Pharoah Sanders

Little Rock to New York

Ferrell Lee Sanders was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, on 13 October 1940, the only child of a school cafeteria cook and a city worker. His grandfather led a church choir and his mother sang to a harmonium. He played drums in church, then clarinet, alto and finally tenor saxophone in high school, and as a teenager played Little Rock's R&B clubs behind Bobby Blue Bland and Junior Parker, sometimes from behind a curtain because white audiences did not want to see Black musicians.

In 1959 he moved to Oakland, studied art and music, and first met John Coltrane in the Bay Area. Around 1961 he went to New York, where he was often homeless, slept in the subway, sold his blood and pawned his horn; people called him Little Rock. Sun Ra, who gave him somewhere to live and clothes, is said to have encouraged the name Pharoah, which he took when he joined the musicians' union. He made his first album, Pharoah's First, for ESP-Disk in 1964.

With Coltrane

Coltrane heard him at the Village Gate and in 1965 brought him into his band, where Sanders stayed until Coltrane's death in July 1967. He played on Ascension, Meditations, Om, Kulu Sé Mama and Live in Seattle, his overblown, screaming tenor and split tones pushing the music further out; Albert Ayler put it as Coltrane the Father, Sanders the Son and himself the Holy Ghost. He also played on Alice Coltrane's Journey in Satchidananda.

The Impulse! years

Signed to Impulse! in 1966, he made eleven albums there, from Tauhid (1967) to Love in Us All (1974), a run his producer Ed Michel called arguably the greatest on the label. Karma (1969), with the singer Leon Thomas, made his name: its thirty-two-minute The Creator Has a Master Plan, heard as a sequel to A Love Supreme, got FM radio play and put a free-jazz record into Billboard's album charts. With the pianist Lonnie Liston Smith he made Jewels of Thought, Deaf Dumb Blind and Thembi (1971), adding African percussion, bells, koto and balafon to a sound now called spiritual jazz. Live at the East gave him his highest jazz chart position.

After Impulse!

Pharoah (1977), recorded for the small India Navigation label in a converted spring-water factory, is built around Harvest Time; Sanders disliked it and resisted its reissue for years, but it has since become one of his most loved records. Through the 1980s he recorded for Theresa, winning a Grammy for Blues for Coltrane in 1988; in the 1990s he worked with the bassist and producer Bill Laswell, including The Trance of Seven Colors, recorded in Morocco with the Gnawa master Mahmoud Guinia. He became an NEA Jazz Master in 2016.

In 2015 he heard the electronic producer Floating Points' music and asked to meet him. Their collaboration, Promises, recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra and released in 2021 when Sanders was eighty, was named album of the year by Mojo, Time and The New York Times and shortlisted for the Mercury Prize. He played his last concert at the We Out Here festival in England in August 2022, closing with The Creator Has a Master Plan, and died at home in Los Angeles on 24 September 2022.

On stage

He was a constant performer for nearly sixty years, from Coltrane's late band to his own quartets with John Hicks and William Henderson. The Creator Has a Master Plan is the song he played most, often at enormous length. Filmed performances include a 1975 Paris radio concert, Mark Allen's Pharoah Sanders Live in San Francisco, with Kazuko played in an abandoned tunnel, and his eightieth-birthday show at Zebulon in Los Angeles in 2020. A year after his death Promises was performed at the Hollywood Bowl with Shabaka Hutchings in his place.

Standing

Ornette Coleman called him probably the best tenor player in the world. Kamasi Washington, Shabaka Hutchings, Nubya Garcia and James Brandon Lewis are among the players who carry his sound forward, and his Impulse! records have influenced artists from Marvin Gaye to Iggy Pop. Asked about his playing in 1995, he said he was not much of a technical player; what he did was express.

Just let the music come, and spend as much time as you can listening.

Pharoah Sanders, at 80