Promises

Credited to Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra. The main sessions were at Sargent Recorders in Los Angeles in summer 2019, and the strings at AIR Studios in London in summer 2020, during the pandemic, in a socially distanced process using 100 microphones per RA. Sanders had learned of Shepherd's work in 2015 after hearing Elaenia; it was his first studio album in over a decade and the last released before his death. The piece opens with a central motif on synthesizer, piano and harpsichord; Sanders's tenor saxophone is sparse, wordless vocals arrive in movement four, the strings climax in movement six and the saxophone ends at the close of movement seven. Shepherd told RA that Sanders's playing was like a megaphone for his soul, and described his fourth-movement vocalizing as ornithological, like birdsong. Sally Herbert conducted, Carmine Lauri led the strings and Julie Mehretu's painting Congress is on the cover.

Metacritic scores it 86; Pitchfork's Mark Richardson called it a clear late-career masterpiece and gave 9.0, the Observer's Kitty Empire called it breathtaking, and Uncut's Stephen Dalton found it frustratingly slight. It topped the year-end lists of Mojo, Paste and Time. The film Promises: Through Congress, by Trevor Tweeten, premiered at the Whitney Museum on April 24, 2021. MusicBrainz lists a first release of November 24, 2020, which we cannot explain.