Impulse albums – from 1967’s Tauhid to 1974’s Love in Us All – comprise arguably the greatest run on the label. Yet outside of 1969’s Karma, none of Pharoah’s Impulse albums are currently in print in the U.S.
Half of them are unavailable on CD or vinyl, the other half are bundled
as two-for-one budget imports, with no remastering or bonus tracks.
Most of the ink given to Sanders appears at the tail end of Coltrane
bios, noting that Sanders was the lone horn player to share the
bandstand with Coltrane at the end of his life. In Ornette Coleman’s estimation, Sanders is “probably the best tenor player in the world.”
And
while Sanders has released many albums on many labels, nothing matches
his Impulse years. The music he made with large ensembles in the late
‘60s and early ‘70s drew from the jazz tradition, but elevated the form
so as to embrace gospel, soul, African folk, R&B and what would soon
be deemed world music, weaving it all into a tapestry that spoke of
African-American identity, spiritual realization and world peace. Many
of the players that Sanders brought into his band would become stars in
their own right: Lonnie Liston Smith, Leon Thomas, Norman Connors, Gary Bartz, Stanley Clarke, Idris Muhammad, James Mtume
and more. His music remains a beacon. As Smith put it to me in
describing the music he made with Pharoah: “We were trying to enlighten
the world through music, because music is a universal language.”
Ferrell
Sanders was born under the sign of Libra in Little Rock, Arkansas on
October 13, 1940. After high school, he moved to Oakland and earned the
nickname of “Little Rock,” eventually befriending John Coltrane while
playing gigs on the West Coast. Sanders moved to New York City in 1961,
which wasn’t the easiest of transitions. “When I got to New York, I was
like a survivor, on the street,” he told JazzTimes back in
2008. “It was wintertime, it was cold. I was like a bird or whatever,
finding whatever I could get.” While working as a chef at the small
MacDougal Street coffeeshop called the Playhouse, Sanders encountered Sun Ra, the great cosmic bandleader, who bestowed a new moniker on the young tenor saxophonist: “Pharoah.”
"I don’t really see the horn anymore, I’m trying to see myself."
--Pharoah Sanders
After
a brief stint in Sun Ra’s Arkestra, Sanders realigned with Coltrane,
recording with him on his exploratory late-career albums like Ascension, Meditations and Kulu Sé Mama. Sanders played with Coltrane until his death and on albums like Live in Japan,
Sanders bears more of the soloing load. Favoring overblowing, shrieks
and other extended techniques like harmonics, biting the reed and
yelling through the bell of the horn, Sanders pushed beyond the barriers
of jazz towards unfettered sound, no longer beholden to chord changes
and scales. It was not always appreciated. One New Yorker
review compared Sanders’ sound to “elephant shrieks, which went on and
on and on [and] appeared to have little in common with music.”
When
Coltrane succumbed to liver cancer in July of 1967, Sanders was seen as
the one guy who could inherit Coltrane’s legacy. But while Sanders
envisioned a universal sound that drew from many musical cultures as his
mentor did, the results were different. “John did his own thing; I did
my own thing,” Sanders told JazzTimes. “It wasn’t a carry-over of something that he did. Whole different thing from what I was doing.”
Pharoah Sanders - Upper Egypt & Lower Egypt
When Sanders went to cut his first album for Impulse, Tauhid,
in November 1966 at the famed Rudy Van Gelder Studio in Englewood, NJ,
he had a vision. “I don’t really see the horn anymore, I’m trying to see
myself,” he said in the liner notes. “The more I can find out about
myself, the more I can know...what the roots of existence are.” Drawing
on his travels through Japan with Coltrane’s group, as well as his
reading about ancient Egypt, Tauhid balanced the incendiary sax
shredding of Sanders’ years with Coltrane with a newfound lyricism and
patience, letting each song unfold at a natural pace. And with the
guitar of Sonny Sharrock adding both furious noise and nimble R&B
chording that gave the sidelong “Upper Egypt & Lower Egypt” its
melodic hook, Sanders’ work began to resonate beyond jazz as the Stooges
and MC5 incorporated the spirit of Sanders into their proto-punk sound.
Around
that time, piano player Lonnie Liston Smith was brought into the fold,
along with free jazz vocalist Leon Thomas. Sanders’ band began to swell
beyond the confines of a small group. “There was Sonny, plus drums, plus
all kinds of percussion instruments everywhere,” Smith recalls. “I was
surrounded by a sea of beautiful sound, coming from everywhere. Leon was
yodeling, Pharoah was sounding like he was playing more than one note. I
was trying to get more sound of out of the piano, using my forearms to
get more sound. It was amazing: The less we practiced the better we
sounded.”
We
worked out a technique where about 17 or 18 minutes in, I would dim the
lights up and down in the studio to let him know that he was getting to
the point where he should start winding down.
--Ed Michel
At
the fore of that massive, spontaneous sound was Sanders and his horn.
“Where the average horn player builds to in intensity and then tails
off, that’s Pharoah’s beginning,” Leon Thomas told James Briggs Murray
in The Oral History Interview with Leon Thomas. But whereas
Sanders had faced criticism from the jazz world for overblowing and
transforming his horn into a human scream, as the leader of his own
group, he began to strike a balance in that tempestuous sound, moving
between chaos and beauty, playing “out” as well as “in.”
As
the band grew to a nonet, a composition in Pharoah’s repertoire –
originally titled “Pisces Moon” – underwent a dramatic change. As
Thomas recounted, they were performing the song one night in a Jersey
City church: “When it came time for me on the song, I heard this sound
and didn’t know where it was coming from. A yodel starts happening. The
articulation was in the throat. No one had heard it before. The church
was the right place for it. It was an extension of or part of ‘tongue’ –
[I was] speaking in tongues.” The chant of “yeah” nine times in the
original song manifested now as a line: “The Creator has a master plan.”
Pharoah Sanders -The Creator Has A Master Plan
Coming five years after A Love Supreme and at the peak of the ‘60s, Karma became the fullest iteration of spiritual jazz. Its joyous, cycling bassline and chanted title evokes the memory of A Love Supreme,
and in Thomas’s estimation it was intentional. “The Creator Has a
Master Plan,” a 33-minute careen between soul and free jazz that
soundtracked many a trip the minds of listeners at home and conjured
altered states in its players as well. “Pharoah was like a God, it was
so spiritual,” said Norman Connors, one of the many drummers who played
with Sanders during that era. “The music was very sacred and had a
certain tone about it, mystical and just beautiful.”
Despite
being a half-hour journey, “The Creator Has a Master Plan” was
something of a free jazz hit, garnering mainstream FM radio airplay at
the time. Not only Archie Shepp and Rashied Ali, but now Carlos Santana
and Marlon Brando were seen at Sanders’ shows. In Thomas’ estimation, Karma allowed spiritual music to descend and infiltrate the earthly realm of pop: “Karma was there before ‘Give Peace a Chance’ and ‘What’s Going On.’ [After Karma,]
Marvin [Gaye] even changed his demeanor, knit caps and beards. Taj
Mahal got robes, all from working on shows with us. We had subtle input
and influence. There became more spiritual consciousness after that
song.”
Pharoah Sanders - Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah
Jewels of Thought and Summun Bukmun Umyun
followed in quick succession while the band was operating at its peak:
playing shows, touring the country and hitting the studio with little
forethought. “Recording Pharoah was like having a tribe arrive in the
studio with wives and cooks and participants and an audience,” said
producer Ed Michel, who succeeded Bob Thiele at Impulse in 1970. “The
cooks and entertainers set up in one section making vegetarian meals and
the band set up in front of them. It was like having a village in the
studio.”
“Pharoah
would just start playing and making sounds, and we'd go from there,”
Smith said of the process. “You were just stretching to see how far you
could go, and we were just deep into the music.” Smith cites The Mysticism of Sound and Music by Sufi master Hazrat Inayat Khan – a book found in the basement of the East Village’s infamous occult bookstore Weiser Books
– as being a key influence on the group (Smith said you could often
find the likes of Sun Ra and Coltrane browsing the shelves). The den of
musicians studied all kinds of religions, realizing that no matter the
denomination, they preached the same message of peace. Sufi mysticism,
Zen Buddhism, Pentecostal gospel, the teachings of Islam: Sanders’ music
drew from all of it.
Pharoah Sanders - Astral Traveling
Smith’s
reading led to another epochal spiritual jazz moment the next year, as
the group (now boasting five drummers and percussionists) decamped to
record 1971’s Thembi at the Record Plant in Los Angeles. It’s
an album full of atypical instrumentation: fife, koto, balaphone,
kalimba, maracas, cow horn, bird whistles and African percussion.
“Everybody else got to set up their instruments, unpack and all that,”
Smith says. “I'm in the corner and I went over to the Fender Rhodes –
which I had never seen before – and started touching it. And this song
just came out. Everybody ran over and said, ‘We got to record that, what
is that?’ At that time I was starting to read about astral projection,
so I said, ‘Let’s call it ‘Astral Traveling’ as it seems like we are
floating all through the universe.’”
We would start playing and something happened to the entire room.--Norman Connors
Throughout
his Impulse years, Sanders’ takes in the recording booth could stretch
well beyond the standard side of an LP. “Pharoah would play forever,” Ed
Michel says. “We worked out a technique where about 17 or 18 minutes
in, I would dim the lights up and down in the studio to let him know
that he was getting to the point where he should start winding down. The
only problem was that at that point when Pharoah would get playing, he
would close his eyes.” Michel likened these Impulse albums to a stew,
where every element mixes together and bubbles, and while he doesn’t
consider himself a spiritual person, when it came to Pharoah’s sessions,
“I could feel the energy. The energy in the space was happening was
absolutely contagious.”
Pharoah Sanders - Black Unity
It’s an energy that transferred to the albums themselves. Cue up the ecstatic Summun Bukmun Umyun, the roiling and relentless Black Unity or the sumptuous Elevation
and the effect of Sanders’ spiritual music is both heady and physical.
These large ensembles move as one entity, the battery of drums and
myriad African percussion steadily driving the music forward. In this
context, Sanders’s horn performs an act of transubstantiation. Breathing
in all that’s happening around him, his horn acts as an afterburner,
sending everything higher into the stratosphere.
But
as the ‘70s wore on, trends began to change in African-American music,
with funk and disco increasingly replacing jazz on the hi-fi. And in the
jazz world, Pharoah’s fusion of world cultures into a universal sound
had been replaced by electric fusion, and Herbie Hancock’s landmark classic Head Hunters
held sway. While Pharoah’s fire-breathing still powered some moments on
these later albums, they are levied by an increasing use of space and
rhythm to carry them. As Sanders told JazzTimes: “I just wanted
people to feel like I had a warm side, too, not just playing one kind
of a thing. I like to play some inside things and some very colorful
types of music.”
After releasing eleven albums in seven years, capped by the two long, elegant explorations that comprise Love in Us All, Sanders left Impulse in 1973; he wouldn’t release an album for the next four years.
While there have been glimpses of that ecstatic
sound to be found on his subsequent discography, the sustained
brilliance of Sanders’ Impulse years has been matched by few ensembles
in jazz history. For strength, beauty and startling vision, Sanders’
music remains a spiritual high point in American music, touching all who
encountered it. “We would start playing and something happened to the
entire room,” Norman Connors said of his time with Pharoah. “I can't
really describe it. It's just such a beautiful thing. It was almost as
if everybody was going to heaven.”
Pharoah Sanders in 1966. Michael Cuscuna /CORBIS/ Getty Images
In A.B. Spellman’s essential 1966 book, Four Lives in the Bebop Business,
Ornette Coleman said the following: “The best statements Negroes have
made, of what their soul is, have been on tenor saxophone.” As
wise as Coleman was, it’s a debatable point: Charlie Parker and Ornette
himself both ignited revolutions on alto. But it makes sense, too.
Whether Lester Young, Dexter Gordon, or Albert Ayler (to name just a
few), black musicians gave their lives to that instrument, told their
stories through it, and crafted and refined — and defined — the tenor saxophone’s various sounds and textures.
“The tenor’s got that thing,” Coleman
went on to tell Spellman, “that honk, you can get people with.” No one
honks and hollers, howls and hums, quite like Pharoah Sanders. The
native of Little Rock, Arkansas, who got his start in New York with Sun
Ra and made his reputation playing with John Coltrane, went on to record
an essential series of eleven albums as a leader for the Impulse! label
between 1967 and 1974, three of which — Tauhid (’67), Jewels of Thought (’69), and Deaf Dumb Blind Summun Bukmun Umyun (’70) — have just been reissued on vinyl by Anthology Recordings. In 1966, Coltrane said that Sanders, whom he had hired the previous year for his landmark Ascension
session, and then for his regular quintet, was “always trying to reach
out to truth. He’s trying to allow his spiritual self to be his guide.” Coltrane’s later phase of spiritual
jazz would transition into the astral, or cosmic, jazz of his wife (and
bandmate) Alice after his sudden passing in July of 1967. While Sanders —
who was convinced to change his name from “Farrell” to “Pharoah” by
Sun Ra — was a key contributor on many of Alice Coltrane’s releases of
the same era, also on Impulse!, his own works from this period are
significant for their Afrocentric aesthetic, which make them
particularly timely now. “Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt,” for instance, is a gorgeous, searching, sixteen-minute Sanders-penned suite from Tauhid.
Sanders employed an unusual group for this session, which included Dave
Burrell on piano, Sonny Sharrock on guitar, and Henry Grimes on bass,
each especially splendid. Sanders, still active at 77, may be most
renowned as a tenor, but like many saxophonists he’s well-versed in the
entire woodwind family, and early in the piece, he has a striking solo
on the piccolo before he raises up a sandstorm with his horn twelve
minutes in. The song ends quietly with his own vocal effects — Pharoahas a triple threat. On Jewels of Thought,
he assembled a different but equally impressive group of musicians:
Lonnie Liston Smith on piano, Idris Muhammad and Roy Haynes on drums,
Cecil McBee and Richard Davis on bass, and the inimitable vocalist Leon
Thomas. In
“Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah,” the first of two expansive pieces,
Thomas contributes spoken word and his signature avant-yodeling. Sanders
reminds us how lyrical he can be, and what an exceptional tone he has,
early in the composition, before he takes off into hyper-expressionist
cries. Throughout these albums, and especially on Jewels of Thought‘s
“Sun in Aquarius,” the sidemen contribute with an assortment of
percussion instruments — chimes, rattles, bells, gongs, and kalimbas —
which creates a whirl of sound that is earthbound yet otherworldly.
The following year, for Deaf Dumb Blind Summun Bukmun Umyun, Sanders
added Sun Ra’s longtime drummer, Clifford Jarvis; trumpet star Woody
Shaw; and alto saxophonist Gary Bartz, eight weeks before he would be
onstage with Miles Davis in front of 600,000 at the Isle of Wight
Festival (where he wore a Pan-African flag button.) Like Jewels of Thought,
it has two extended pieces: “Summun Bukmun Umyun” (Arabic for deaf,
dumb, blind) and a ravishing Lonnie Liston Smith arrangement of “Let Us
Go Into the House of the Lord,” where McBee solos movingly with his bow.
If it’s not necessarily the space, or setting, for Shaw to dazzle, it
is for Bartz, whose sharp, slashing tone pushes back against Sanders’s
soprano nicely. Bartz, still in fine form today, was at a particularly
fertile moment in his career as well. Later in 1970, he would record the
rich, varied Harlem Bush Music — Uhuru (featuring vocalist Andy Bey), which was reissued recently by the Jazz Dispensary. The cover art for Deaf Dumb Blind is
telling: Six black men, standing in the main plaza of the relatively
new Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Opera House hovering behind. It was
the neighborhood formerly known as San Juan Hill, a famously African
American area. Smith holds a kalimba in his right hand. They wear bold
colored shirts, not dashikis exactly, but gone are the accoutrements of
polite dress that were required in certain institutions. Do they want
in? Or are they set to establish their own cultural pillars? Sanders has had interesting turns in
his career. He had a proto–smooth jazz hit with “Love Will Find a Way”
in 1977. When I saw him for the first time, at the old Fat Tuesday’s
during the Lincoln Center–led neoconservative movement of the mid-1990s,
he used an electric bass player, anathema at the time — and brought the
house down. The three works here are both of
their time (“Sun in Aquarius”) and ahead of their time, as Sanders has
helped shape the sound, vision, and sensibility of Kamasi Washington,
who has cited Sanders’s Karma
as an influence. And that slight pivot away from Western culture fifty
years ago has turned into, to borrow a term from Coltrane, a giant step.
The music on these Pharoah Sanders recordings doesn’t break down into
mere tunes, but instead is a journey, into new and old terrain.
Pharoah Sanders with bassist Nat Reeves and drummer Joe Farnsworth, Dizzy’s, NYC, 9-12It’s a spring afternoon in a comfortable section of South Central Los
Angeles. The richly textured tone of a tenor saxophone wafts across the
lawn of a two-story house, blending with the dull hum of I-10 not far
off. The moment suggests a number of things: a career that balances
music-making and homemaking, and one that’s active, generating a healthy
income. Both home and tone belong to Pharoah Sanders, the latter being
perhaps one of the most valuable and recognizable sounds to survive the
’60s avant-garde. I hear it, a bit disarming in its domestic setting, as
I cross the lawn to speak with the man whose fearsome reputation
endures as one who breathes fire and rasp. The irony is that at the age of 66, the white-bearded veteran’s music
has long since grown to a full range of moods and styles. It was way
back in the late ’60s, after his profile was raised high by a two-year
stint in John Coltrane’s final lineup, that Sanders began to expand his
sound. Subsequent recordings, on Impulse! Records in the ’70s, and a
succession of independent labels through the ’80s and ’90s, brought
forth an accessible, at times gentle, fusion of R&B, soul and world
influences.
These days, Sanders works an average of four months a year, with set
lists that are as likely to feature him blowing a familiar ballad as
burning through a high-energy modal workout. He prefers to front his own
quartet, though on occasion he will appear as a featured guest with
such diverse headliners as Carlos Santana and the Jazz at Lincoln Center
Orchestra, as well as with ensembles led by McCoy Tyner and Kenny
Garrett.
Though Sanders can point to a catalog of recordings that includes
almost 40 releases as a leader since Pharoah’s First (ESP-Disk) in 1964,
his recent studio activity has been limited to a few special projects:
playing on Garrett’s 2006 album Beyond the Wall, and back in ’03,
recording an album in Tokyo, The Creator Has a Master Plan (Venus).
(Japan continues to hold Sanders dear; he often tours there, and the
Japanese division of Universal Music reissued all 11 of his Impulse!
albums in mini-LP format this past summer.)
Whatever the context, Sanders retains the power to surprise and
delight (a New York Times review of a Blue Note gig found the normally
sedate writer using an exclamation point to express his awe). For
example, our conversation revealed that he enjoys listening to New Age
music, specifically the Norwegian duo Secret Garden, and that he has a
four-year-old daughter who teaches him her little dances. (Her name,
with little surprise, is Naima.)
Dance, as many of Sanders’ fans have witnessed, is a show-closing
element of his recent performances: a joyful bit of foot-stomping and
saxophone-swinging that elicits smiles, hand-clapping and an almost
Pentecostal feel. “I try to uplift the people in the audience and bring
them into the music,” he says. “Sometimes it’s hard, sometimes it’s
easy, sometimes people are waiting for you to get there so it’s easier
if that’s happening. It’s a very spiritual kind of thing.”
And what about those moves?
“Well, I haven’t got that exactly like I want it but I’m working on
my little dance. One time I told John Coltrane, ‘Hey, man, we gotta get
us a little dance.’ And he said ‘OK, I’m gonna work on it.'”
Hang on. Coltrane was thinking about choreography?
“He always had a little dance of his own. I remember one time I saw
him at Birdland and he went from one end of the stage and back, playing.
I’d seen him just go down to his knees or to the tip of his toes, but
I’d never seen him do that. He was going back and forth; he was just so
excited. I needed to find me a different dance, and I got it almost
together now.”
The discussion continued on a similar course for 90 minutes, Sanders
speaking of recent projects, future plans and older days, like when he
went by his given name of Ferrell.
JAZZTIMES: Can we go back to when you first started to think of
yourself as a musician, in Little Rock, Ark.? I’ve read that both of
your parents were music teachers.
No, no. I’ve read some interviews and a whole lot of things have been
said that I didn’t say. My mother was a housewife and she cooked at the
schools. And my father worked for the city department. My mother’s
father, my grandfather, he taught math and music at school. And he was
head of a church choir and all that stuff. But I was around music all my
life. I lived near a church that went on almost every night. Some
people called it a sanctified church; they wore white dresses, white
stockings, white pants, all that stuff. They’d be loud and go until
about one, two o’clock in the morning. It was the only church like that;
most churches were Baptist. I belonged to a Baptist church.
JAZZTIMES: You started playing music in high school, right?
Yeah, it was Sipio Jones High School. One year I went back home and
they had torn it down, which made me feel a little sad about it, but
nothing I could do. Jimmy Cannon was my band teacher-he’s the one that
got me started. I owe everything to him. He was a very serious-minded
person and a great trumpet player. Very outgoing, but when it came to
music you better be quiet because he might throw something at you. I
used to listen to him so much and I didn’t want to go to any other
class.
I found a way to cut a lot of my classes so I could come up to the
band room and listen to him. I would miss English class and it got to be
where the teacher asked me, “Mr. Sanders, are you going to come to
class this week? You know the test is gonna be Friday.” But she
understood. Everybody in the school knew where I was. Mr. Cannon started
putting some music in front of me to read so we got started reading
different overtures and whatever. He loved me ’cause I was very serious
about the music and I was serious about the high school band. I felt
like that was home for me.
JAZZTIMES: Do you remember the first tune you ever played all the way through?
It was a spiritual tune, a church kind of a hymn. A lot of times they
played this song at funerals. [Hums melody] I had to do a solo at the
church my mother and I belonged to. I just played the melody about three
or four times, then I said I better go and end it.
JAZZTIMES: What instrument did you start on?
I was playing the clarinet. I started listening to Benny Goodman and
all them guys. After the clarinet I went to the alto. And then later on I
played tenor. So I was borrowing a friend’s alto and I used the tenor
from the school. The reason I switched to tenor is I wanted to be a
player at the time; I wanted to learn how to play the blues and all
that. I kept hearing the blues on the saxophone. I didn’t hear no
clarinet in my hometown. And the only jobs around in the clubs were
blues jobs. My father had a collection of records and I would listen to
tunes like “After Hours,” “Blue Flame,” “Caldonia” with Louis Jordan. I
learned a lot from playing the blues down in the South, and there were a
lot of great blues singers in Arkansas, like Albert King and a lot of
others.
JAZZTIMES: Did you get any professional advice from Mr. Cannon?
I used to ask him a lot of things, and I guess what he really wanted
to do was play. He had his day thing at the school, to try and keep
money coming in, but he used to tell me, “The only thing about playing
this kind of music, you be traveling.” And he wasn’t a person that liked
to travel. He said you may not want to do that. He didn’t tell me not
to, he was just talking about himself. He was right. You do have to
travel, flying here and there. I haven’t stopped doing that.
JAZZTIMES: Speaking of that, where have you been most recently?
We started out in New Orleans at the Jazz & Heritage Festival
[Sanders’ quartet performed on April 28, 2007]. After that I went to New
York City to play with Kenny Garrett’s band for about a week, then back
to L.A for one day and the next day to Australia for just one hit at a
festival in Melbourne. And now back.
JAZZTIMES: I caught your Jazz Fest set. From where I was sitting, the
crowd really loved it, especially when Terence Blanchard sat in.
Yeah, it was a nice feeling there; I enjoyed it. It was my first time
playing with Terence, but I’ve always loved his playing. I heard him
playing live and later on his CDs. He plays beautifully-he plays
beautiful piano, too. I asked some people, since we were there in New
Orleans, “Do you think maybe he would come up and play on a tune?” So
all of a sudden he came and had his horn out.
JAZZTIMES: What about Kenny Garrett? It seems you’re almost always
playing with him when you come through New York lately. How did you guys
first come together?
Well, he liked my playing and we just got together. I really enjoy
his playing, every bit of it. His solos, his tunes and his whole
concept. Plus, his qualities as a person I really love. He speaks
different languages, like Japanese. He would always come in and sit in
with my band when I was in town and when he did, he changed the whole
thing around. He’s good at that-how to change and make a different
concept of the music. So I’m learning from him, too. I can be kind of
stagnant in what I’m doing, but he’ll wake me up. I know sometimes he
wears me out but he likes it; he likes everything to be right. He’s a
perfectionist in his own way. I like that because it reminds me so much
of the East Coast, New York City. Those guys, they don’t be playing
around. They just hit and go do it. A lot of the energy is coming from
New York City.
JAZZTIMES: How do you guys decide what to play when you’re co-headlining?
Usually he does. He’ll have some written music for me to look at; a
lot of it’s just from the record session that we did [Beyond the Wall,
Nonesuch, 2006]. I should know it by memory by now, but sometimes I just
need it just for a reference.
JAZZTIMES: You’ve been playing a lot of music associated with Coltrane lately. What was the ballad you played in New Orleans?
It could have been “Say It (Over [and Over] Again).” [Hums melody]
This idea of playing Coltrane, it’s coming from me. Sometimes when I
can’t think of things to play I say, ‘Let’s play “Naima”‘ or some other
tune of his. Usually I come to the bandstand with about three or four
tunes, but I’ve found when we have less time it’s best that we play
maybe just one or two so at least we can all play. Then you have to
really try to figure out how to end this fella, because they have
problems if you go over the time limit.
JAZZTIMES: Especially at festivals.
Yeah, so I just try to stay in contact with what’s happening. And I
have a great band. William Henderson plays piano, but he plays several
instruments-guitar, drum, bass, vibes, all-around musician. On bass I
have Nathanial Reeves; he was working with Kenneth [Garrett] in New York
so he went out to Melbourne with me. And I have Joseph Farnsworth on
drums, a great person and a great player.
JAZZTIMES: Did you play out in any of the clubs after your set in New Orleans that afternoon?
No, it was a pretty tight little tour I had. I had to go to New York
City the next day. Then that flight to Australia. I don’t know how many
hours it was but it was a very long flight.
JAZZTIMES: I heard when you were down there you found a new tenor saxophone that you liked.
Yeah, it had a nice feeling to it. I think it was a Temby. It plays
the way it looks: nice and very glossy, nickel-plated, high-grade. I
just have to adjust it to the way I play and then I’ll be straight with
it maybe. But you know, I play on a Selmer [Mark VI]-that’s my main
instrument, the only horn that I know how to play on that I really like.
I like to try out other instruments, play them around the house for a
while and then maybe bring one out for a gig.
JAZZTIMES: Do you ever play soprano anymore?
I always practice on my tenor more than anything else. I never pick
up my soprano unless I’m doing a recording, like one time on that tune
called “Astral Traveling.” But after that I put it back in the closet
because I just don’t like the sound that I’ve been getting, even right
to today.
JAZZTIMES: Your music-store story reminds me that you and Coltrane first met in San Francisco while shopping for mouthpieces.
In fact, [in Melbourne], I was in there looking for a mouthpiece like
I always do, and wound up buying something else. But John could pick up
any mouthpiece, and he’d get the same sound. His sound was in his own
embouchure, very unique stuff-that’s the way I heard it.
JAZZTIMES: So you’re still looking at different mouthpieces? I’ll look at some mouthpieces when I’m in other countries, and ask
around, “Is anything different?” But not so much now. I’m just trying to
find ways to repair my instrument, I should have my instrument checked
out more often than I’ve been doing. I usually wait till the last minute
when everything is falling apart. I hate for even a little slight funny
noise; it bothers me. I remember [the John Coltrane album] Live at the
Village Vanguard Again!, we played “Naima” on there. I felt so bad
because I was trying to play some harmony with John and my key got stuck
and it was a wrong note! [laughs] It’s on the line of the tune as
John’s taking the map to go out. It was an A-flat key that always gets
stuck on that tenor. I felt like John must have said, “Man, what’s this
guy doing?” He never said anything to me about it but I knew it was
wrong. I could have maybe overdubbed that little note, but I wasn’t the
boss. Every time I hear that tune-“Uh-oh! Here comes the wrong note!”
JAZZTIMES: Speaking of Coltrane, I think of you both as “saxophone
scientists,” trying to extend what the instrument can do. Would you
agree?
I just feel like I’m just trying to find different ways to express
myself and that’s what that’s all about. It’s all like a concept. I work
on different concepts all the time. I don’t wanna sound like this or
that, so I change up something. So it keeps me going. But one time he
asked me on the telephone, did I know how to play a low A on my horn,
and I told him, “I don’t think I do.” He said he heard [R&B alto
saxophonist] Earl Bostic do that, and I said, “Really?” That’s a [half]
step down [from the lowest playable pitch of the tenor]. [Ed. Note:
Coltrane performed and recorded with Bostic in the early 1950s.] And
this was without putting your knee into the bell as you blow [to produce
overtones] to make the A below the B-flat. There was no fingering to do
that then, so I started running wild, trying to figure out how could he
do that? I didn’t know how, unless he was fingering the B-flat in some
weird kind of way.
JAZZTIMES: So did Coltrane ever reveal the secret?
I don’t know that John knew how to do it! But he always changed his
sound around, at various points, when he made different albums, I would
notice that it would be a broader sound, or however at the moment. So he
was always into finding different ways to express himself.
JAZZTIMES: Speaking of different ways, I’ve noticed that you like to
sing into the bell of the saxophone horn. When did you start doing that?
When I was in high school. And I was told that it’s not a good sound.
Then I stopped doing it for a long time when I left Arkansas and moved
to California. Then I came to New York City and I started doing it
again. I felt like I was putting my whole soul or whatever into that. I
did it on one album called Tauhid [Impulse!, 1966]. Now, sometimes I’m
humming and sometimes I may be doing a certain tonguing, a flutter kind
of a sound. That’s about the best way I can really explain it. But I
would listen to Earl Bostic do things like that on his records, a
sophisticated kind of music that he be playing, and he’s humming all
through it. I thought it was a really great sound.
JAZZTIMES: I’m sure you’re familiar then with Dewey Redman’s style of
playing where it sounded like he was speaking while blowing.
Yeah, his thing was talking and playing at the same time. I loved
that too. I never heard him do it in Frisco when we were there at the
same time, only when he came to New York City. I don’t know how he did
that; my thing is not quite like that.
JAZZTIMES: If we can get back to Coltrane: What was he like to talk to? What sort of instructions would he give you? Musicians don’t usually talk too much; we just greeted each other.
[Drummer] Rashied [Ali], he talked to John a lot at the time, but I was
still trying to figure out what’s going on. If we were going to play a
tune, most he told me was “You take the second solo” or something like
that. He didn’t care what I played, he just wanted me to play.
JAZZTIMES: Never anything on paper?
Well, sometimes he would-a key, some tonality or rhythm. He would
write it out. It wasn’t something that he jumped into; he was prepared.
JAZZTIMES: Did you ever rehearse before recording?
No, his thing didn’t work that way. [His instructions] might be there
for you to look at and that was it. He’d come and say, “Well, that’s
it, fellas, that’s it.” He might have something like a sectional
rehearsal, like get together with Alice [Coltrane] on the piano and
whatever he told her I just listened and went from there.
JAZZTIMES: And then one take …
If it sounded good to him, that was his conviction; everything was so
strong. He wasn’t about playing a lot of takes and rehearsing and all
that.
JAZZTIMES: When Coltrane passed away in 1967, did you have a sense you were carrying on…
No, absolutely not. John did his own thing; I did my own thing. It
wasn’t a carry-over of something that he did. Whole different thing from
what I was doing.
JAZZTIMES: I see. What about some of the guys who came after
Coltrane? Did it feel like his sound was living in the sounds of other
players like Gato Barbieri, Steve Grossman, Michael Brecker and, of
course, Archie Shepp?
Well, although they may have learned the way to listen differently
from John, they sounded like themselves to me. I heard Gato when he was
working with Don Cherry. Don told me, “You should hear this guy, man.”
So he was another person who was playing like that, not with a straight
sound or tone. I liked what he was doing at the time.
JAZZTIMES: It’s interesting that both Barbieri and yourself have been known for playing with a sound rich with overtones.
I guess you would call it that. I never found that name until later
on, but I always took a liking to people who try to work on things-the
upper and middle and the lower part of the instrument.
JAZZTIMES: You both recorded for Impulse! Records around the same
time, working with larger groups. Did you connect with what Barbieri was
doing?
No, I didn’t. I was doing my thing. And in the ’70s I started playing other tunes, like ballads and stuff like that.
JAZZTIMES: Less avant-garde, like on your last couple of Impulse! albums?
Yeah, up to that time people never heard me play ballads. I just
wanted people to feel like I had a warm side, too, not just playing one
kind of a thing. I like to play some inside things and some very
colorful type of music. I’m still not all the way in. I’m still a little
out with a lot of things-I call it out because I can’t write it down. I
used to play those ballads a long time ago, but when I got to New York
City [in 1961] I was so excited about what was going on that I stopped
playing them. I got a job working with Sun Ra, so you know what I mean.
JAZZTIMES: You worked with Sun Ra? How did that come about?
I was working as a chef in the basement of a club in the Village
called the Playhouse, making fish and chips, ice cream, espressos, stuff
like that. And Sun Ra would be working there almost every night. He had
about seven or eight pieces. I didn’t know everybody but I knew
Marshall Allen, a great alto saxophonist, and John [Gilmore]-he played
[bass clarinet and tenor saxophone.] So one time somebody came down and
asked [if someone would] get on the door to collect admission. I got a
little cigar box and helped them out. At that time all the money they
were getting was off the door. It was about a dollar and a half per
person. I let Sun Ra know that I played tenor and if you need one
sometime just let me know. He let me sit in and play so that’s how that
started. I only played with him for a little while.
JAZZTIMES: I guess you had your tenor with you just in case. I had my horn with me everywhere I went. Every time you see me I had
my horn; I had no place to put it. I would go out there in Washington
Square Park and sit on a bench all day long, kept my eye on my horn.
That’s all I had.
JAZZTIMES: What about playing for tips?
No, I didn’t do that. Maybe I should have but I wasn’t even thinking
about nothing like that. When I got to New York, I was like a survivor,
on the street. It was wintertime, it was cold. I got that job but I
didn’t have nowhere to stay after I finished. So I kinda hid in the
restaurant on the floor. But in the daytime if I got six cents I could
buy a Snickers; for about 15 cents, a slice of pizza or something like
that. I don’t know what it is today. I got that job and I asked him
about me getting paid. He said, “Well, I can’t pay you right now.” Then
he told me you can’t be eating the food, but I ate anyways. I remember
he was a jazz pianist and I think that he owned the whole place. He
played pretty good but at the time I guess life wasn’t great for him,
the way he was acting.
JAZZTIMES: I can’t help being amazed at how far you have come since
then. Did you ever have a feeling that you’d one day be OK, with your
own house and family?
I wasn’t even thinking about nothing like that. I was only thinking
about music. I wanted to play. I wanted to play with the best musicians
in the world. But in New York City, it’s such a different lifestyle. I
was still surviving then. I was like a bird or whatever, finding
whatever I could get. I remember Eric Dolphy used to say, “Yeah, man.
You should go down there [to a record company] and get you a contract.”
He didn’t say anything about which one, Impulse! or ABC or whatever. He
was just trying to tell me that I should be heard. That was when I first
got to New York City.
Then I started playing at [the East Village nightclub] Slug’s, where
John later heard me. I remember first I was doing some things there on a
Saturday afternoon, then I got a job working there weekly. Then
[Village Vanguard owner] Max Gordon came down because we were drawing a
lot of people. He kind of liked what he saw and what he heard so he had
me come into his club. I felt kind of good about that because I had
never played in a major, major club. That was the first time.
JAZZTIMES: A few last questions: What have you not done that you’d
like to do? Who else would you like to play with that you haven’t?
I’ve played with Carlos Santana, as part of his show, and that was
fun, a little like a teaser. I would like to play with him on some
different things. And you got the Marsalis brothers there, Branford and
Wynton. I did this thing with Jazz at Lincoln Center [Feb. 14, 2002] and
that was great. I didn’t play long enough but I enjoyed it. My problem
is I’m still wide open. I just gotta learn how to solo in a shorter
time, get right on into it. I’d like to visit some of the musicians in
other countries, work with them and try to play with them. India, some
parts of Africa and places like Indonesia, China, Japan and into
Thailand.
JAZZTIMES: What religion do you practice?
I look at all religions and just put them all into one, you know.
That’s what I do. It’s like a personal kind of thing. I don’t go to a
church or mosque, I’m here every day doing my own thing. But I try and
pray all the time. The day’s like one big prayer to me, not at any one
time.
Tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders burst through the gates in John Coltrane's group. At 65, he's going strong.
by Daniel King
April 19, 2006
San Francisco Chronicle
Few musicians, if any, can match it. The volume is so
high, the tempo so fast and the tension so thick, Pharoah Sanders puts
down his saxophone, screams and then returns to it for his sprawling
improvisation. [Listen to the podcast of saxophone giant Pharoah Sanders' music] It's a moment his audience expects. The saxophone
innovator has come to symbolize the flammability and spirituality of
what's called the jazz avant-garde. But his glorified role in John
Coltrane's quintet of the 1960s is so mythologized, many people overlook
Sanders' vision beyond it. Now 65, Sanders, with disarming eyes and a chinstrap
beard, continues to make some wrenching, hulking and, at the same time,
serene music. His Bay Area reputation continues to grow, ever since he
moved to Oakland from Little Rock, Ark., in 1959. A Los Angeles
transplant for the past few years, he returns to San Francisco for a
solo concert at Grace Cathedral on Friday -- his second there in 18
years. The event, presented by SFJazz as part of its spring
series, has a natural fit in the hall. There's a seven-second
reverberation that should amplify his prayerful tone just fine, judging
by a tape someone made of his 1988 solo there.
"When you reach a spiritual level," he says from Los
Angeles, getting ready for the flight, "you become the instrument
yourself. "I just want them to feel me," he adds quietly. "I just show up and that's it. That's what the music sounds like." Not entirely: His sound can be hypnotic or thunderous, depending on the night. Spontaneity, at least, one can predict. Going solo is often undesirable for saxophonists, many of
whom feel abandoned or pressured without a rhythm section. Sanders
welcomes the challenge. "I think people get the wrong idea about soloing," he
says, "as if it means you have to play a lot of notes. It means you have
more freedom to put more feelings through your music." John Hicks was Sanders' chief pianist from the '60s
through the '90s. "He's got plenty of endurance and a strong sound, so I
think he'll handle it," says Hicks, laughing slightly over the phone
from New York. "I don't know many saxophone players who can do that." Born to a pair of musicians, Ferrell Sanders -- named
"Pharoah" by Sun Ra, the avant-garde's Space Brother No. 1 -- moved to
Oakland after high school, studying briefly in college
before hitting the nightclubs -- Bop City, the Jazz Workshop and the
Both/And, among them. In 1962 Sanders left for New York. Unable to find
work, he slept on the streets and sold his blood for cash. "I was just
trying to survive," he says. Eventually he joined Ra's Arkestra, then fell in with the
saxophone mavericks of the time: Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp
-- who'd go on to revolutionize jazz, drawing praise and derision from
critics. After moving back to the East Bay, Sanders joined
Coltrane's radical "free" group and stayed in it until Coltrane's death
in 1967. Here, however, is what gets lost in the conventional
retelling: Sanders did not adopt Coltrane's tone -- Coltrane adopted
Sanders'. Their styles are compatible, but who rubbed off on whom? It's
clear: By the late '50s, Coltrane was up to his shoulders in pentatonic
scales and minor modes, pioneering approaches to harmony. Sanders?
Somewhere else completely. Both tenors use overlapping rhythms and strong
dissonance, an approach Sanders continued to refine into the 1970s. One
of his favorite spots for it was the Keystone Korner in North Beach,
which before closing in 1983 had incense on the stage, mandalas on the
walls and lines out the door. A clear fit. "It was the psychedelic era and people were very open to
spiritual experiences," recalls the club's owner, Todd Barkan.
"Pharoah's performances were becoming seances." Barkan, now artistic administrator of Jazz at Lincoln
Center, tells of a "humorous" but "frightening" night at Keystone Korner
"when a drunken guy came in. Pharoah had a bowl he'd hit with a mallet,
and it made such an intense vibration, the guy didn't want to go on
that trip with Pharoah. The man must've weighed 400 pounds and he
started swinging a huge chain! Then he started toward the stage, and I
had to call our brothers in blue next door at the police station." "It was indicative," Barkan says, "of just how intense Pharoah's impact was." After a brief drop in popularity, Sanders climbed back in
1979 by signing to the Theresa label, where among other records (since
released on CD by Evidence) he made the Bay Area classic "Journey to the
One," which features the glowing "You've Got to Have Freedom." There's
an even stronger version of that tune on "Live," which opens with
Sanders' shock tenor in full flight. Here was a rhythm section -- drummer Idris Muhammad,
Hicks, bassist Walter Booker -- as powerful as any in jazz, and with
Sanders at the helm it scoured the Bay Area. Muhammad, 66, performed at
the Boom Boom Room a few weeks ago, and backstage he talked about his 25
years with Sanders: "We'd go back to the hotels after the shows to talk
about what'd happened. I realized the creator has a way of doing things
that you have no control over. We bonded as a team." But not everyone supported Sanders. In 1966, the New Yorker's Whitney Balliett savaged him,
likening his solos to "elephant shrieks, which went on and on and on."
Sanders' performance, he claimed, "appeared to have little in common
with music." In his review, Balliett quoted someone saying, "Exactly.
It's not music and it isn't meant to be. It's simply sound, and has to
be judged as such." Even Sanders' supporters gave backhanded compliments: In
1972, The Chronicle's Dennis Hunt called him "primitive" and
"nerve-wracking," then professed how much he enjoyed the music. His detractors have one complaint worth refuting: They
hear him as erratic, messy and overheated. They say he plays shrieking
overtones as an alibi for his shortage of lyrical passages. He smears
the solo as a metaphor for freedom, they say, which by itself cannot
stand the test of time. Here's what they miss: We go to Sanders not for Lester
Young or Ben Webster or Coltrane, but for the colors and texture, the
gravelly climax, the slippery whoosh and the prayerful ballad with
touches, faintly, of Shepp and Jimmy Rushing and Bessie Smith echoed in
the vibrato. Nowhere else in today's music -- except in the albums of
David S. Ware -- do we find that gargling, disciplined sound. Sanders'
tone reflects the turbulence of the 1960s, and of today. That's why he speaks to us, why the State Department
brought him to Africa in the 1990s, why the Lines Ballet has frequently
commissioned him. It's why Yoshi's sells out the instant his gigs are
announced. In 1966, Sanders told journalist Nat Hentoff after a
recording session, "Everything you do has to mean something, has to be
more than just notes." Sanders, like Coltrane, lives that. Reflecting on
Sanders' influence, saxophonist Ornette Coleman, who rose to fame
shortly before him, says by phone: "If there's anyone who has that
quality of freedom, it's Pharoah. He's probably the best tenor player in
the world." To hear a podcast of Pharoah Sanders' music, go to
www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=5&entry_id=4457
.
Pharoah Sanders will perform at 8 p.m. Friday at Grace
Cathedral, 1100 California St., San Francisco. $25-$44. (800) 225-2277.
sfjazz.org.
Last March, in a conference room at the former Peabody Hotel,
Little Rock Mayor Mark Stodola stood up to address a small gathering of
mostly out-of-town academics. He cleared his throat, thanked everyone
for coming. To the mayor's immediate left was seated Pharoah Sanders,
the pioneering avant-garde saxophonist who Ornette Coleman, no amateur,
once called "probably the best tenor player in the world."
"I want you all to know," said the mayor, looking out at the sparse
crowd, "I come from a musical family." Sanders, 73, wore a long, loose-fitting white shirt that fell far
below his waist. He kept his eyes closed while the mayor spoke, facing
down into his lap as if meditating or in great pain. "I was very pleased
to hear about all the talent that Pharoah has exhibited over the
years," the mayor continued, not hiding the fact that he knew very
little about the man sitting next to him. Sanders hung his head even
lower, which hadn't previously seemed possible. The speech went on for a
few more minutes and ended with the mayor proclaiming that day, March
8, "Pharoah Sanders Day here in the city of Little Rock." Light applause, and then Sanders finally opened his eyes, stood and
shuffled over to the podium. His beard was jagged, white, Zeus-like. He
threw up his hands, the international sign of speechlessness. "God bless
everybody, all of you," he said very slowly, his voice almost
inscrutably deep. There was silence for a while, but for the awkward hum
of an AC unit. "I don't know what else I can really say," he said. "I
will remember this day my whole life." Maybe you were there that day at the Peabody, but I doubt it. Not
many were. I wasn't. The moment is preserved on an old VHS tape
somewhere deep in the catacombs of the Butler Center for Arkansas
Studies. I visited the Center not long ago and met with John Miller,
coordinator of the concert series Arkansas Sounds. Miller was there, he
introduced Sanders and he remains visibly shaken by the encounter. "He's
got this weird, heavy presence," he told me, sitting in his office
surrounded by stacks of local cultural debris. "It was like I could walk
into a room, and I'd just know, 'He's here.' Then I'd look around and
there he'd be. You could feel that heaviness." Why weren't we there? Consider that there is arguably no musician
more influential or interesting, no one more central to the story of the
development of music-as-art, to grow up and develop creatively in
Little Rock than Pharoah Sanders. This is the man who, at 25, was
handpicked by John Coltrane to join his band, and who Coltrane would go
on to say, "helps me stay alive sometimes." The man who the poet and
playwright Amiri Baraka wrote "has produced some of the most significant
and moving, beautiful music identified by the name Jazz." If there is a
Pharoah Sanders Day, then, why does nobody celebrate it? I've been asking that question of a lot of people lately, and the
best answer I've gotten so far was from John E. Bush IV, great-grandson
of the John E. Bush who founded the Mosaic Templars in 1883. Bush is
younger than Sanders, but he's met him a few times, even played with him
some out in Oakland, Calif., decades ago. (When they were first
introduced, in the '60s, Sanders asked him if he had a saxophone
mouthpiece he could buy, then lost interest and walked off.) "Little Rock has never accepted him," Bush said, sounding defeated,
flustered. "With Pharoah, it's like the story of Jesus. When he went
home, they said to Jesus, 'Ain't you Joseph's son? The carpenter? We
know you.' And Jesus knew then that he couldn't work no miracles there.
He was just Joseph and Mary's boy. That's the feeling Pharoah has about
Little Rock. People here don't know Pharoah Sanders. They've just heard
the name." Back before they called him Pharoah, after he'd fled Arkansas and was
living broke and routinely homeless in Oakland and New York, he had
another name. Back then they called him "Little Rock." *** Whenever Sanders talks about his upbringing in interviews,
which isn't often, he never fails to mention Jimmie Cannon. A Korean War
vet from Oklahoma, Cannon was the band director at Scipio A. Jones, the
black high school in segregated North Little Rock, where Sanders lived
with his mother and father in the 1940s and '50s. Cannon played tenor
sax and spent his nights out on an endless string of gigs across the
river in downtown Little Rock, a lifestyle that seems to have appealed
to Sanders right away. "Say what you got to say, then shut up," was one
of his maxims, and that seems to have appealed to Sanders, too. Sanders' lifelong introversion, his deeply felt inner solitude, is
fundamental. Going by the accounts of those who have known him, it is
one of his most notable qualities: He hardly speaks. On the other hand,
all he ever did was make noise. His parents, by all accounts musical
themselves, didn't approve of music as a career route, and so as a boy,
living in a small house on Hazel Street across the street from a
drive-in movie theater, Sanders would stand outside on the porch and
practice his scales for hours. Out in public, he was rarely seen without
a neck strap. In those days he went by his given name, Farrell, a name that's oddly appropriate considering the atavistic, primal, feral
imagery that early critics would resort to years later in describing
his sound. Whitney Balliet of the New Yorker referred to his "elephant
shrieks" in 1966, while the jazz historian Eric Nisenson, confronting
one his solos, wrote, "One is reminded of a child having a tantrum, who
begins by whining and complaining and builds to out-of-control howls and
shrieks." Picture young Farrell out on his porch at night with his sax,
a child having a tantrum. Cannon went on to play with Count Basie's Orchestra, as did his
friend, the Little Rock-born trombonist Richard Boone, who would often
sit in on Sanders' band classes. In this way, he learned how
professional musicians — adults — spoke and joked with one other, how
they carried themselves. By the time he was 15, he was sneaking into
clubs across the river. In a mid-'90s interview with Down Beat magazine,
he remembered dressing up in a suit, wearing dark shades and a fake,
drawn-on mustache, slipping past the bouncers into the darkness of a
nightclub. Little Rock nightlife in the postwar years meant West Ninth Street, a
dense, vibrant ecosystem that some called "Little Harlem" and others
called simply "The Line." It meant two-for-one dances at Club Morocco,
where the house band was Ulysses S. Brown and The Castlerockers. Glance
through the listings in any given issue of the Arkansas State Press, the
black newspaper of record, and every week is a blur: Ella Fitzgerald
and B.B. King, Howlin' Wolf and Redd Foxx. At Robinson Auditorium there
would be Little Richard or Fats Domino or Bo Diddley. Lil' Green and the
Jumping Jive Maestro. There was "Kan Man," who threw saddlebags bulging with concert flyers
over his bicycle handlebars and rode around both sides of the river
pasting them to trees or streetlamps. At night he played a Prince Albert
can as if it were a harmonica. There was Lloyd Armon, host of "Lloyd's
Midnight Ride" on KGHI (and later KOKY) and proprietor of Lloyd's Cafe,
Lloyd's Drive-In and the Hotel Del Rio, featuring the ever-exclusive
Ebony Room. There were racketeers, pool halls, secret societies and
drive-by shootings. Club 67, The Casablanca, The Twin City Club, The
Magnolia Room. At the center of it all, there was Taborian Hall, the heart of Ninth
Street with its classical architecture and ever-shifting clubs on all
three floors. Sanders picked up early gigs at the second-floor Waiters
Club, opened in 1955 and managed by a man named Boo-Boo Douglas. There
was an old wooden piano in the corner, and every night a dice game that
seemed to never end. He also played the Flamingo Club across the street;
it had a more modern vibe and a younger crowd. He backed Junior Parker
there, and Bobby "Blue" Bland. On a good night, he could make five
dollars. Around this time he met York Wilborn, who was a couple of years older
and who had a car. They bonded immediately over music and quiet. "If he
wasn't saying nothing, I wasn't saying nothing," Wilborn told me. "We'd
just play and practice, try to figure stuff out." Wilborn, who lived
with his mother on Louisiana Street, would regularly make the drive
across the river to pick up Sanders so the two of them could listen to
records and try their best to play along. Their favorite was John
Coltrane's "Blue Train." He played too fast for them, so they'd always
have to slow it down, but that was no good either, because it changed
the key. Wilborn led a locally adored rhythm and blues band in those years
called The Thrillers, and Sanders frequently sat in on sax. Henry Shead,
who would go on to a celebrated career as a Las Vegas lounge act,
played piano. The name Thrillers came from an audience call-in contest
on a public access "American Bandstand"-type TV show called "Center
Stage." They played Ninth Street and anywhere else that would have them.
They once backed Minnijean Brown Trickey, not yet famous as one of the
Little Rock Nine, at the Dunbar Community Center. She sang "Love Is
Strange." The band recorded one single, billed for whatever reason as O'Henry, for the Memphis label Fernwood: "Wanna Jean" backed by "Why Do I Love You."
Wilborn's name is misspelled on the record, and he never received any
royalties. Sanders wasn't there at the session, but these are the songs
that he played. Harmless, boogie-era dance numbers with a rolling
sax-and-piano backbeat. Listening to them now, it's hard to imagine
Sanders committing to this stuff. He has been abrasive and cosmic and
spiritual and esoteric, but he has rarely been danceable. Sanders went on tour with the Thrillers in 1958, the summer before
his senior year. A former bus driver named Andy had offered to manage
the group and they'd agreed, on account of some connections he had to a
resort in Idlewild, Mich. The plan was to play a series of gigs before
heading to the resort, where they'd audition for the resort's owner and
spend the summer there playing for rich people and getting rich
themselves in the process. They made it as far as Norfolk, Va., before
realizing they were broke. (They'd purchased their matching suits on
credit.) Andy pawned a typewriter, and the crew advanced to
Philadelphia. That's where things really went downhill. It turned out Andy had been
mishandling their finances, essentially robbing them, and nobody could
pay for their hotel, which promptly kicked them out onto the street.
Wilborn fired Andy, then Shead contracted jaundice and was hospitalized.
They spent the rest of the summer playing at a bar in Philadelphia,
trying to earn enough to make it back to Little Rock. The Idlewild
resort gig ended up going to a young vocal group from Detroit called The
Four Tops.
Courtesy of Sylvia "Sy" Smith
Any relief at returning home must have been tempered by the fact that
they were walking into what the historian Grif Stockley has described
as "the ugliest period in Little Rock's history," aside from the Civil
War. The integration crisis of the previous year had resulted in an
atmosphere in which, as Daisy Bates wrote in her autobiography,
"hysteria in all its madness enveloped the city."
In an old interview with a public access TV show in Brooklyn, Sanders
was asked if racism was ever a problem growing up in Arkansas. "When I
had to go to the grocery store," he said, "I had to fight going and
coming." You can see him considering it, turning it over in his mind.
"Yes," he said finally, "there was a lot of racism, a whole lot back
there at that time." Everyone knows what happened to the students who tried entering
Central High in 1957, but there's less attention given to the similar
showdown that occurred at North Little Rock High. It's there on the
front page of the Arkansas Gazette: Sept. 10, 1957. Six students from
Scipio A. Jones, Sanders' classmates, walked up the steps to the public
high school and were swarmed and blocked by hundreds of their repulsed,
snarling white neighbors. The photo caption reads, "This Time It's
Across The River." "The Negroes were shoved and pushed but not struck,"
wrote the Gazette's Roy Reed. "They did not resist." By 1959, Club Morocco had gone bankrupt. For that matter, so had the
Arkansas State Press. That was the year Sanders left for California. As
to why exactly he left, there is no definitive answer. Maybe it was
because his own city made very clear the notion that it did not want
him, his family or his peers. The local trumpeter Walter Henderson, who
played with Sanders as a 17-year-old and later met him a few times in
Chicago, thinks it might have been something else, too. "There is a
certain kind of complacency here that stops people from following their
dreams," Henderson told me. "And maybe the only way you can follow them
is to get the hell out."
*** York Wilborn and The Thrillers became York Wilborn and The
Invaders became York Wilborn and The Psychedelic Six became Classic
Funk. York Wilborn became a band director in Marianna. After Sanders
moved away, Wilborn saw him a few more times. Once, in the '60s, he
brought one of his albums home so that his mother could hear it, and
Wilborn dropped by to see his old friend. By then, he was already
playing with Coltrane, the musician they had imitated as kids, and
Wilborn asked him how he played all those "long lines and crazy stuff."
Sanders told him, "Music is just like a circle," which he didn't
understand. He said, "Well, OK." Charles Stewart, founder of the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame, which
inducted Sanders into its ranks in 2004, remembers spending time with
Sanders before and after the ceremony. He said he took his saxophone
with him everywhere, even kept it in his lap in the car. He told
Stewart, "I don't want it to fall over." Watching him perform at the
Statehouse Convention Center, Stewart said, "He did something I've never
seen anyone do before. He blew so much air — and I don't even know how
you do that — but he was able to take his mouth away from the reed and
still play it for several minutes." One of the most unusual and physically difficult techniques
associated with Sanders over the course of his career is called circular
breathing, in which, by inhaling through his nose and keeping stores of
air in his cheeks while still blowing on his instrument, he can create
the impression of a continuous, unbroken breath. There's a 1982 video
you can find online of him playing his song "Kazuko"
in an abandoned tunnel, accompanied only by a hand-pumped harmonium.
Near the middle of the 10-minute song, the camera zooms in on his face
as he begins playing a series of quick and sharp arpeggios. His cheeks
inflate and deflate rapidly, and because of the acoustics of the tunnel,
it sounds for a while as though he's doing something actually
impossible. It sounds like a choir of saxophones, but it's just him.
It's one of the strangest things I've ever seen. Amiri Baraka, always Sanders' most acute listener and maybe the most
important real-time chronicler of the free jazz movement ("New Black
Music is this: Find the self, then kill it," he once wrote), claimed
that Sanders in particular standardized the technique, claimed even that
he "has advanced the science of breathing." Baraka described Sanders'
implausible strings of notes beautifully, as "long tissues of sounded
emotion." In his book "Black Music," Baraka includes Sanders in his
pantheon of musicians who are also "God-seekers." In his history of the saxophone, "The Devil's Horn," the writer
Michael Segell goes to see Sanders play and speaks to him briefly after
the show. They talk about what he learned from Coltrane. "He often said
the saxophone is not completed," Sanders says. "He heard something else
in it; he thought there was more there but it hadn't been heard yet. So
that's my mission, that's what I've been looking for the past forty
years. I think he would be pleased with all the new sounds I've
discovered." Then, after hesitating for a while, he seems to reconsider.
"Except, of course, they're not new sounds," he says. "They're very old
sounds."
What he means, I think, is that music is just like a circle.
Pharaoh Sanders turned 75 yesterday, and for the occasion I’m
posting a slightly edited interview that I conducted with him and Kenny
Garrett (they were then beginning the collaboration that produced the
fine recordings Beyond The Wall and Sketches of MD: (Live at the Iridium) for a DownBeat cover story. __________
Kenny Garrett-Pharaoh Sanders (12-2-04):
TP: How did the collaboration begin? Who made the first overtures? How
long have you known Kenny and how long has Kenny known you? PHARAOH: I haven’t known Kenny personally really that long. I always
liked the sound of his music, his concept. Kenny loves to play all the
time, and one night when I was working at Iridium he brought his horn
and asked me could he sit in. I said, ‘Kenny Garrett? Yeah.’ From that
point on, whenever I’d come in town, he’d come by to sit in if he had
some time. Sometimes he wouldn’t bring his horn, and I’d tell him, “Man,
bring your horn next time.” The agent saw what was happening, and
started putting things together. TP: Why did you think it would work? PHARAOH: Not so much his style of playing, but his concept of the
music. Also, he’s very comfortable around me, and that made me feel
comfortable around him. When he sat in, I saw what he’d do the band, and
I really liked it. He opened up a lot of things in my head. So the idea
of us working together was right on time. I’ll put it that way. TP: What sorts of things did Kenny bring out of you, or is bringing out of you now? PHARAOH: We talked about systems of multiphonics, how to get more
than one note at one time. He’s into different fingerings and harmonics,
and does that very well, and he knew that I was doing similar stuff,
things that must horn players would never get into. He brought me a book
that I’m still trying to get into. I’ve done my own concept, my own way
that fits me, and we each have things we like to do. So we’d listen to
each other and try to figure out what it was. TP: I guess you figured those things out for yourself in the ‘60s. PHARAOH: Yeah, from playing. I got into it back in Oakland,
California, from a music instructor named Professor Penn. I heard how
Ornette Coleman could do two notes at one time, and I asked him about
it. He educated me a little bit—not that much—about overtones and the
harmonics. From that point on, I just went for myself, what I heard. TP: Parenthetically, overtones and multiphonics became part of
musical parlance during the days of jump bands and rhythm-and-blues
bands and blues bands, in which saxophonists were what used to be called
colloquially “honkers and squealers.” Was that part of your early
experience in Little Rock or when you went to California? PHARAOH: Part of my experience when I moved from from Little Rock to
Oakland. At the time, although I liked what I heard, I don’t think I was
ready to perfect overtones and multiphonics, because I was still into
trying to study the other elements. I hadn’t learned chord progressions,
or how to create arpeggios, or all my scales. Then I learned a bit how
to play on the piano. Before I came to New York, I was playing in clubs
around in Oakland and Frisco, playing a lot of ballads and Charlie
Parker music. TP: One commonality I see between you and Kenny is that you’re both
interested in extending the technique of your instruments as far as you
can, but it always seems to be towards purposes of melody and
communication, so that it isn’t done for its own sake, but towards a
purpose. PHARAOH: I don’t even think of the tenor when I’m playing. I’m not so
much into saxophone technique as another person might think. I look at
all of it—drums, harps. I don’t know what my concept might be at the
time. It really depends on what tune we’re playing, and that’s what I
try to convey through my horn, whatever instrument I hear, or whatever
sound I hear. TP: I’ve seen raucous houses go silent on one decrescendoing note as
you wind down a set. Sound seems so important to your tonal personality. PHARAOH: Well, it is. It just seems like there’s no end to my trying
to perfect what I’m trying to do. That’s the way I look at it. And Kenny
reminds me of myself a lot. He don’t seem to be satisfied just on what
he does. It sounds so great to me, but it always seems like he can make
it better. TP: Another common thread is that neither of you is afraid to be
populist. After you played with Coltrane, you attracted a wide audience
with Creator Has A Master Plan with Leon Thomas, and in the late ‘70s
and early ‘80s you did things like Journey To The One and Rejoice, with
choruses and African percussion. And Kenny incorporates the music of his
youth, Funk and R&B. PHARAOH: Kenny does what he does very well. I don’t even call it
funky. It’s just Kenny to me. There’s so many different ways to express
yourself. And if a person wants to call it funk… I’m not into
categories. TP: My point is more that both of you are so focused on technique and
extracting everything you can from of your instrument, and yet the
ultimate purpose is to communicate, you never lose sight of melody, and
you appeal to a wide audience. PHARAOH: I always try to figure out, every night, when there’s people
in a place, how to play what they want to hear, but NOT play what they
want to hear! [LAUGHS] I got tired of trying to program a first tune,
second tune and so on. I just start playing, and whatever happens at
that moment is what’s existing at the time. But I always feel like I’m
the audience and the player. If I don’t like what I’m doing, then I
don’t need nothing else. TP: Do you see the saxophone as an extension of your voice? PHARAOH: That’s what I work on. I’m still trying to learn how to play
a straight sound, play the pitch straight. When I’m playing, I worry
whether every note is close to being in tune, about the way I attack the
notes, the concept of how I feel—I mean, the whole spirit of the thing.
If I’ve got a bad reed, I can’t be what I want to be. Some reeds give
you a resistance where you can play, but when you find a reed that’s
going to curl up, just dead, and then your sound will be like that. I
don’t like to play until I find a good one.
TP: Was that also an issue for you back in the ’60s when you were playing with John Coltrane? PHARAOH: Yes, that was a problem then. I didn’t know John had that
problem, too. I used to wonder if it was just me. But I saw John throw
reeds right on the floor if it wasn’t happening. I used to wonder
sometimes: Why did I have to play saxophone? I could have played
trumpet, and not have to worry about a reed every night. TP: What got you started on saxophone? School band? PHARAOH: I played bass clarinet in the school band. They didn’t want
no saxophone. And when I played clarinet, I always wanted more of a
soft, mellow flute sound rather than a squeaky sound. I used to tune the
whole band up when we played festivals and concerts. When I heard a
James Moody tune called “Hard To Get,” I started tipping off on the alto
saxophone, but I was still thinking clarinet. TP: Was that on your own, or in bands? PHARAOH: That was on my own. Well, I was playing on blues jobs in
Arkansas. I started playing tenor because there were lots of alto
players in my town, and I felt like tenor was more my instrument. TP: Were there any stylists you were focusing on then? PHARAOH: I liked Charlie Parker, but no one had his music. So all I
could listen to at that time was James Moody, who I always loved, and
also Count Basie, “April In Paris” and tunes like that. That was about
it until I left. TP: Then you went to Oakland, and there was that very active Bay Area
scene. I remember reading that you’d head out at 9 at night and come
back at noon the next day, and hit all the different spots. PHARAOH: I was staying with my aunt. I think they thought I was a bit
crazy, kind of out, because I didn’t want to work on a day job. “He
doesn’t want to work.” I wanted to work, but it seemed like the music
was first with me. Every time I’d go to the employment office and try to
find work, I would sit there for a minute, and leave. I just wasn’t
into it. [KENNY GARRETT, WHO HAD BEEN DELAYED BY TRAFFIC, ARRIVES] KENNY: I’d like to say first that it’s an honor and blessing to be
able to stand on the same bandstand with Pharaoh. I mean, Pharaoh sat on
the same bandstand with John Coltrane. I try to stand as close to my
understanding of the truth as possible, and Pharaoh is that to me. I
just wanted to put that on the record, since Pharaoh is sitting here,
and I never told him that. I think he knows anyway. Every time Pharaoh played in New York, I tried to come down. A lot of
younger musicians sleep on people like Pharaoh and George Coleman, who
set the pathway. I’ve always tried to hear the guys I admire, no matter
where I am in my career, because I feel it’s very important to stay in
contact with that. Now, I’ve always incorporated hip-hop, funk and jazz
in my music, and that’s still there when I play with Pharaoh. But the
tenor has a fatter sound than the alto, and being on the bandstand with
Pharaoh makes me think of other sonic possibilities. Pharaoh also shows
me that I can do things differently—make that note a little bigger or
sing it a little more. He brings me closer to what it is I’m trying to
get to. PHARAOH: As I said before, it seems like Kenny’s the performer and
he’s the audience. That’s what comes out in his music, and people react
to it. I start dancing myself! I love connecting with the audience,
because you can do what you want. If they’re open. It depends on what
night. TP: This is a difficult business. And Kenny, you’re a road warrior. You’re out a lot. KENNY: Yeah, I try to stay out. My generation doesn’t get the
opportunity to play at the Five Spot for six months or a year, so I
think it’s important for me to play as much as possible. When I think
about Monk or Trane or Miles, guys who played all the time, they were
better able to cultivate their talent or concepts. TP: How are you approaching this quintet’s presentation? KENNY: We’re just playing, still trying to figure out how to set it
up. We both have an idea of what we want to play, and then collectively
we try to find tunes we’re comfortable with. Sometimes, on my own set,
after we’ve played all the high-energy music, I like to play a ballad or
something that takes your mind off that a little bit. There are some
people who are hearing jazz for the first time, and a little groove
never hurt. I try to picture myself as a listener. I like to hear cats
play all night, but I also want to have something that I can nod my head
to. I’m interested in a variety of things, and I try to challenge
myself. So I play with people like Q-Tip, Guru, and Jazzmatazz, or play
Adagio for Strings with the New Jersey Symphony, or play Charlie
Parker’s music with Roy Haynes. Then you learn things about yourself and
about that music, and you can present that in the next situation. TP: Pharaoh said that you talk a lot about multiphonics, and that you
presented him with a book on the subject, while his approach is
homegrown. Did Pharaoh influence you in this area? KENNY: Definitely. Actually, it’s something that Pharaoh plays that
goes BAHT-BAH-DAH—BAHHHH! I was trying to figure out how he did it, and I
went home and figured out a system for myself. So I got into it the
same way Pharaoh did—searching. Then an Italian saxophone player showed
me a book on it, and I dropped the book on him.
TP: All sorts of interesting dynamics occur in any improvising
situation. Pharaoh started off as an alto and clarinet player before
coming to tenor. Last night, you were so far down on the horn that if my
eyes were closed, I might have thought you were playing tenor
saxophone. KENNY: Someone else said that last night. I do play a little farther
down in the horn because I like the sound, but maybe it’s more obvious
alongside the tenor that I’m playing that style. Plus, I’ve been playing
my C-melody, which is a combination of a tenor and an alto, so that’s a
little confusing, too. TP: When Kenny walked in, Pharaoh was discussing his influences, and
he mentioned that he got to Charlie Parker through James Moody’s Octet,
which toured the South a lot when he was a teenager. PHARAOH: I started playing the alto at that time. I wasn’t hearing as
much as I should have, because in Little Rock there wasn’t much to hear
except blues on the radio. Also, I wasn’t able to practice at home that
much, so I had to go somewhere else. Whatever I learned came from my
teacher, Jimmy Cannon, who was a trumpet player. He brought records to
the school, and as he played them I’d ask who it was. That’s how I
started listening to Miles and Lucky Thompson, who was a great tenor
saxophonist, and Trane, Rollins, and Harold Land. He liked Clifford
Brown and talked about him a lot, so later on I bought Clifford Brown’s
record with strings, and tried to figure it out. One thing led to
another. KENNY: My earliest influences were Hank Crawford and Grover
Washington, and Cannonball Adderley’s commercial recordings, like
“Mercy, Mercy, Me.” As I checked out Cannonball more, I found that he
actually played straight-ahead. I couldn’t believe it was the same guy.
I’m from Detroit, and everybody was checking out Charlie Parker, but all
the tenor players were playing like Dexter and all the alto players
were playing like Jackie McLean. to play more like Bird, trying to
understand… [END OF SIDE A] …and he used to play along in the lower part of the register—he used
to love that. So I heard that, and as I got older, I used to go back and
listen to that record to see he what was so impressive about that. I
actually got a chance to play with Joe Henderson before he passed away
on Black Hope and on a Mulgrew Miller record called Hand In Hand.
I also listened to a lot of trumpet players because I loved the
strength of the sound. I had an opportunity to play with Cootie Williams
in Mercer Ellington’s band, and Marcus Belgrave was my teacher and
mentor. I also played with Freddie Hubbard, Donald Byrd, Woody Shaw,
Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Wynton Marsalis, and Tom Harrell. Freddie
particularly inspired me a lot; I always wanted to try to match his feel
and his energy. I felt the same thing when I first heard Coltrane. In fact, there’s a
story that I should tell. When I was in high school, I used to play
John Coltrane’s soprano, although I never KNEW it was his soprano!
Because I went to school with his nephew, who used say, “My uncle is
John Coltrane.” I never believed him.” Then one day Ravi called me and
said, “My cousin Daryl is here with me.” I didn’t say anything. I just
thought about that soprano. I wish I’d known. I would have tried to keep
that horn. Maybe those vibrations would have rubbed off! TP: Another thing you have in common is that you both started working
early. Kenny could have gone to college, like a lot of your
contemporaries, but you didn’t. When Pharaoh was coming up, college was
less common. To use a cliche, you learned on the university of the
streets. PHARAOH: I started playing drums first. Man, I should have kept on
playing drums. But I wanted me a horn, so I bought a clarinet from a guy
that went to church. He wanted $17 for it. So I gave him 20 cents every
other Sunday until I could buy this clarinet. I thought that was the
world, for me to get this clarinet. But it was a metal clarinet. But at
the time it was okay for me. The older musicians used to tell me, “You
got to get your sound. You got to get the right mouthpiece. The right
horn.” I was always trying to figure out how could I get a Selmer tenor.
In my time, a Selmer was about $500, and that was like saying a million
dollars to me. I never even had a hundred dollars in my life! I had
some friends at home who let me use a King alto and a Buescher tenor,
but I wasn’t comfortable because I had to take care of the
instrument—don’t mess it up. I still had my clarinet, though I didn’t
want to play it. My father looked at me and at that horn, and said,
“That’s not nothin’. Get you a job.” I had to go to a friend’s house to
get in an hour or two practice, or there’d be some conflict. practice
in. Still, I was always wanted my school to have a good band, and for
the guys to play right and read stuff right. TP: Kenny, you could have gone to college, but you joined Mercer
Ellington right out of high school. Was this altogether a good thing?
Were there pros and cons? KENNY: It was all pros to me. Basically, the harmony that I learned, I
discovered by myself. I use different nomenclature. If I sat down with a
professor, they might say, “Well, that’s what we call this,” and I’ll
say, “Well, this is what I call this.” I remember talking to Herbie
Hancock, and he said, “Well, everybody calls the different chords
different names.” To me, if I had gone to Berklee, I wouldn’t have had an opportunity
to play with Cootie Williams, who came out of retirement. Or to sit with
Harold Minerve, who was a lead alto player who was a protégé of Johnny
Hodges. I was able to catch the last part of the big band era, and play
in organ trios. So I look on all of it as a blessing, because it makes
me who I am now. TP: Did the older musicians talk to you the same way as Pharaoh experienced, that you have to have a sound of your own? KENNY: Actually, my father told me that. I remember one day we were
at the Dairy Queen on Mack and Michigan, and he said, “Who is this on
the radio?” I didn’t know. He said, “Well, everybody has a sound.” It
was Stanley Turrentine. After that, I think I subconsciously started
thinking about a sound. I didn’t realize I had a sound, though, until I
was about 18 when I heard a tape and recognized myself. Once I realized
that my sound was a bit different, then I started trying to cultivate
it. TP: Is the sound that you now project the sound that you had in your
mind’s ear when you were just starting out? Or did it develop on its
own? KENNY: I think for me it was a combination of both. I definitely was
conscious about the sound I wanted—and am still searching for! Every day
I think about that perfect sound, if there is a perfect sound. But as
I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that I might not find the PERFECT
sound, but I have something that’s uniquely mine. So I just accept that
as a gift from the Creator. Of course, I’m always searching. I have
different mouthpieces, and I’ll say, “okay, that has this element in it,
but not this other element I’m looking for.”When you get the right
combination, you know it, and you can play whatever you want to play.
All the ideas just flow out. PHARAOH: I know what Kenny’s saying. He reminds me so much of John
Coltrane. John would ask me after a night working, “How did that
mouthpiece sound?” “It sounds great, John. It sounds like it’s been
sounding.” One time I was working on a mouthpiece, and I knew John would
like it. He tried it out at Birdland, and afterwards he said, “Man,
I’ve got to have this.” I thought that maybe I should work on all of
them like that. Later on, he called and told me, “I’m not getting the
same sound all over my horn, so it doesn’t seem like it’s going to work
for me.” The bottom was cool, but the upper register was sort of thin.
I’d filed five of those mouthpieces. So stopped working on mouthpieces,
because I was messing up. There’s no end to looking for the best sound or tone you can get. I
don’t even know what I’m looking for! Once Big Nick Nicholas told me, “I
told Rollins and them cats to open up the keys so you can get some
sound.” So I started raising up my keys. But that put a defect on the
technique. My fingers would get stuck between the keys; they were just
too high. I decided to have the keys on one horn raised up high, but not
the others. The horn I’m playing on right now is raised up high.
Because I use a very small layer mouthpiece, that kind of helps me to
center the sound, so I can play louder. But if I used the same
mouthpiece on an instrument where the keys are normal height, I wouldn’t
get that much sound out of it. TP: Kenny, is there anything you’d personally like to ask Pharaoh for purposes of this conversation? KENNY: I’ve always wondered what it felt like to stand on the
bandstand with John Coltrane and hear that beautiful sound. What went
through your mind? Because when I’m standing next to Pharaoh, what’s
going through my mind is, “Oh, he has such a beautiful sound.” PHARAOH: I always felt that what I was doing wasn’t happening at all.
I’ve heard a lot of saxophone players play in person. And I played
clarinet, and always felt I had a pretty good sound. But playing with
John on the bandstand, it seemed he’d been through that and was just a
little bit ahead of us, in a way. I tried to figure out what is it he
does to the combination of the mouthpiece and the reed to get that gutty
kind of sound. But I heard him play on all kinds of mouthpieces, and it
still comes out. On the bandstand, it seemed like his sound wasn’t so
much like a saxophone sound. Whatever he did was coming from inside. It
was more like a personal voice or something on every note. It seemed
like the sound had more meat, more of everything that I’m looking for. I
didn’t want to SOUND like that, but I was trying to figure out how was
he able to go beyond. I know I’m fingering the same note. But I’m not
getting nearly what he gets out of it. That made me start to search for different ways to finger certain
notes. I play, say, middle-C so many different ways, with so many
different fingerings, and I still don’t know which ones to use. When I’m
playing on a ballad, I use a certain fingering to make it more like a
quality sound. Then it goes on and on. I’ve tried many mouthpieces, and
I’m still not happy about the sound. I have to keep working on it.
Sometimes Kenny comes to me and says, “Oh, that’s a good sound.” When he
leaves the room, I want to know what he’s hearing! To me, I’m trying to
be the listener, to figure out what the good sound is. Is it because
the sound is more resonant? It’s cutting through? I go up and down, up
and down. I’m still not satisfied. KENNY: Miles used to talk about when he was playing with Charlie
Parker, that he thought he wasn’t ready and so on. But usually the
leader hears something. I would like Pharaoh to tell me what he thinks
John Coltrane heard in him, what he was looking for. PHARAOH: I don’t know! [LAUGHS] It seemed like he’d challenge the
horn, trying to get all he could get out it. One time he asked me, “Can
you do a low A?” I think Earl Bostic could do that just with his lips.
And he used to talk about the lower B-flat on the horn. I guess he was
looking to go another step down, to get whatever he could out of the
instrument for his expression. But I haven’t yet got to the point yet of
trying to find out what he found in me. I used to do a lot of things on
my horn that I know he wasn’t doing, and he would ask me how was I
fingering this or that. I couldn’t even tell him. I’d have to do it just
right on the spot. A lot of my stuff comes from the inside. Especially
for the lower notes, I try to get a raw, like, riled sound by humming
into the horn, or harmonize it some kind of way, to just change the
textures. Not all the time. Just sometimes. Or maybe make another
harmonic so you say, “What’s he doing?” It wasn’t any kind of fingering. TP: It sounds like your character must have appealed to Coltrane,
just as Kenny’s appeals to you. Your perpetual dissatisfaction with the
status quo and always trying to advance and find something new—perhaps
that was part of it. PHARAOH: I know Kenny tries to find all kinds of way to develop his
sound. That reminds me of John. John was different than any other
musician I know. I’m trying to figure out what he was hearing, and it’s
hard to say. I do know he heard something. TP: Is this collaboration going to continue? PHARAOH: It will, but not now. KENNY: I hope it does continue. There are only a few people who I
want to sit down on the bandstand with, and Pharaoh is definitely one of
them. Also, it’s a learning thing for me, too. It’s not only about
being a leader. And as I learn, I hope that I’m also giving, that I’m
saying, “Okay, this is another approach.” When I hear him, I think, “Oh,
wow, that’s exactly what I was feeling.” I just can’t do that at this
point! It’s a lot of fun to play with him, because there’s mutual
respect. I know Pharaoh is going to play, and I’m going to play; we come
to play music and have a good time.
Three
invaluable reissues showcase a young bandleader and his top-tier
players as they create a powerfully cohesive group sound: elegant,
adventurous, warm, and ferocious all at once.
On
June 28, 1965, four months after the assassination of Malcolm X and
just a few weeks before the Voting Rights Act became law, John Coltrane assembled his largest-ever ensemble to record Ascension.
A beautiful and harrowing listen, the album’s sole piece extends across
40 minutes of thundering, screaming, and meandering free jazz,
radically breaking from the formal elegance and tight group interplay he
had epitomized with his “classic quartet” on A Love Supreme,
released earlier that year. The album also marked a changing of the
guard, with Coltrane welcoming into the spotlight a scrappy, untested
generation of iconoclastic players, many of whom were beginning to
embrace emergent strains of black-power philosophy in their music. Among
them were such soon-to-be luminaries as Archie Shepp, Marion Brown, John Tchicai, and a young, unknown tenor saxophonist named Pharoah Sanders. Sanders had arrived in New York a few years prior, struggling to get
work and often living on the streets. Early collaborations with Sun Ra and Don Cherry
helped him find his footing in the burgeoning free-jazz community; it
was Sun Ra that suggested changing his name from Farrell to Pharoah. But
it was his work alongside Coltrane that set him on the course he would
follow for the rest of his career. Starting with Ascension,
Sanders became an invaluable foil for Coltrane’s virtuosic, divisive
deconstructions. “Sometimes I didn’t know whether Pharoah was doing the
growling or John,” said Frank Lowe, a contemporary of Sanders who played
alongside Alice Coltrane. “You know, you don’t stand next to a man and copy him—so Pharoah was pushed into other areas.” Despite the prestigious alliance, with Coltrane publically praising
him as a man of “tremendous spiritual reservoir,” many critics balked at
the viscera of Sanders’ solos. Whitney Balliett, writing for The New Yorker, decried his playing as “elephant shrieks... [which] appeared to have little in common with music,” while the San Francisco Chronicle
dismissed him as “primitive.” As the 1960s wore on, with the Vietnam
War entering its second decade, the Black Panther Party forming in 1966,
and the rise of a “turn on, tune in, drop out” youth culture, the
beloved post-bop of only a few years prior seemed trampled underfoot by a
disorderly new generation of squawking, honking interlopers. What’s astonishing is how rapidly Sanders developed from a wildcard
sideman into a confident bandleader after his mentor’s untimely passing,
in 1967. Albert Ayler
famously declared, “‘Trane was the father. Pharoah was the son. I was
the holy ghost”; Sanders’ seven-year, 11-album run for Impulse! Records
directly builds on the core premise of Ascension, stretching
Coltrane’s templates across a string of masterpieces. These three
invaluable reissues showcase the young Sanders confidently guiding a
steadily growing panoply of “fire music” MVPs, uniting their disparate
voices and egos to create a powerfully cohesive group sound: elegant,
adventurous, warm, and ferocious all at once. Tauhid, from 1967, is his debut for the label, and it plays
like a mission statement. At the helm of an all-star sextet that
includes Henry Grimes on bass, Dave Burrell on piano, and Sonny Sharrock
on guitar, Sanders leads the group through three pieces that transcend
the traditional “head/solo/head” structure (where, following a quick
introductory melody, each player gets a turn in the spotlight before the
piece returns to the “head”). On Tauhid, the pieces are suites
that play like seances, with movements billowing and unfolding of their
own accord. The group’s unity is powerful, creating a spiritual
atmosphere that casts a spell from the opening bars. Opener “Upper Egypt & Lower Egypt” takes the “Acknowledgement” section from A Love Supreme
as a starting point before Sanders launches his group into the
stratosphere. Where Coltrane kicked off his album with a quick 30
seconds of fanfare before diving in, Sanders lets Burrell and Sharrock
lead with almost five minutes of roiling piano and guitar, backed by
bells, thrumming bass, and cinematic tom rolls. It doesn’t take much to
imagine a sacred rite of initiation performed in a darkened room filled
with the scent of frankincense. This gives way to a bowed
bass-and-piccolo duet between Grimes and Sanders that owes more to Toru
Takemitsu’s fusion of European modernism and traditional Japanese music
than New York’s jazz nightclubs. Nine minutes in, Grimes finally settles
into a groove and the group falls into place, vamping on two breezy
chords. When Sanders eventually joins in, just shy of the 12:30 mark,
his opening notes tweak Coltrane’s introductory solo on A Love Supreme;
it’s half homage, half breadcrumb trail, giving wary jazz heads enough
of a reference point to stick things out while Sanders breaks bold new
ground. Less than four minutes in length, “Japan” follows, a lovely
pentatonic march with Sanders on the mic. A gently swaying hymn with no
particular flash (and no solos), it reinforces the group-hug
friendliness that defines Tauhid’s softest moments and tempers
its most aggressive. The album closes with the three-part “Aum / Venus /
Capricorn Rising,” a suite that flexes the ensemble’s avant
credentials. In the first minutes, Sanders makes good on his reputation,
ripping through the foreground while Sharrock darts in and out of the
fray, carving proto-punk shapes that anticipate no wave by almost a
decade. Soon, though, he’s wrenching yearning melodies out with an
undeniable expressive force. The group pivots right with him, tapping
into a sound that’s as sophisticated as it is primal. Jewels of Thought develops this dichotomy further, with a benevolent love-in on the A-side and a somber, dissonant astral voyage worthy of Sun Ra’s Arkestra
on the flip. Leon Thomas’ vocal contributions are, for many, an
acquired taste. With his earnest monologue on
“Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah”—about a “universal prayer for peace”
where “all you have to do is clap your hands, 1-2-3”—and his propensity
to yodel, he has about as much gravitas as a summer-camp counselor. If
you liked what you heard on Tauhid and were hoping for more,
this addition may blindside you—it’s no surprise jazz yodeling failed to
catch on. Yet despite the lingering dweebiness of Thomas’ performance,
the piece soars. By allowing soulful prettiness alongside more vicious
passages, Sanders opens the album up, connecting the dots between joyful
communion and unflinching catharsis. A squalling solo toward the end of
the side sounds like a cry from the deepest, most tortured part of his
soul, but it’s supported by an unerringly mellow piano accompaniment
(and answered by still more yodeling, now comfortably chilled out in the
back of the mix). It’s a moment of deep vulnerability in a genre can
often devolve into macho blowing contests. If “Hum-Allah” is the sugar, then “Sun in Aquarius” is the medicine
it helps get down. After an intro of reedy, North African-cribbing
winds, thumb piano, and gongs, it yawns out like a terrifying chasm
before letting Lonnie Liston Smith’s piano boil over for the better part
of five minutes. Sanders is in devastating form, screaming through his
tenor. Even after a mid-side comedown and a breathtaking bass duet from
Cecil McBee and Richard Davis, he leaps back in undeterred, firing out
one of his heaviest solos like a machine gun. His fourth release for Impulse!, Deaf Dumb Blind (Summun Bukmun Umyun)
may be Sanders’ finest work from this era. The album is split into two
side-long sessions, and the group, now an octet, breathes as one like
never before. Coming off of a busy touring schedule, the players were
locked in, often building songs out of loose ideas or hints of an
arrangement. If the title track finds the players in a joyous,
near-telepathic groove, “Let Us Go Into the House of the Lord” is simply
spiritual jazz of the highest order. Aching with emotion, it stands
alongside Alice Coltrane’s “Prema” and Albert Ayler’s “Our Prayer” as a devotional masterpiece and a fulfillment of free jazz’s promise. Many of the same musicians from Jewels of Thought
remain, and you can hear how subsumed they are in the music. They play
on top of, around, and in between each other without ever making a wrong
move. The song’s title couldn’t be more apt; the music exudes so much
sorrow, hope, compassion, joy, and humanity it seems to truly reach for a
home beyond our world. The decades that followed saw Sanders’ career take different turns,
never quite reaching the ecstatic highs of this era, and much of his
early work fell out of print. What’s remarkable about these reissues is
not only how timeless the music is, but how relevant it feels today.
Many of his contemporaries seemed to be pushing forward to see how far
out they could go and who could get there fastest. Sanders went straight
for the source. By pursuing a spiritual approach, he created a body of
work that responded to its own historical moment without being
time-stamped by it. Shortly after Coltrane and his group recorded Ascension, LA was engulfed in the flames of the Watts riots; by the time Jewels
was released, Martin Luther King, Jr., had been murdered. This turmoil
and anguish is clearly audible in Sanders’ playing, and today, as the
nation once again feels like it’s splitting at the seams, Sanders’
agonized cries resonate, as expressive and important as ever.
THE MUSIC OF PHAROAH SANDERS: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH PHAROAH SANDERS:
Kofi Natambu, editor of and contributor to Sound Projections, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He has written extensively about music as a critic and historian for many publications, including the Black Scholar, Downbeat, Solid Ground: A New World Journal, Detroit Metro Times, KONCH, the Panopticon Review,Black Renaissance Noire, the Village Voice, the City Sun (NYC), the Poetry Project Newsletter (NYC), and the African American Review. He is the author of a biography Malcolm X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: The Melody Never Stops (Past Tents Press) and Intervals (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of Solid Ground: A New World Journal, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology Nostalgia for the Present (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
Pharoah Sanders (a corruption of his given name, Ferrell Sanders)
was born into a musical family. Both his mother and father taught
music, his mother privately and his father in public schools. Sanders'
first instrument was the clarinet, but he switched to tenor sax as a
high school student, under the influence of his band director, Jimmy
Cannon. Cannon also exposed Sanders to jazz for the first time. Sanders' early favorites included Harold Land, James Moody, Sonny Rollins, Charlie Parker, and John Coltrane. As a teenager, he played blues gigs for ten and 15 dollars a night around Little Rock, backing such blues greats as Bobby "Blue" Bland and Junior Parker. After high school, Sanders
moved to Oakland, CA, where he lived with relatives. He attended
Oakland Junior College, studying art and music. Known in the San
Francisco Bay Area as "Little Rock," Sanders
soon began playing bebop, rhythm & blues, and free jazz with many
of the region's finest musicians, including fellow saxophonists Dewey Redman and Sonny Simmons, as well as pianist Ed Kelly and drummer Smiley Winters. In 1961, Sanders moved to New York, where he struggled. Unable to make a living with his music, Sanders
took to pawning his horn, working non-musical jobs, and sometimes
sleeping on the subway. During this period he played with a number of
free jazz luminaries, including Sun Ra, Don Cherry, and Billy Higgins. Sanders formed his first group in 1963, with pianist John Hicks (with whom he would continue to play off-and-on into the '90s), bassist Wilbur Ware, and drummer Higgins. The group played an engagement at New York's Village Gate. A member of the audience was John Coltrane, who apparently liked what he heard. In late 1964, Coltrane asked Sanders to sit in with his band. By the next year, Sanders was playing regularly with the Coltrane group, although he was never made an official member of the band. Coltrane's ensembles with Sanders were some of the most controversial in the history of jazz. Their music, as represented by the group's recordings -- Om, Live at the Village Vanguard Again, and Live in Seattle
among them -- represents a near total desertion of traditional jazz
concepts, like swing and functional harmony, in favor of a teeming,
irregularly structured, organic mixture of sound for sound's sake.
Strength was a necessity in that band, and as Coltrane realized, Sanders had it in abundance.
Sanders made his first record as a leader in 1964 for the ESP label. After John Coltrane's death in 1967, Sanders worked briefly with his widow, Alice Coltrane. From the late '60s, he worked primarily as a leader of his own ensembles. From 1966-1971, Sanders released several albums on Impulse, including Tauhid (1966), Karma (1969), Black Unity (1971), and Thembi (1971). In the mid-'70s, Sanders recorded his most commercial effort, Love Will Find a Way
(Arista, 1977); it turned out to be a brief detour. From the late '70s
until 1987, he recorded for the small independent label Theresa. From
1987, Sanders recorded for the Evidence and Timeless labels. The former bought Theresa records in 1991 and subsequently re-released Sanders' output for that company. In 1995, Sanders made his first major-label album in many years, Message From Home (produced by Bill Laswell for Verve). The two followed that one up in 1999 with Save Our Children. In 2000, Sanders released Spirits -- a multi-ethnic live suite with Hamid Drake and Adam Rudolph. In the decades after his first recordings with Coltrane, Sanders
developed into a more well-rounded artist, capable of playing
convincingly in a variety of contexts, from free to mainstream. Some of
his best work is his most accessible. As a mature artist, Sanders discovered a hard-edged lyricism that has served him well.
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