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The Mystical VibeZ of Pharoah Sanders (October 13th 1940 – September 24th 2022)

He played the most ferocious saxophone in jazz and then spent fifty years making some of the gentlest music anyone has recorded. Eighteen tracks for Pharoah Sanders, 1940–2022.

Farrell Sanders, called Pharoah

Pharoah Sanders was born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1940 and arrived in New York broke enough to sleep on subway trains. Sun Ra took him in and gave him the name. Then, from 1965, he joined John Coltrane's final band — the group that made Ascension and Meditations — and became the most extreme voice in a music that was already at its limit. His playing in that period is pure overtone: shrieking, multiphonic, closer to a human scream than to a saxophone.

What happened after Coltrane's death in 1967 is the more interesting story. Sanders spent the following decades making music of extraordinary tenderness, built on modal vamps, chanted vocals and long, patient builds. The ferocity never left, but it became something he deployed rather than something he lived in.

He died in September 2022, two years after making one of the best records of his life.

What to listen for

"The Creator Has A Master Plan" is the essential Sanders recording — over thirty minutes in its full form, with Leon Thomas singing and yodelling, moving from serenity into total chaos and back. It is one of the great pieces of American music.

"Astral Traveling" and "Love Is Everywhere" are the gentle end, and "Journey In Satchidananda" with Alice Coltrane is the most beautiful thing either of them made.

The Movements come from Promises (2021) — his collaboration with the electronic producer Floating Points and the London Symphony Orchestra. Made when he was eighty, it is a single continuous composition built on a seven-note figure, and it introduced him to an audience who had never heard a jazz record.

The Phyllis Hyman tracks — "As You Are" and "Love Is Here" — are the soul-vocal chapter and are rarely heard.

"My One and Only Love" and "Central Park West" show the standards player, and both are Coltrane references.

Go deeper

Karma (1969) contains "The Creator Has A Master Plan" and is the album. Thembi (1971) is the strangest and most beautiful. Promises (2021) is the late masterpiece.

Alice Coltrane's Journey in Satchidananda is the companion record and features him throughout.

And for the tradition he belonged to — spiritual jazz — Sun Ra, Don Cherry, Lonnie Liston Smith and Leon Thomas are where to go next.

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