Let My Pharoah Blow!

For Pharoah Sanders (1940-2022)

I remember the day I got turned on to Pharoah Sanders. Sophomore year at my old school, I am in my dorm room on the first floor and hear these sounds coming from the third floor and across the hall. I feel summoned by these sounds, to climb the stairs, to follow the notes, to enter the room from which the music emanated. It was the roost of a classmate, Ken Vermes, who all these years later is still a saxophonist in San Francisco.

That's the way we found new music in those days. We followed the sound. One generation passed mixtapes to turn each other on; it was the same impulse: You've got to hear this, you're going to love it. I feel sad for my college students with their solitary ear buds, who do not have that opportunity: the communal music, the open doors, the way we made friends and created bonds to each other, and to the music. We loved to turn each other on to music. It was a gift.

The music was the album Tauhid by Pharoah Sanders. One song, the 17 minute "Upper Egypt, Lower Egypt," took up an entire side of the 1967 Impulse! Records album. It began as appealing, then exotic, jangle of bells, piano, drums and percussion, a cool breeze across a parched desert. And then Pharoah would enter, lithe on the piccolo, and most persuasive on tenor saxophone. It was the most distinctive tone in any jazz I'd heard before. It had weight, poise, the juice and fullness of a ripe summer peach. Without warning, it could elevate to the to the squeals and squalls we'd associated with his most recent colleague, fellow traveler and mentor, John Coltrane. It was a sound that begged the understanding of god: Not appeasement, not forgiveness, just questions for the Lord: Why? Who? How?

"He blows love up into the weatherless territory of worship," Harmony Holiday wrote in her "Elegy for Pharoah Sanders" on her Substack, Black Music and Black Muses

Sanders died at age 81 on Saturday, September 24. He had remained active and influential. Last year, in 2021, Sanders recorded what may be the biggest hit of his long career, a song cycle called Promises with the the DJ and electronic musician Floating Points (Sam Shepherd) and the London Symphony Orchestra, on the Luaka Bop label. It was among the ten best albums of the year on many rock critics' polls.

That sustaining spirituality made Sanders not just a revered jazz musician, but a musician beyond genre. Some people find Karma, his next album after Tauhid, to be his masterpiece, but why split hairs when the mastery of Sanders was so abundant? Karma was Sanders' most audacious album, released in early 1969, consisting mostly of a 32-minute song, "The Creator Has a Master Plan." It blew minds at the time and still does with the singing of Leon Thomas. At first Thomas puts across the lyrics, repeated hypnotically, a little scatting, the singing low-key until he starts to yodel.

That's right, he yodels, but Thomas' voice has the timbre of a saxophone. It fits. For those who like to make such pronouncements, Tauhid and Karma are chapter two in the core curriculum of what has become known as "spiritual jazz." Chapter one would be the many records Sanders made with Coltrane including Ascension!, Meditations, and a number of albums live or recorded in Japan, the pre-industrial, postwar Japan of 1965-1966, where Coltrane and Sanders were lit up by the gentle spirituality they perceived there. He told this to Nat Hentoff in the liner notes to Tauhid about the short song "Japan" on the second side of the album, which also includes a three-part suite of "Aum" (or "Om"), "Venus," and "Capricorn Rising."

After hearing of Sanders' passing, I ransacked the house looking for CDs and LPs, and was delighted to replay some of the range of recordings I hadn't listened to for years. I found a home-burned disc probably purchased from eMusic.com, labeled Sun Ra/Pharoah Sanders. The full title, I think, is Sun Ra Featuring Pharoah Sanders and Black Harold, recorded by risk-taking futurists at ESP-Disk in 1964, but not released until 1976. Black Harold is flutist Harold Murray; Sanders was playing tenor on the session because the Sun Ra Arkestra's primary saxophonist, John Gilmore, was on leave playing with Paul Bley and others.

Born Farrell Sanders in Little Rock, Ark., in 1940, it is said to be Sun Ra who began calling Farrell "Pharoah." When he was 19, Sanders left Little Rock, for Oakland, Ca., where he advanced his already substantial musical knowledge under the tutelage of some of that cities' accomplished jazz artists. Three years later he was in New York. Though renowned as an improviser, he often composed his music on paper. Always looking to improve his technique, he used different reeds and embouchures to develop his distinctive "clusters" of notes. That way, he said, "I could get more feeling, more of me, into each note I played."

Sanders also may have had synesthesia, the ability to see music in colors. In June 1994, Bill Laswell recorded the album The Trance in Seven Colors on Island's Axiom label, in Morocco featuring Sanders and Gnawa musician Maleen Moumoud Ghania. Sanders plays tenor sax among a large group of musicians and dancers in the port city of Essaouira, (colonial name Mogador) on Morocco's Atlantic coast. (Orson Welles shot his Othello there, at the seawalls).

Ghania's instrument, handmade for generations by his family, is the Guimbri, described by liner note writers Eric Rosenzveig and Peter Wetherbee as "a hollow-bodied bass-like instrument. Its strings are wound from goat intestines and its body is covered from the skin of the neck of a camel." At its purest, the musicians and dancers and chanters and rhythmic hand-claps play healing ceremonies, addressed towards a mix of Muslim and ancient West African spirits, that last for eight hours, which cycle through seven colors of a trance.

It sounds far out even for an explorer as intrepid as Sanders. But there's a Sanders co-write with Ghania to begin, and includes another Pharoah composition, "Peace in Essaouia (For Sonny Sharrock)." Sharrock, the guitarist on Tauhid, was a long time Laswell associate, an essential player on New York's post-punk/jazz/black rock/new music scene, who had died (May 26, 1994) less than a week before the Morocco sessions. It is a tribute to Sanders' consciousness, where the spiritual melded so effortlessly with his musical fluidity, that he takes up just the right amount of space, not too much, not too little, to sound so natural in this ritualistic music.

An entirely different side on Sanders can be heard on his Moon Child album. I recall being mildly disappointed at first by this European release, recorded in Paris in 1989 and released in 1990 on the Dutch label Timeless Records. It's a lean band: William Henderson on piano; Stafford James on bass; Eddie Moore on drums, and Cheikh Tidian Fale on percussion. Henderson, Sanders wrote in the notes, has "a certain warmth which creates colorful sounds." Of James, he is succinct: "Without the bass you don't go nowhere."

Because it may be his most straightforward album, Moon Child probably baffled me because I kept waiting for the squalls. But Moon Child is mellow but assertive; it's nocturnal music, free of turmoil, and displays a mastery of standards I hadn't heard from Sanders before. The title track is his; the others include tunes by Horace Silver ("Moon Rays"); George Gershwin ("Soon," from the 1930 musical "Strike Up the Band," with lyrics by Ira Gershwin); "Moniebah" ("The Pilgrim") by the South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim (neé Dollar Brand).

There are two other standards: "All or Nothing at All," most often associated with Frank Sinatra, and a 12-minute version of "The Night Has a Thousand Eyes," which I only knew as a No. 3 hit for Bobby Vee in 1962-1963. This version weaves a very different, potent spell I could not imagine then.

You could start there, and work back. Or with Promises, fury tamed by age, fewer notes, but the beauty and purity of tone unaffected. Or start with Tauhid, as I did, and which sounds as much a revelation today as it did then. I'd love to turn you on.