Music Monday: Pharoah Sanders, Oliver Lake, and Kirk Knuffke
- Sep 22, 2025
- 2 min read
My semester is starting to find its rhythm and that’s giving me the space to listen to enjoy some music.
This week, I’ve been really loving the recently released complete Paris 1975 recordings of Pharoah Sander’s Love is Here. I don’t know much about the band or the context for these recordings, but Sanders is in great form mixing a kind of lyricism with just enough of an edge to be exciting. This is well worth hearing even if you have heard this material on the 2020 release Live in Paris (1975) (Lost ORTF Recordings).
In the spirit of 1970s jazz, it was Oliver Lake’s 82 birthday last week. Naturally, I played a mid-1970s Oliver Lake album. I picked Lake’s 1975 album Heavy Spirits. I don’t know many of the performers on it other than Olu Dara who played with David Murray on a number of contemporary releases (and who is the father of Nas). I love albums like this not because they open any new space in my mind, but because they speak to the energy of improvised music in the 1970s. Check it out.
Finally, I’ve been really enjoying Window, a new album from trumpeter Kirk Knuffke, bassist Stomu Takeishi and drummer Bill Goodwin. The album is pretty diverse, but I found it all engaging. I even enjoyed Kirk Knuffke’s dusky singing. I could do without the poetic interventions, but this didn’t diminish my enjoyment of the album. This feels like the perfect album for the transition from Check it out here:
One last song. I had not realized that Aretha Franklin released her version of “Let it Be” before the Beatles. It’s pretty wonderful:
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