Pharoah Sanders

Based on Wikipedia: Pharoah Sanders

The Saxophone Player Who Became a Prophet

Ornette Coleman, himself one of the most revolutionary figures in jazz history, once called Pharoah Sanders "probably the best tenor player in the world." That's not the kind of praise you throw around lightly in a genre populated by giants like John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, and Coleman himself. But Sanders earned it through decades of pushing the saxophone into territories most musicians wouldn't dare explore.

Born Ferrell Lee Sanders in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1940, he would eventually become known simply as Pharoah—a name that suited his almost mystical approach to music. His sound was not pretty in any conventional sense. He specialized in techniques that would make a classical instructor wince: overblowing, where you force so much air through the instrument that it screams and wails; harmonics, producing ghostly overtones above the fundamental note; and multiphonics, the seemingly impossible feat of playing multiple notes simultaneously on an instrument designed for one note at a time.

The result was what some called "sheets of sound"—a phrase originally coined for John Coltrane's dense, cascading runs, but equally applicable to Sanders' walls of sonic texture. If you've never heard this style of playing, imagine the difference between a single thread and a woven tapestry. Most saxophonists give you the thread. Sanders gave you the whole cloth.

From Church Hymns to Cosmic Exploration

Like so many American musicians, Sanders found his first instrument in church. He started on clarinet, accompanying hymns—a beginning that seems almost impossibly humble given where he would end up. His mother worked as a cook in a school cafeteria. His father worked for the City of Little Rock. An only child, young Ferrell showed early talent not in music but in visual arts.

The switch to saxophone came during his years at Scipio Jones High School in North Little Rock. Something about the tenor spoke to him in ways the clarinet hadn't.

After graduating in 1959, Sanders moved west to Oakland, California, where he lived with relatives and studied both art and music at Oakland City College. He eventually earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts, though the exact institution has been lost to history. This art background would inform his approach to music—he thought in textures and colors as much as notes and rhythms.

The real journey began when Sanders moved to New York City in 1962. This was the center of the jazz universe, and Sanders arrived with essentially nothing. By many accounts, he was often homeless during these early years. It was Sun Ra—the eccentric bandleader who claimed to be from Saturn and whose music was as far out as his mythology—who took Sanders in. Ra gave him a place to sleep, clothes to wear, and something else: encouragement to adopt the name Pharoah.

The name had deeper roots than Sun Ra's Egyptian-themed cosmic philosophy, though. According to Sanders himself, his grandmother had wanted to name him after the pharaohs mentioned in the Bible but had settled on Ferrell instead. When Sanders joined the New York musicians' union, he finally claimed the name she'd envisioned. Early advertisements sometimes misspelled it as "pharaoh," but Sanders preferred the simpler spelling.

The Coltrane Connection

By 1963, Sanders was playing with serious musicians—Billy Higgins, the elegant drummer who would become one of the most recorded in jazz history, and Don Cherry, the pocket trumpet player who had helped Ornette Coleman revolutionize the music. More importantly, he had caught the attention of Eric Dolphy and John Coltrane.

John Coltrane in 1963 was already a legend, but he was restless. His classic quartet had perfected a sound, and Coltrane was pushing beyond it. He was drawn to the more radical experiments of Albert Ayler, whose saxophone playing sounded like New Orleans marching bands being fed through a blender, and Cecil Taylor, whose piano work abandoned conventional harmony entirely. Sanders represented this new direction.

In 1965, Sanders became an official member of Coltrane's band. His first recording session with the group produced Ascension—an album that still divides listeners sixty years later. Running nearly forty minutes as a single piece, it featured eleven musicians engaged in collective improvisation that ranged from lyrical beauty to what could only be called organized chaos. It was Coltrane's declaration that he was leaving conventional jazz behind entirely.

Sanders and Coltrane recorded Meditations later that year, a dual-tenor album where their saxophones intertwined and clashed. Sanders then joined what would be Coltrane's final working band. His role was often to play long, dissonant solos—music that challenged audiences who had come expecting A Love Supreme or "My Favorite Things."

The influence flowed both ways. Coltrane's late style—the music that confused and even angered some longtime fans—was shaped in part by Sanders' fearless approach. And Sanders absorbed Coltrane's spiritual focus. The chanting that appeared on Coltrane's Om would resurface throughout Sanders' later work. He had found not just a mentor but a kindred spirit.

The Disciple and the Holy Ghost

Albert Ayler, another saxophonist pushing the boundaries of what the instrument could do, famously described the relationship in religious terms: "Trane was the Father, Pharoah was the Son, I am the Holy Ghost." This wasn't mere ego—it was an attempt to describe how these musicians saw themselves as channeling something larger than individual expression.

When Coltrane died in 1967, just forty years old, the mantle passed to Sanders. He became the most prominent standard-bearer for what came to be called spiritual jazz—music that aimed not just for aesthetic beauty or technical excellence but for transcendence itself.

Karma and The Creator's Master Plan

Sanders signed with Impulse! Records in 1966, the same label that had released Coltrane's most important work. His 1967 album Tauhid—the title is an Arabic word referring to the oneness of God in Islamic theology—established his solo identity. Here was music rooted not in American Christianity but in a more syncretic spirituality, drawing from Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and African traditional religions.

The 1969 album Karma would become his commercial breakthrough and artistic statement. Its centerpiece, "The Creator Has a Master Plan," runs approximately thirty minutes—an epic wave-on-wave of free jazz that somehow remains hypnotic rather than exhausting. The piece builds and subsides, features vocalist Leon Thomas's extraordinary yodeling technique, and creates a sense of cosmic ritual.

Thomas deserves special mention. His "umbo weti" yodeling—a technique he developed by studying African pygmy vocal traditions—added an otherworldly dimension to Sanders' music. It was the human voice used as another instrument, wordless and ancient-sounding.

The other crucial collaborator during this period was pianist Lonnie Liston Smith, who worked with Sanders from 1969 to 1971. Smith's approach—modal, meditative, creating beds of sound rather than flashy solo lines—perfectly complemented Sanders' explorations. Bassist Cecil McBee anchored albums like Jewels of Thought, Izipho Zam (Zulu for "my gifts"), Deaf Dumb Blind, and Thembi.

These albums sold well for jazz records, particularly within African-American communities. Black radio stations supported Sanders' vision even when it challenged listeners. But as the 1970s progressed, the cultural moment that had embraced free jazz began to shift.

The Long Middle Years

The 1971 album Black Unity marked a transition. Featuring a young Stanley Clarke on bass—before his fusion stardom—it incorporated African rhythms more explicitly than before. Sanders was adapting, not abandoning his spiritual focus but seeking new ways to express it.

What followed was a quarter-century of searching. Sanders left Impulse! in 1973 and began a journey through various labels—a common fate for jazz musicians whose commercial peak had passed. The late 1970s and 1980s saw him exploring rhythm and blues on Love Will Find a Way, returning to modal jazz and hard bop, the more accessible styles that had preceded free jazz.

This wasn't selling out. It was a musician refusing to become a museum piece, to simply repeat his 1969 glories forever. But it also meant a lower profile. Sanders moved from Theresa Records (starting in 1980) to Evidence (when they bought Theresa in 1991), working steadily but far from the spotlight.

Global Collaborations

The 1990s brought renewed creative energy through unexpected partnerships. In 1994, producer Bill Laswell took Sanders to Morocco to record The Trance of Seven Colors with Mahmoud Guinia, a master of Gnawa music. Gnawa is a spiritual tradition blending sub-Saharan African, Berber, and Arabic Islamic elements—music used in healing ceremonies, built on hypnotic bass patterns and call-and-response chanting. It was a natural fit for Sanders' sensibility.

That same year, he appeared on Stolen Moments: Red Hot + Cool, a benefit album for AIDS awareness that Time magazine named Album of the Year. Sanders recorded with Umar Bin Hassan and Abiodun Oyewole of the Last Poets, bringing together jazz experimentation and spoken-word political consciousness.

He collaborated with drummer Franklin Kiermyer on Solomon's Daughter, with the bass-playing experimentalist Jah Wobble (formerly of the punk group Public Image Ltd), and with various other musicians who recognized his stature even when the mainstream didn't.

Major Labels and Major Frustrations

Verve Records, a historic jazz label then experiencing a revival, signed Sanders in 1995. Message from Home seemed to promise a comeback. Save Our Children followed in 1998. But Sanders grew disgusted with the recording industry and left.

In a 1999 interview, he complained that despite his credentials—working with Coltrane, decades of recording, critical recognition—he had trouble finding work. This is the reality for many jazz musicians: respect doesn't always translate to employment.

Sanders had a strong following in Japan, where jazz musicians from the American avant-garde have often found more appreciation than at home. In 2003, he recorded with the Japanese band Sleep Walker, bridging his spiritual jazz approach with contemporary electronic influences.

The Twenty-First Century Renaissance

The 2000s brought a resurgence of interest in the kind of jazz Sanders had pioneered. Festival bookings increased—Bluesfest Byron Bay in 2004, the Melbourne Jazz Festival in 2007, the Big Chill Festival in 2008. A new generation of listeners was discovering Karma and Tauhid through reissues and digital platforms.

In 2016, the National Endowment for the Arts named Sanders a Jazz Master, the highest honor the United States government bestows on jazz musicians. A tribute concert in Washington, D.C., on April 4, 2016, celebrated his career. He was seventy-five years old, still playing, still searching.

Promises: The Late Masterpiece

Then came the collaboration nobody expected.

Sam Shepherd, the English electronic music producer known as Floating Points, approached Sanders about making an album together. Shepherd was in his mid-thirties, known for detailed, atmospheric electronic compositions that owed something to jazz but existed in a different sonic world entirely. What could he possibly create with an eighty-year-old free jazz saxophonist?

The answer was Promises, recorded in 2020 and released in March 2021. The album added a third element: the London Symphony Orchestra. Running forty-six minutes as a continuous piece in nine movements, it builds from near-silence to orchestral crescendos, with Sanders' saxophone weaving through synthesizer textures and string arrangements.

Pitchfork called it "a clear late-career masterpiece." Other critics agreed. Here was Sanders, nearly two decades after his last major release, proving he still had something vital to say—and finding the perfect collaborators to help him say it.

The album demonstrated something important about Sanders' art. Despite his association with free jazz's most extreme experiments, his playing on Promises was patient, melodic, almost tender. The rage and the sheets of sound were always only one aspect of his voice. The spiritual seeking was the constant, and spirituality can express itself in whispers as well as shouts.

Understanding Spiritual Jazz

To understand what made Pharoah Sanders significant, you need to understand what spiritual jazz was trying to accomplish—and what distinguished it from other jazz styles.

Traditional jazz, from New Orleans through swing and bebop, was entertainment music first, however sophisticated. Even bebop, with its fiendish complexity, was designed for clubs where people came to drink and socialize. The musicians might be having profound experiences on the bandstand, but the setting was secular.

Free jazz, which emerged in the late 1950s, abandoned conventional harmony and song structures. Musicians like Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and Albert Ayler created music that could sound like chaos to unprepared ears—but they weren't just being difficult. They were seeking liberation from European classical conventions that had shaped jazz from the beginning.

Spiritual jazz took free jazz's liberatory impulse and directed it toward the transcendent. John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, released in 1965, was the landmark—a four-part suite explicitly framed as a devotional offering, a prayer in saxophone form. Sanders and other musicians extended this approach, creating music intended as a path to higher consciousness, not just aesthetic experience.

The religious influences were eclectic. Sanders drew from Islam (hence Tauhid), Hinduism (the concept of karma that titled his breakthrough album), and concepts that crossed traditions. His music aimed for what Hindus call samadhi and Buddhists call satori—moments of direct perception of ultimate reality, beyond the thinking mind.

This might sound impossibly abstract, but Sanders' best music makes it visceral. The long, hypnotic pieces create conditions for altered states of consciousness. The intensity of his playing—those screaming overtones, those impossible multiphonics—can shake listeners out of ordinary awareness. It's music that asks you to surrender rather than analyze.

The Legacy

Pharoah Sanders died on September 24, 2022, at his home in Los Angeles. He was eighty-one years old. The announcement from his label, Luaka Bop, did not specify a cause of death.

He left behind more than thirty albums as a leader and countless recordings as a sideman. His influence extended beyond jazz to electronic music, hip-hop (his records were sampled frequently), and the broad category sometimes called "world music." Musicians like Kamasi Washington, the saxophonist who brought jazz to rock festival audiences in the 2010s, cite him as essential.

But influence and record counts don't capture what Sanders meant. He represented a possibility—that music could be a spiritual practice, that improvisation could be prayer, that the strange sounds he coaxed from his saxophone could open doors in consciousness that ordinary experience keeps closed.

Whether you find this convincing depends on your own experience. Some listeners hear Sanders' more extreme recordings as mere noise, ego-driven displays of technique. Others find them genuinely transformative. There's no way to prove which response is correct. You can only listen and discover what happens.

What's certain is that Pharoah Sanders committed fully to his vision for six decades. From accompanying church hymns in Little Rock to recording with the London Symphony Orchestra, from homeless nights in New York to the NEA Jazz Masters award, he never stopped searching. The Father had shown him the path. The Son walked it to the end.