PHAROAH SANDERS

PHAROAH SANDERS

“Aum is the most powerful word in this universe. It means God, it means peace, it means the beginning of things... (When I use the word) a kind of magic takes place. It gives me a lot of peace of mind, it relaxes me, it protects me when I’m in public or anywhere else. It is a word which can bring you up or down — whichever way you want to go. ”

Pharoah Sanders

Pharoah Sanders was talking about a familiar component of Hindu religion and a personal element of his spiritual life, but he could just as easily have been talking about his music. In a time when musicians in both rock and jazz are breaking their necks trying to see who can be more cosmic, Pharoah Sanders stands as one of the few artists of our day to whom that beleagured word applies in its most profound sense.

John Coltrane, speaking in 1966 when Pharoah was one of the galvanic pivots in the master’s band, caught the essence of the man: “Pharoah is a man of large spiritual reservoir. He’s always trying to reach out to the truth. He’s trying to allow his spiritual self to be his guide. He’s dealing, among other things, in energy, in integrity, in essences.”

Sanders possesses, as did Coltrane, the seemingly superhuman facility for taking raw feeling, rage, yearning cries and rushing energy, melding it with a religious reverence and awe in the face of the infinite and somehow transmuting the whole mixture of spiritual purity and post-^lues wails into one of the most transcendent, moving aural experiences you will have in a lifetime. If you think that’s hyperbole, it may be in part because words pale before the power of his music. And I am not alone in that hyperbole.

Early in Pharoah’s career, when his music was just beginning its almost vertical ascent into ever-higher realms of energy-transfixion, David Rosenthal wrote (in British Jazz Journal): “High and shrill tone in the upper register combine with lower growls to give the effect of a piercing scream which lifts the listener right out of his seat with its intensity and power.”

Ralph Gleason, writing (in the San Francisco Chronicle) of Pharoah’s work with Coltrane, spoke of “long, almost continuous presentation of improvisation,” with “ensemble climaxes of stupendous intensity.”

earned his chops, the volcanic intensity of Pharoah’s music comes as no surprise. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas on October 13, 1940, he moved to the Bay Area at the age of 19 and began study and gigs with Hughie Simmons, Ed Kelley and Smiley Waters. In three years, he moved to New York, where his music and spiritual personality really began to take off. He worked with Rashied AJU, Don Cherry, Sun Ra, John Gilmore, and finally, of course, Coltrane.

It was with Coltrane that Pharoah came fully into his own at last. Trane was the most profoundly influential musician of the Sixties, after all, as well as the first jazz musician to mate sound with spirituality in a truly far-reaching way. There is no doubt that of all the players, on saxophone or any other instrument, who had their heads turned around and even the courses of their lives changed by John Coltrane, Pharoah is the man’s unchallenged spiritual heir. Musically, he may have influenced Trane in some ways as much as vice versa, as Nat Hentoff pointed out in the liner notes for the Coltrane Om album: “Sanders added a particularity of both sound (high, urgent) and precedent — breaking ideas, thereby stimulating Coltrane even more to ways of hearing and an expression that continued to develop and surprise. They surprised himself, I expect, as much as his listeners.”

Or, as Coltrane himself put it: “He is one of the innovators and it’s been my pleasure and privilege that he’s been willing to help me, that he is part of the group ... Pharoah is constantly trying to get more and more deeply into the human foundations of music. He’s dealing in the human experience.”

That basic humanity has taken Pharoah Sanders, in the years since Coltrane’s death, across history and geography, through the dimensions of religious experience into astrology and the reaches of the galaxy and back, as cosmic as ever and with perhaps even more fire, to the sidewalk earth where people are beginning to find each other once more in a fierce rebirth of human wonder. From Tauhid’s “Upper and Lower Egypt,” the culmination of Pharoah’s study of ancient Egyptian religion and culture, to Karma’s assertion of total nonsectarian panspirituality, to the extended journey of “Sun in Aquarius” and the renewed flashy fury of Black Unity, Pharoah has never stopped. And he never will.

Lester Bangs