Music Monday: The Music of Pharoah Sanders

About two weeks ago, the great Pharoah Sanders passed away. As readers of my blog know, I have a great fondness for post-Coltrane saxophone and Sanders’s music in particular. I would expect that anyone interested in spiritual and free jazz or improvised music more broadly would find something inspiring and compelling in Sanders’s music. 

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been listening to a good bit of Sanders’s work as a band leader and it was moving and dynamic as ever. As I perused his discography, however, I was struck by how often he supported other musicians over the course of his long career and added his distinctive tenor playing to their recordings without overshadowing the other musicians or bandleader.

In some cases, as in Coltrane’s sometimes maligned and often misunderstood posthumous live album Om, Sanders contributes to the sheets of sound that seem to reach their apogee in this recording. 

It’s hard to get more deeply spiritual than what Coltrane and friends were trying to do on Om (as well as Ascension or Expression), but Sanders’s nearly contemporary work with Alice Coltrane in 1970, Ptah, the El Daoud, which conjures its spiritual power from Egyptian and Indian inflected music propelled only higher by Coltrane and Sanders’s playing. (More on that album here).

(I’m adding to my little list here and album that I haven’t yet heard, but I discovered while scrolling through Sanders’s discography. Sanders plays on Larry Young’s 1973 record: Lawrence of Newark. 

I need to listen to more Larry Young sometime soon!)

Sanders’s collaborative spirit continued in the 1980s and 1990s including a lovely date with Benny Golson (no such thing as too many tenors?) celebrating the legacy of John Coltrane with a set of tunes that harken to his more hard-bopish days.

In the 1990s, Sanders’s showed that he could still light a fire on one of my favorite albums Sonny Sharrock’s Ask the Ages (1991), and I love that he manages to play within the concept of Sharrock and Laswell’s rock-influenced jazz. 

Finally, as many of you know, Sanders returned to some recent prominence among the alternative music crowd through his appearance on the Floating Points’ album Promises last year.   

For a musician (and person!) often recognized for his generous and spiritual character, it feels fitting to recognize his remarkable work with other musicians. It’s also a cool reminder that despite his sometime incendiary style, he could play within any number of structures from mid-1960s hard bop to contemporary electronic recordings. His playing was almost always on point and he always seemed to be himself, and perhaps that’s the best way that anyone could be remembered.