You’re probably not going to like this set. But I don’t want to underestimate you. To make the critical balancing act worse, I don’t want to oversell you, either. I do this all the time in my house, praising to the skies a movie or a recording that my family then confesses didn’t at all live up to my encomium.
Pharoah Sanders took the tenor sax out of the hands of John Coltrane, so to speak, and proved that its previously understood limiting factors could be stretched unimaginably further. He got all manner of sound out of its bell, many of them not immediately pleasing to humans and probably harmful to pets.
While in his early 20s, Sanders and his horn settled in New York City, where he went from occasional homelessness—often crashing with Sun Ra—to gigs with the likes of Don Cherry. By 1965, he was part of John Coltrane’s ensemble. You’ll hear his early work on the Coltrane albums “Ascension” and “Meditations.” But if Coltrane was playing “anti-jazz,” as downbeat opined in 1961, Sanders had further to go.
Post-Coltrane, he continued releasing albums on the Impulse! label, with a few side-trips to Arista and Strata-East, but in 1980 he signed with the young Theresa label, beginning an eight-album association that lasted through 1986.
He started relatively unobtrusively with 1979’s Ed Kelly & Friend, the friend remaining unspecified as Sanders was still under contract to Arista. As Mark Stryker’s excellent liner notes observe, “the front cover carried a coy title and pictured only the pianist, with a nearby saxophone, Kufi hat and shoes.” Kelly was a San Francisco-based pianist, thoroughly grounded in a post-bop style, whose collaboration with Sanders appears on the last of the seven CDs in this set. It may be a good place to start, as we hear Sanders in a comparatively restrained mode to start things off, as in “Answer Me, My Love,” a waltz popularized by Nat King Cole. But we soon get to “You’ve Got Have Freedom,” a Sanders original that he often revisited, in which the saxophonist gives voice to the mighty overtone-laced shrieks that his fans embraced.
“Journey to the One,” which leads off the collection, was recorded in December 1979 and features John Hicks on piano, Ray Drummond, bass, and Idris Muhammad, drums, but an array of guest artists includes Eddie Henderson, fluegelhorn, on “Doktor Pitt” and “You’ve Got to Have Freedom,” the latter also featuring a vocal quartet that includes Bobby McFerrin. And again there’s “You’ve Got Have Freedom,” this time stretching over seven minutes.
Paying tribute to Coltrane, Sanders included Rodgers & Hart’s “It’s Easy to Remember” on this album, and here is where you’ll once and for all decide if you’re prepared to embrace the Sanders approach. It’s one of 14 pieces among the Theresa recordings (all of which are included in this set) that includes fellow-musicians from his Coltrane days.
Bobby Hutcherson’s vibes lead us into the title track on Rejoice, an album recorded in 1981. Vocalist B. Kazuko Ishida then exhorts us to join in a celebration of peace and love, which is fine with me. Comprising four sessions with some changes in personnel, listen for harmon-muted trumpeter Danny Moore shoe-horning a quote from “Peter and the Wolf” into Benny Carter’s “When Lights Are Low” and some absolutely gorgeous ballad work from Sanders on “Ntjilo Ntjilo (Lullaby to a Child about a Canary),” popularized by Miriam Makeba.
“You’ve Got Have Freedom,” returns on the live album Live, this time enjoying the freedom of over 14 minutes before “It’s Easy to Remember” also returns. Recorded in 1981, it’s a quartet session with pianist Hicks, Walter Booker on bass, and drummer Muhammad, the last-named now a frequent Sanders collaborator. Heart Is a Melody is another live album, recorded the following year. Listen to Sanders’ labyrinthine work on Coltrane’s “Olé,” clearly at home with the Spanish-inflected beat as he turns from a sweet statement of the melody to something rather more fierce. I’m always amused at the quotes one discovers; listen to pianist William Henderson work a bit of “Have You Met Miss Jones” into his bop-inflected solo on Tadd Dameron’s “On a Misty Night.”
One of the key aspects to many of Sanders’s performances is the frequent wish to mesmerize. You’re invited to sink into the fabric of a number, and here it’s “Heart Is a Melody of Time,” a Sanders-William Fischer original that features an eight-voice chorus (overdubbed, but you wouldn’t know if it the liner notes didn’t tip you off).
His album Shukuru pushes the barriers still further by putting Henderson on a Kurzweil synth to dirty up the sound, especially on the title track as Sanders more calmly enjoys the song’s melodic aspects. Some of Sanders’s fans were dismayed by what they perceived as a generally more relaxed characteristic throughout the Theresa recordings, explained by Sanders’s expressed wish to get back in touch with his swing-era roots. I’ll leave it for you to judge, but there is no lack of improvisation in a manner suggesting this wish.
And Sanders and Henderson were the driving forces behind most of Pharoah’s final Theresa album, A Prayer before Dawn, from 1986. Two Coltrane originals, “After the Rain” and “Living Space,” are featured, but the album finishes with extended versions of Dave Brubeck’s “In Your Own Sweet Way” and Mel Tormé’s “The Christmas Song.”
This appraisal only begins to mine the gems scattered throughout the set, but, again, your enthusiasm will be stoked or (probably severely) tempered by the trademark Sanders sound. It’s an acquired taste, but, once acquired, I think you’ll happily return to it. As usual, Mosaic has done a superior job in collecting and restoring the material, which is presented, again as usual, in a handsome limited-edition box.
The Complete Theresa Recordings
Pharoah Sanders
Mosaic Records #282 – 7 CDs
www.mosaicrecords.com
B.A. Nilsson is a freelance writer and actor who lives in rural New York. His interest in vintage jazz long predates his marriage to a Paul Whiteman relative, and greatly helped in winning her affections.
