Tag: pharoahsanders

Pharoah Sanders, Black Unity

Album of the Week, May 11, 2024

When I was listening to free jazz in college and the years after, I had a fairly narrow conception of Pharoah Sanders’ contribution to the art. On the basis of performances like Meditations and Karma, I assumed that all his work was out there, shamanistic, wild. And while that is indeed a good description of some of his playing, it’s far from the whole story. Some of his performances preceding and following Karma are good jumping off points to make the story delightfully complex, starting with this one, recorded in November 1971.

We’ve seen before how issues of black power and civil rights influenced some of this music, particularly in John Coltrane’s “Alabama” (discussed in the context of Trane’s follow-up album Crescent) and in Archie Shepp’s poem for Malcolm X and elegiac salute to W.E.B. Dubois. Black Unity seems at once to be a nod to the Black Unity and Freedom Party, a Black Power political party in the UK, and a statement of musical purpose that underpins the group improvisation recorded here.

The group is top-notch, with Marvin “Hannibal” Peterson on trumpet, Carlos Garnett on flute and tenor sax, Joe Bonner on piano, Stanley Clarke and Cecil McBee on bass, Norman Connors and Billy Hart on drums, and Lawrence Killian on percussion. Bonner was an underappreciated hard bop pianist from Rocky Mount, North Carolina who had a series of collaborations with Hart and saxophonist Billy Harper in the 1970s as well as solo outings. Garnett played with Freddie Hubbard and with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. Stanley Clarke might be the best known name on the album, having come to prominence as a founding member of Chick Corea’s Return to Forever and winning five Grammy awards for his jazz fusion work over the years. And Norman Connors had a varied career, sitting in for Elvin Jones with the John Coltrane Quartet when the group performed at his middle school (!), playing with Sanders, recording as a leader on Cobblestone Records, and switching to R&B in the mid-1970s.

The variety of talent that Sanders’ group brought to the collective improvisation accounts for some of its sheer exuberance. The entire album is one long 37-minute collective exploration of sound, most but not all centered around a deep-grooving three-note theme that emerges within the first minute out of a cluster of sound from the Stanley Clarke, Joe Bonner and the collective percussion section. From the groove, though, emerge other sounds – a sustained wash of what sounds like a hurdy-gurdy, the balafon, and finally a version of the groove theme from the three horns, played in unison. From there the music seems to overflow outward, with all the players going in different directions over the continued groove.

The first moment of “breakage” into free jazz in the collective comes from Sanders, whose horn begins to climb a rocky hill about eight minutes in. “Hannibal” Peterson plays with fierce intensity, alternating between chromatically ascending the scale and then playing an extended improvisation around the supertonic. And Garnett grounds his playing in the original key, bringing it back to the tonic. The horns pause for a second and a relatively brief moment of respite in which the forward pulse of the bass is the main motion gives us the breath we need to flip the record.

Side two opens with a Joe Bonney solo that leans into the upper reaches of the melody. Bonney’s work with other artists ran the gamut from wild to celebratory, but his playing here is solidly in the post-McCoy Tyner world; while a good chunk of his solo firmly subscribes to the Tyner block chords model, there’s also a moment of complete and utter freedom that seems to stop time before he shifts back into a more melodic mode that calls to mind some of Herbie Hancock’s mid-1960s Blue Note output. Sanders follows Bonney, this time on the balafon. The percussive nature of the instrument, which Wikipedia helpfully describes as a “gourd-resonated xylophone”, means that its sound is approximately equal parts tone and wooden thud, and the bassists and percussion step up to support and enhance the sound.

The last part of the work is driven by the basses and percussion. McBee gets a solo that quietly underscores the similarity of the main theme to the “A Love Supreme” theme and time stops for a minute as the two bassists trade ideas against each other. When the beat comes back, emerging from a cloud of clicking percussion, dueling pizzicato, and drone, it’s less frantic, more assured. There’s a higher pitched string instrument in the mix as well, perhaps a harp or koto, that together with the basses transports the entire soundscape for a few minutes to a different world. This entire section is the most eye opening, as the collective groove that has underpinned all the free exploration and melodic expansion seems to stand revealed. If Sanders was making a philosophical—or political—statement on this album, it might be in this revelation of common cause underneath many different expressions of black musical identity In the last three and a half minutes, the rest of the band re-enters to quietly bring the theme back home. When they stop, we hear a crowd burst into applause and calls of “Right on!,” providing the final mind-blowing moment of the album—that it was recorded as a single live performance.

Sanders would explore the axis between group improvisation, deep melodies, and ecstatic free jazz throughout the rest of his career. You can find more examples of any of the sides of his work throughout his discography; for more like Karma, check out “Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah” on his Jewels of Thought. By the mid-1970s he was playing more melodically (as you can hear in this great 1975 live set from Transversales Disques), and it’s that Pharoah that appears in his last recording, the 2021 Floating Points collaboration Promises. But regardless of whether he was playing fierce and free or achingly sweetly, the common core of all the work is searching (and finding) transcendence, putting him firmly in line with the work of his mentor Coltrane. We’ll get one last check-in with another Trane associate next week as we see how McCoy Tyner continued to evolve following his departure from Blue Note.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Alice Coltrane, Ptah the El Daoud

Album of the Week, May 4, 2024

We heard Alice Coltrane on McCoy Tyner’s Extensions last week—and she had played in her husband John Coltrane’s quartet until the end of his life—but her solo career didn’t really take off until this 1970 album. Yet it wasn’t her first album, nor even her first for Impulse. Following John’s death, in early January and again in June 1968, she and members of his quartet and quintet recorded a tribute to him in the couple’s home studio in Dix Hills, New York, which was released as A Monastic Trio later that year. Huntington Ashram Monastery followed in 1969, which was a simpler trio with just Ron Carter and Rashied Ali, again recorded in the home studio.

While Ptah, the El Daoud was recorded in the same home studio (a choice perhaps necessitated by her family; she was taking care of four children, all under the age of ten), it’s a very different record. While Pharoah Sanders appeared on her first album, he only played on one track; here he and Joe Henderson both perform, with Sanders in the right channel and Henderson in the left. Ron Carter returns and they are joined by drummer Ben Riley. Perhaps most importantly, here Alice turns to the harp as a primary instrument; as we’ve heard on Extensions, this was an instrument that would be a key part of her sound and which allowed her to claim a distinctive voice all her own.

Literally meaning “Ptah [the supreme Egyptian deity] the beloved,” “Ptah, the El Daoud” begins with Ron Carter playing a march figure that’s joined by Ben Riley’s drums and the piano, then by the saxophones playing in unison. Joe Henderson takes the first solo, with a fleet approach to the instrument that circles around the key pitches, rather than generating ascending or descending “sheets of sound” arpeggios; Alice Coltrane accompanies with sharp stabs at the chords. Pharoah Sanders’ solo ascends relentlessly, embracing the groan of his instrument as he generates harmonics with overblowing, but also playing through a series of modulations with precision and clarity, somewhat belying Alice’s description of him as the more intuitive player compared to Henderson’s more cerebral approach. When Alice Coltrane takes the solo, she shifts from the sharp chords to glissandi in the upper octaves, an approach to soloing that seems to echo her style on the harp. And Ben Riley’s solo on the drums, accompanied by Pharoah Sanders on the bells, is sharply rhythmic and precise in a way that hearkens back to the opening march of the tune, leading into a recapitulation.

“Turiya and Ramakrishna” is a title that provides clues to the deep mysticism that pervaded Coltrane’s work, with Turiya defined as “a state of consciousness—the high state of Nirvana, the goal of human life,” and Ramakrishna referring to the Hindu mystic and spiritual leader. The tune itself is a blues, but a blues informed by Coltrane’s cascading scales and accompanied by Sanders’ bells. The horns stay out for this one, and we hear Carter and Coltrane circling around the central “three notes” of the tune, gradually turning the blues into a repetitive mantra. Carter’s solo is delicate, gently moving down the octave and circling back up to the top of the tune, playing only a few notes, but the right notes.

“Blue Nile” is the standout track from this set. Featuring Coltrane on harp and Sanders and Henderson on flute, the spiritual influences hinted at by the first side of the record are here laid bare. Henderson’s playing finds a few outer regions, while Sanders’ is unexpectedly tender and romantic; Carter plays a repeated rhythm on octaves, occasionally slipping in a supertonic or subtonic, while Coltrane’s harp warps the fabric of the cosmos. Riley’s drums seem to scuffle like the wings of a bird across the top of all the other moving pieces. It’s an amazing performance and one unlike anything else Alice Coltrane had played to this point.

“Mantra” puts the horns front and center, opening with an abstract wash of noise before Alice Coltrane enters with a brief theme. There is less in the way of a central melody here, and the musicians improvise in a more purely “free jazz” context. That’s not to say the playing is atonal; Sanders, in particular, moves in and out of several tunes before reaching an ecstatic and powerful peak, then stepping back into tonality over rolling chords from Coltrane. Her solo begins with those rolling chords over a bowed ground from the bass, and gradually the right hand evolves into a sort of ecstatic hovering flight as the left continues to hold firmly to the ground. The horns re-enter, seemingly taking to the same ecstatic flight, albeit in the lower register, before resolving to the irresolution of the dominant.

Alice Coltrane’s work was for years ranked, when discussed at all, as a lesser shadow of her husband’s, a dismissal that unfairly minimizes her own compositional and performing strengths. While Ptah was not reissued on CD until 1996, and didn’t see a proper remastering until 2022 (the source of my copy of the album), her music was nevertheless profoundly influential, and new discoveries from her extensive discography continue to appear. The release of her Carnegie Hall Concert this year is cause for definite celebration, and there appears to be more to come. Next week, though, we’ll check in once more with Pharoah Sanders for a different sort of performance.

You can listen to today’s album here:

Pharoah Sanders, Karma

Album of the Week, April 20, 2024

Pharoah Sanders continued to work with John Coltrane following his appearance on the Seattle club performance that became A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle. The first released fruit of their collaboration was Ascension, then Meditations, Om, Kulu Se Mama, Expression and a host of live recordings. While working with Coltrane, though, he started his series of recordings for Impulse Records, beginning with the November 15, 1966 session that produced Tauhid. What followed, though, was nothing short of a hit, an almost album length performance that cemented the advances of A Love Supreme, adding additional types of percussion and making the vocals a feature, and essentially codifying the “spiritual jazz” genre.

It’s not clear that Sanders knew this was going to be the outcome when he entered the RCA Studio with Bob Thiele in New York on Valentine’s Day, 1969 to record the first session, “The Creator Has a Master Plan.” What is clear is that he had something in mind much broader than a traditional jazz quartet album. The players included Trane’s onetime bassist Reggie Workman, alongside second bassist Richard Davis; James Spaulding (previously heard on The All Seeing Eye and Schizophrenia) on flute; Julius Watkins, who had previously recorded with Trane on Africa/Brass, on French horn; the great Lonnie Liston Smith on piano; Billy Hart on drums; Nathaniel Bettis on percussion; and Leon Thomas on percussion and vocals. A second session five days later yielded the second track, “Colors,” and featured the same players minus Davis, Spaulding, Hart and Bettis, and adding Freddie Waits on drums.

Leon Thomas was a big part of the distinctiveness of the new sound. He had sung in more traditional ensembles in the early 1960s but was drafted in the early 1960s. When he returned from the service in the late 1960s, substantially weirder, he began working with Sanders on this record. His contributions included writing the poems for both tracks, singing them, adding miscellaneous percussion, and especially employing a distinctive yodel. The yodel had roots in ritual practice and in African Pygmy music; you can hear examples of the latter in the field recordings of Colin Turnbull.

“The Creator Has a Master Plan,” recorded during that first Valentine’s Day session, takes up the entirety of Side One plus half of Side Two. There have been only a few records I’ve reviewed where I feel you get a better sense of the composition by listening to the CD version, and this is one. Sanders’ vision ranges for more than 30 minutes across the two sides and signals its intent from the opening notes of the saxophone, which quote some of the progressions that Coltrane used in A Love Supreme. In this case, though, they’re played over a host of percussion, flute, and piano chords, and the modal darkness quickly gives way to a more hopeful chord as Spaulding’s flute twirls overhead.

The ensemble pauses, then the bass picks up the main theme. Again seemingly inspired by A Love Supreme, the theme is an eight-note pattern formed by two closely related motifs that stretch out over an octave before resolving back to the tonic (V-I-V-IX, V-I-V-VIII). The bass theme is accompanied by tuned percussion and by Lonnie Liston Smith strumming the strings of his piano like a harp. Spaulding picks up the theme in the flute, and Sanders finally enters, first playing pedal notes on the supertonic and tonic and then freely improvising in a major key over the open tuning of the theme. His tone is mostly ballad-smooth, but there’s a little brimstone around the edges. Smith’s piano primarily sticks to reinforcing the core chords, and Watkins’ French horn primarily provides supporting color. This beginning section of the work—call it Prologue and Part 1—proceeds for almost seven minutes and 30 seconds before Leon Thomas enters.

Thomas’s vocal and percussive part, like Trane’s chant on “A Love Supreme: Acknowledgement,” serves to kick the whole performance into a higher plane. He both provides the explicit message of the song and adds vocal color from multiple religious vocal traditions, including the aforementioned Zaire Pygmy people, gospel, and traditions even further afield. Thomas also plays hand percussion, further adding to the ceremonial overtones. This first section comes to an end with a restatement of the opening theme, now with greater passion and energy, as though the band was preparing to wrap up the performance.

But that doesn’t happen; instead, at 13 minutes, the bass theme and opening recapitulates as though beginning the work again. But this time, after about two and a half minutes of Sanders’ soloing, the tempo accelerates to double speed and the real Pentecostal hollering begins, starting with Sanders and spreading to Watkins, the basses, and finally Thomas, who takes a wordless solo that first emphasizes the melody and then moves beyond it, employing multi-octave effects, falsetto, and more. (There are stretches that echo some of the Moroccan and Egyptian street performances that Peter Gabriel sampled in his Passion soundtrack, for instance the vocal color that underpins from 0:05 – 0:23 of “It Is Accomplished.”) It’s so intense that the solo actually seems to be overdubbed in a few parts. It’s in this section, by the way, that the LP version inserts a side break, returning on side 2 to absolute chaos with every player blowing or striking their instrument at maximum volume, saturating the entire sound field and providing something akin to a vision of a multi-eyed, multi-faced, multi-winged fleet of seraphim. It’s not for the faint of heart or sensitive of hearing.

At the end of this section, Sanders reintroduces the faster theme and signals a return to tonality, but not to the more subdued meditation of the beginning. We are still transcendent beings by this point, a point he quickly reintroduces by overblowing to produce additional harmonics. Thomas’ solo returns to a more melodic yodel, this time accompanied by a sustained pedal note in the bass and French horn. Finally, 28+ minutes in, Sanders returns to the original theme and tempo and provides a final recapitulation of the opening theme along with the final statement of the poem by Thomas, going into a fadeout. A fadeout! After more than 32 minutes of straight performance! This band was going to keep playing all day.

After the onslaught of “Creator,” “Colors” comes as a meditative, though not exactly peaceful, coda. The opening statement from Sanders could almost have come from the opening theme of “Creator,” but instead of the insistent bass groove we get a field of bells, arco bass, flute and piano chords that provides a meditative bed for Thomas’ sung poem. Here he dispenses with the vocal pyrotechnics, providing a straight reading of the Creator as the source of the “rainbow of love.” Sanders blows one last run of the theme from the prelude of “Creator” under the final statements of the colors, then lets Spaulding have a final crack at the gentle melody before finishing with a last two note statement of the octave.

There is no such thing as a jaundiced listen to this music; it remains mind-blowing and repays close, repeated listening. Bob Thiele knew he had something big on his hands with this session, but had to convince the brass at ABC. He’s quoted as saying, “Until the record came out, it was the same tired tune: ‘What kind of crap is this? This isn’t going to sell; it doesn’t mean anything; it’s a lot of junk; you can’t dance to it; you can’t listen to it;’ ad infinitum.” But sell it did, and topped the Billboard Jazz chart for 12 straight weeks.

Like all good gospels, Karma recapitulated and honored what had come before while simultaneously marking the birth of something new. We’ll hear some of what followed in its wake next week.

You can listen to the album here:

PS: Another really good review of Karma by Josh Mound can be found on “The Best Version of…” in Audiophile Style.

John Coltrane, A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle

Album of the Week, March 16, 2024

Following the January 1965 release of A Love Supreme, John Coltrane took it on the road with the musicians of the Quartet, playing a legendary handful of shows that presented the material, still unfamiliar to many audiences, with a newly expanded band. For years it was thought that a performance at the Antibes Jazz Festival on July 26, 1965 was the only surviving recording of these shows. However, in 2021 a new recording, of a performance at the Penthouse Club in Seattle, was unearthed, and it was astonishing — not only did it document Trane performing the entire suite plus additional interludes, it also featured an expanded band that added Donald Rafael Garrett playing a second upright bass alongside Jimmy Garrison; Carlos Ward, playing alto saxophone in what would be his only performance with Trane; and most importantly the tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, in a rare early appearance with the band.

Sanders, born Ferrell Lee Sanders in Little Rock, Arkansas on October 13, 1940, was still relatively unknown when he began playing with Trane, but he was far from inexperienced. Having moved to New York City in 1962 and with no fixed residence, the great Sun Ra gave him a place to live and encouraged him to use the name “Pharoah.” He performed with Billy Higgins and Don Cherry, coming to the attention of Eric Dolphy and John Coltrane. By June 1965 he was recording with Trane, first on his great free jazz work Ascension alongside the Classic Quartet and other guest players like Archie Shepp, Marion Brown, and Freddie Hubbard; then in October 1965 on this recording. He would go on to record more dates with Trane, including the milestone session Meditations and Om.

Garrett (born 1932 in El Dorado, Arkansas) had met Coltrane in 1955 while Trane was touring with Miles, and played with Ira Sullivan, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and Eddie Harris. In 1961 he played as second bassist with Coltrane’s group alongside Jimmy Garrison. Then in 1965 he met Trane again and was invited, along with Sanders, to join the band. And Ward was invited to sit in with the band after Trane heard him play. He can be heard on this record and on one track on the separately issued Live in Seattle, and went on to play with Rashied Ali, Abdullah Ibrahim, Don Cherry, and the funk band B.T. Express.

The performance of the suite at the Penthouse was preceded by two other sessions; on September 30 the group recorded the music for Live in Seattle, and the following day they recorded Om in a rented house in Lynwood, Washington. So the group had some time to gel with each other, and you hear that in the playing. The album opens with Trane playing a version of the fanfare that opens the suite, over chords in Tyner’s piano and arco bass. One of the two bass players then plays a free pizzicato solo that eventually evolves into the four-note “Love Supreme” motif, and the band is off to the races.

The whole performance feels like a stretched (or expansive) version of the suite. With the two basses in particular, there is more soloing throughout, with both Garrison and Garrett getting substantial solo time. Tyner gets extended passages where he explores alternate rhythms. Most importantly, you begin to hear all the players improvising at once on their own ideas and motifs, sometimes in different directions, nudging the performance more solidly in the direction of free jazz. It’s not “free” on the level of an Ornette Coleman performance, leaving rhythm and melody behind—in fact, it’s solidly grounded in both. But you can feel the strictures of chord changes and meter slipping away as the band collectively pulls in multiple directions, their performance shaped only by the outline: fanfare, motif, melody, motif played in all twelve keys. Then “Resolution,” “Pursuance,” “Psalm,” each separated from the other by improvised interludes. Each of the main movements explores more of the uncharted spaces beyond the roadmap.

Sanders’ playing in particular is worth calling out. While his early solo records showed a saxophonist with a gift for melody who played in relatively conventional styles, in Trane’s group he was there specifically to play freely and further the search. And search he did. Both saxophonists explore the outer realms of the sounds that can be produced by their instruments, overblowing (blowing so hard that the reeds vibrate in such a way that a sound an octave higher is produced) and producing split tone sounds (generating multiple sounds at once). It can be bracing listening; it is undeniably new.

Listening to the album provides an additional perspective on the musical search Trane was perpetually on. Having foregrounded melody as well as his formidable technique, he was now exploring sounds beyond the normal, and performance modes that included elements of religious ritual, including shaken bells, ecstatic “speaking in tongues,” and trancelike rhythms. Put together, you get the ingredients of the next iteration of Trane’s “spiritual jazz” formation, which had by this point moved beyond composition and even beyond more mundane improvisational practices and was into a freer, more ecstatic place. We’ll continue to explore elements of spiritual and free jazz through recordings from Coltrane and his circle through the rest of this series, starting next week with someone who just missed inclusion on A Love Supreme.

You can listen to this album here:

Friday bootleg time

An assortment of selections from Doom and Gloom from the Tomb that I’ve been meaning to check out for a while. In reverse chronological order (of posting, not of recording).

Sonic Youth, Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro, North Carolina, August 5, 2000 – falling neatly in between the first show I saw of theirs and the next two, squarely in the middle of their NYC Ghosts and Flowers period. Be ready for beat poetry.

Pharoah Sanders – Festival de Jazz de Nice, Nice, France, July 18, 1971  – Live Pharoah? Yes please.

Bill Evans Trio – Pescara Festival, Italy, July 18, 1969 / Vara Studio, Hilversum, Holland; March 26, 1969 – two live Bill Evans dates that sound worth checking out.

Yo La Tengo Does Dylan  – of course they do. Curious about the cover of “I’ll Keep It With Mine,” which is on the short list of Dylan songs that I’d consider singing in public.

Leonard Cohen – The Paris Theatre, London, March 20, 1968 – OMG.