Pharoah Sanders (1940-2022)

The jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders (13 October 1940–24 September 2022) was a central figure in the free jazz movement of the 1960s and continued contributing to its progeny until his final years. It could be argued that Sanders did not play “popular music.” There was an aesthetic schism between the better-selling jazz albums of the time and free jazz. Yet, strikingly, one of the movements of his final recorded work, Promises, on which he was the featured guest soloist with composer Sam Shephard (a.k.a. Floating Points) and the London Symphony Orchestra, has garnered more than nine million listens on Spotify. Another one of Sanders’s tracks, “Astral Traveling” from his own 1971 album Thembi, has been listened to more than four million times.

Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Sanders started taking lessons on clarinet before switching to tenor sax in high school. His professional career started with blues gigs in Little Rock. A move to Oakland, California, allowed Sanders to expand his repertoire into bebop, rhythm and blues, classical, and free jazz. A 1961 move to New York introduced him to some of the most important jazz artists of the time, and ultimately John Coltrane (“Pharoah Sanders”).

Enough time has passed that the early reaction to the free jazz movement, typically shock combined with a mixture of awe and repulsion, has shifted to an historical acceptance and praise of this remarkable music. Sanders’s centrality to the music can be heard on the first recorded take of Coltrane’s watershed 1965 recording Ascension (now listed as Edition II). In it, Sanders fits in perfectly with the often-cacophonous group explorations and takes a solo that exemplifies the genre. His tone is so harsh and distorted at times that the timbres become more important than the choice of notes. Sanders explained in a 2020 interview, “A lot of time [sic] I don’t know what I want to play. So I just start playing, and try to make it right, and make it join to some other kind of feeling in the music. Like, I play one note, maybe that one note might mean love. And then another note might mean something else. Keep on going like that until it develops into – maybe something beautiful” (Friedman). While critics’ descriptions of Sanders’s music from the 1960s usually didn’t use the word “beautiful,” beauty can be heard with multiple listenings. Popular music of the 1960s was often marked by similar time signatures, harmonic progressions, and instrumentation. In such a homogeneous musical environment, the radical free-jazz musicians of the time had great difficulty breaking through. Yet, notably, in no commentary that I could find does Sanders talk about the sense of swing, chord progressions, jazz melodic vocabularies, musical forms, or any other conventional elements of “mainstream” jazz. In fact, he seems loath to talk about the creation of his music at all. The music is the message.

The music that Sanders created on his own albums after Coltrane’s death showed a desire to continue Coltrane’s legacy of creating searching works of art that reflected an Afrocentric communalism combined with forays into Eastern spiritual thought. Until the release of Promises, Sanders was best-known for “The Creator Has a Master Plan” (from his album Karma), which has been described as “an expansive performance from 1969 that peaks in wailing cacophony but ends with a buoyant, soulful vocal refrain” (Flanagan and Chinen). Other works of historical importance released during the same era include Black Unity (1972) and Thembi. The former consists entirely of one track that is a tour de force of communal energy, with a title that takes it into the political realm. Thembi often veers into less dissonant territory with rhythmic grooves that made it more accessible to a wider audience. At times, the album shows a more delicate side of Sanders’s playing and offers a different angle on his use of the word “beautiful.” I wonder if the title of the opening track, “Astral Traveling,” is a nod to his earlier work with Sun Ra and the Arkestra.

On his final album, released in 2021, Sanders performs throughout the nine-movement work “Promises.” Sanders is not only surrounded by a different musical frame but situated in a different canvas altogether. The extended piece travels from orchestral minimalism to moments of lush strings, and from ambient electronica to flurries of jazz exhortations by Sanders. It is a fitting ending to a life that was dedicated to the search.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).