The Creator Has a Master Plan

Sanders wrote the music and Leon Thomas the words; it began as Pisces Moon, and in Sanders's telling Thomas's first lyric was mundane until Sanders asked for words that would enlighten people. Recorded in a single day in February 1969, it opens with a chant and a bassline that consciously echo Coltrane's A Love Supreme, builds through extended free passages of overblowing and multiphonics to a wailing peak, and returns to a buoyant sung refrain. Thomas yodels, a technique he said came to him in a church in Jersey City and connected to speaking in tongues.

It got FM airplay despite its length and remains Sanders's best-known piece. Louis Armstrong recorded it in 1970, and it has been covered by Don Cherry, Norman Connors, The Gun Club, Brooklyn Funk Essentials and John McLaughlin. Sanders returned to it all his life, live in Tokyo in 2003, with Joey DeFrancesco in 2019, and at his eightieth-birthday concert, and it was the last thing he played on stage, at We Out Here in August 2022. The upload in the hypersongs web is the 1995 CD edit joining the LP's two sides.