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Kérjen
árajánlatot! |
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| 1. | Upper Egypt & Lower Egypt
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| 2. | The Creator Has A Master Plan
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| 3. | Astral Traveling
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| 4. | Spiritual Blessing
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Jazz / Free Jazz; Avant-Garde Jazz; Avant-Garde
For John Coltrane, 1965 was a year of fervent experimentation that found him, at one point or another, doubling almost every instrument in his group. It was also the year Coltrane began to increasingly invite saxophonist Pharoah Sanders to join his group as his second and complement. Since when did Coltrane need another tenor player, was the general reaction, and who was this guy with the growling, anarchic sound anyway?
Pharoah was born Ferrell Sanders in 1940, in Little Rock, Arkansas, and migrated to Oakland after high school. He first crossed paths with Coltrane in San Francisco around 1960, joining him on a Bay Area search for a saxophone mouthpiece. Sanders made it to New York in 1962, entered the avant-garde edge of the jazz scene, and recorded his first album for the tiny independent label ESP-Disk.
In early 1965, Sanders was juggling a job as a cook and an irregular gig at an East Village club. "I was playing at this place called Slug's on a Saturday, and I think it was sevenish," Sanders recalled of his reunion with Coltrane. "It was only for about an hour and a half before the regular bands came out. I didn't even know he was in the room - I looked up and he was at the bar. I was into a more modal kind of thing and he heard me play some of those tunes I wrote - 'Upper and Lower Egypt' - that was before I recorded it. He came up, we met each other and talked very briefly. He said that he enjoyed the music."
That initial meeting led to an invitation to sit in with Coltrane's band. By mid-'65, Coltrane had begun asking Sanders to participate in various recording sessions and to join a West Coast run with the band. By the end of the year, Sanders's raw, frenetic tenor sound (he would later add flute, piccolo, and percussion to his repertoire) had become one of the most prominent features in Coltrane's retooled quintet, along with bassist Jimmy Garrison, drummer Rashied Ali, and John's wife, pianist Alice Coltrane.
In late 1966, Impulse chief Bob Thiele produced a series of one-offs with various avant-garde players he had come to know directly or indirectly through Coltrane, including trombonist Roswell Rudd, alto saxophonist Marion Brown, and Sanders.
Sanders recalls: "Bob Thiele approached me about doing something with them. Tauhid was the first record I did, and it had about the best sound. I played alto and tenor saxophone on that, but they [listed] just tenor."
In fact, Sanders also played piccolo on Tauhid, which featured the original composition Coltrane had heard that night at Slug's, "Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt." It was an auspicious start. But before Sanders returned to the studio as a leader, more than two years would pass while he devoted himself to duties alongside Coltrane.
After Coltrane's death in July 1967, Thiele, desiring to fill a throne left empty, increased his focus on the avant-garde: signing Alice Coltrane and Albert Ayler, continuing to record Archie Shepp. That he would turn again to Sanders was inevitable. That he would produce an extended track that matched Coltrane's spiritual charge and commercial potential was a surprise to all.
Karma was a one-off, two-track album that stood out on free-form rock radio with the singular yodeling technique of vocalist Leon Thomas. Powered by the album's hit tune, "The Creator Has a Master Plan," it became a successor - in message, episodic length, and sales - to Coltrane's A Love Supreme.
"You know it sold," Sanders says today, with lingering ambivalence. "People liked it. But I just couldn't be proud about the engineering part of it. Karma had me and the bass player on the same channel, so they couldn't turn me up [separately]."
The success of Karma could not stop Thiele from departing Impulse in the summer of 1969 to start his own label. His frustration in promoting Sanders to better status at Impulse was certainly a factor. "It was the same tired tune: ‘What kind of crap is this? This isn't going to sell,'" the producer recalled. "After the record [Karma] was released, I remember the president of the company saying, ‘Hey, did we sign that Pharoah Sanders?' I replied, ‘No, you didn't want to.' ‘Oh,' he said, ‘sign him up now; he's hot, let's get him.'"
Thiele's successor at Impulse, producer Ed Michel, inherited a healthy roster of signed artists, including Sanders, who was ready to take full advantage of his new contracted stature.
In rapid succession, Sanders recorded Jewels of Thought and Summun, Bukmun, Umyun, establishing the feel and flow of his releases of this period: lengthy jams filled with percussion and world-beat rhythms, spiritual titles referencing Eastern and Western religions ("Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah-Hum Allah," "Let Us Go Into the House of the Lord"); and a populous lineup featuring stellar soloists (keyboardist Lonnie Liston Smith, saxophonist Gary Bartz, trumpeter Woody Shaw) and rhythm players (bassists Richard Davis and Cecil McBee, drummers Idris Muhammad and Roy Haynes).
Michel remembers the Jewels of Thought session as "a sort of a traveling Gypsy orchestra complete with cooks and camp followers. [The Plaza Sound studio in New York] was huge, and they'd set up a table with lots of food, lots of incense. . . . The only problem was that Pharoah's tunes tended to run as long as they could run. I had to find a way to let him know when he had to bring it down and get out. We decided that just flashing the lights on and off would work fine, except that Pharoah frequently played with his eyes closed. But we worked it out."
Recorded in 1970 and '71, Thembi was a career high point: co-produced by Michel and rock producer Bill Szymczyk, who together introduced Sanders's music to advanced studio techniques of the day - close miking, overdubbing, and effects like reverb, echo, and phasing.
Over the next three years, Sanders shifted from the wild and raw edge of the avant-garde spectrum. While he maintained his distinctive bristle and bite, especially on tenor, he began to favor a more restrained, melodic approach. He soloed over lengthy, peaceful workouts, his music achieving a crystalline, almost aching beauty at times (hear "Spiritual Blessing" off Elevation).
Through the early '70s, Sanders's titles continued to reflect his focus on Afrocentrism (Black Unity, Village of the Pharoahs), spiritual concerns (Wisdom Through Music), and an undying debt to the man who brought him to Impulse ("Memories of J.W. Coltrane" on Live at the East, "To John" on Love in Us All).
In late 1973, Sanders's contract fell victim to cost-cutting measures taken by ABC Records, Impulse's corporate parent. He moved on and, in the decades that followed, recorded for a variety of labels abroad and at home, notably Arista, Evidence, and Verve. In late 1987, he reunited with Thiele and joined with fellow Coltrane alumni McCoy Tyner and Roy Haynes (plus Cecil McBee) on a session that produced the Grammy-winning Blues for Coltrane.
In the heyday of Impulse, when the "New Thing" was truly new, Sanders's fellow jazz explorer Albert Ayler dubbed him the "son" of the holy avant-garde trinity (Coltrane was the "father," and Ayler nominated himself as the "holy ghost"). Sanders was the last of those who had played with Coltrane to depart Impulse, and to this day remains most closely associated with the label that delivered nine of his best-known recordings between 1969 and 1974. To many he is still Coltrane's heir apparent, his most trusted apostle.
---Ashley Kahn, February 2006 |
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