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Pharoah Sanders possesses one of the most distinctive tenor saxophone sounds in jazz. Harmonically rich and heavy with overtones, his sound can be as raw and abrasive as it is possible for a saxophonist to produce. Yet,
Sanders is highly regarded to the point of reverence by a great many jazz fans. Although he made his name with expressionistic, nearly anarchic free jazz in
John Coltrane's late ensembles of the mid-'60s,
Sanders' later music is guided by more graceful concerns. In the free-time, ultra-dense cauldron that was
Coltrane's last artistic stand,
Sanders relied heavily on the nonspecific pitches and timbral distortions pioneered by
Albert Ayler and further developed by
Coltrane himself. The hallmarks of
Sanders' playing at that time were naked aggression and unrestrained passion. In the years after
Coltrane's death, however, he explored other, somewhat gentler and perhaps more cerebral avenues -- without, it should be added, sacrificing any of the intensity that defined his work as an apprentice to
Coltrane. He remained highly active throughout the '80s and '90s, and though his output slowed in the new millennium,
Sanders would continue performing and recording into his eighties, collaborating with electronic producer
Floating Points and the
London Symphony Orchestra on 2021's critically acclaimed album Promises.
Pharoah Sanders (a corruption of his given name, Ferrell Sanders) was born into a musical family. Both his mother and father taught music, his mother privately and his father in public schools. His first instrument was the clarinet, but he switched to tenor sax as a high school student, under the influence of his band director, Jimmy Cannon, who also exposed
Sanders to jazz for the first time. His early favorites included
Harold Land,
James Moody,
Sonny Rollins,
Charlie Parker, and
John Coltrane. As a teenager, he played blues gigs for 10 and 15 dollars a night around Little Rock, Arkansas, backing such blues greats as
Bobby "Blue" Bland and
Junior Parker. After high school,
Sanders moved to Oakland, California, where he lived with relatives. He attended Oakland Junior College, studying art and music. Known in the San Francisco Bay Area as "Little Rock," he soon began playing bebop, rhythm & blues, and free jazz with many of the region's finest musicians, including fellow saxophonists
Dewey Redman and
Sonny Simmons, as well as pianist
Ed Kelly and drummer
Smiley Winters.
In 1961,
Sanders moved to New York, where he struggled. Unable to make a living with his music, he took to pawning his horn, working nonmusical jobs, and sometimes sleeping on the subway. During this period, he played with a number of free jazz luminaries, including
Sun Ra,
Don Cherry, and
Billy Higgins.
Sanders formed his first group in 1963, with pianist
John Hicks (with whom he would continue to play off-and-on into the '90s), bassist
Wilbur Ware, and drummer
Higgins. When the group played an engagement at New York's Village Gate, a member of the audience was
John Coltrane, who apparently liked what he heard. In late 1964,
Coltrane asked
Sanders to sit in with his band. By the next year, he was playing regularly with the
Coltrane group, although he was never made an official member of the band.
Coltrane's ensembles with
Sanders were some of the most controversial in the history of jazz. Their music, as represented by the group's recordings --
Om,
Live at the Village Vanguard Again, and
Live in Seattle among them -- represents a near total desertion of traditional jazz concepts, like swing and functional harmony, in favor of a teeming, irregularly structured, organic mixture of sound for sound's sake. Strength was a necessity in that band, and as
Coltrane realized,
Sanders had it in abundance.
Sanders made his first record as a leader in 1964 for the ESP label. After
Coltrane's death in 1967,
Sanders worked briefly with his widow,
Alice Coltrane. From the late '60s, he worked primarily as a leader of his own ensembles. From 1966 to 1971, he released several albums on Impulse including
Tauhid (1966), Karma (1969),
Black Unity (1971), and
Thembi (1971). In the mid-'70s, he recorded his most commercial effort, Love Will Find a Way (Arista, 1977); it turned out to be a brief detour. From the late '70s until 1987, he recorded for the small independent label Theresa. Starting in 1987,
Sanders recorded for the Evidence and Timeless labels. The former bought Theresa records in 1991 and subsequently re-released
Sanders' output for that company.
In 1995, he made his first major-label album in many years, Message from Home (produced by
Bill Laswell for Verve). The two followed that one up in 1999 with
Save Our Children. In 2000,
Sanders released
Spirits -- a multi-ethnic live suite with
Hamid Drake and
Adam Rudolph. In the decades after his first recordings with
Coltrane,
Sanders developed into a more well-rounded artist, capable of playing convincingly in a variety of contexts, from free to mainstream. Some of his best work is his most accessible. As a mature artist, he discovered a hard-edged lyricism that has served him well.
Throughout the 2000s and beyond,
Sanders played the festival circuit, and collaborated on record with various different artists including
Sleep Walker, Chicago Underground,
Joey DeFrancesco, and others. In 2015, he was granted an NEA Jazz Master Award, along with
Gary Burton, Wendy Oxenhorn, and
Archie Shepp. It is North America's highest award for the genre. In 2020, an archival concert performance was released as Live in Paris (1975). The next year,
Sanders worked with
Floating Points and the
London Symphony Orchestra on an album of entirely new material called Promises. Released in March 2021, the record was met with almost universal critical praise. ~ Chris Kelsey