John Coltrane, speaking to jazz musician Albert Ayler, once described himself, Pharoah Sanders and Ayler as “the father, the son and [the] holy ghost”. Sanders played sideman to Coltrane on many crucial recordings, and, like Coltrane, Sanders could cut it both ways: roll out a spiritual groove that landed like breakers on the shore, or splice the air itself into a trigonometry of fire and aether. He leant into a broadly multicultural spiritualism in his music, but could take flight in ferocious exaltations on his saxophone. His music spoke volumes, while he himself preferred not to, and is at the core of any spiritual jazz discography. As Ben Ratliff wrote in the New York Times in 1999, Sanders was “one of the holy monsters of American music”. With the passing of the son, the last member of Coltrane’s last band is gone, and a crucial connection to the potent and now legendary New York jazz scene of the 1960s and 70s is severed.
Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Farrell Sanders began by playing a clarinet he bought from a recently deceased member of the congregation at his church for $17. He moved briefly to Oakland, California, then in 1962 hitch-hiked to New York without a plan. He arrived homeless, essentially, and took to donating blood to earn money to eat. He listened to jazz being played in the clubs from outside, lived off cheap pizza and worked odd jobs, sometimes sleeping in cinemas in the day. He was not alone in this deprivation – in a review of reissues in The Wire 343, music journalist Philip Clark reminds us that: “learning the vicissitudes of the jazz life, you’re reminded of how thoroughly these musicians were marginalised, socially and culturally”. In a 2020 New Yorker interview he was described as still seeming like just another musician trying to make a living – which has much to say about the lack of provision for towering cultural figures of American jazz such as Sanders.
In New York, he carried his horn everywhere in its lumber box. He sat in on sessions where he could, and occasionally assembled bands from musicians roaming the city like him. It’s regularly reported that Farrell was re-christened Pharoah by Sun Ra, but the truth was more prosaic – it was in fact a name Sanders chose for himself on a whim when he signed union papers. He did meet and play with the Arkestra in 1964 and there are recordings of his sessions with this group from December of that year. Around this time, he also played with Don Cherry and Paul Bley, and recorded his debut as bandleader for Bernard Stollman’s ESP-Disk label. Stollman described Sanders as brusque in that brief meeting: he came in, recorded an album, and left without saying much at all.
In September 1965, when he was still relatively green, Sanders joined Coltrane’s band (Coltrane was 14 years older than him). He played with him on now iconic jazz albums including Ascension, Meditations and Om. Coltrane died two years later, after which Sanders played with Alice Coltrane, including on her classic Journey in Satchidananda and Ptah, The El Daoud.
Sanders recorded around 40 releases as a bandleader, and continued to play John Coltrane’s pieces, even as he insisted on cutting his own path. The core of his sound is found in the dense strata of albums made for Impulse in the late 60s and early 70s, which he recorded at a rate of two or three a year, ignoring the label’s instructions about tracks and timings. Sanders, as he often said in interviews, just played. A case in point is the essential Karma from 1969, which includes two expansive long pieces and whose influences and intent are manifest in every element: On the cover Pharoah sits in a seated yoga pose, lit by a pale aura under dancing pink and orange psychedelic lettering. From the first moments of side one, his saxophone enters like robes on regal carpets, trailed by a lush forest of shakers, bells and flutes, and followed by vocal exaltations.
His playing was once described as being “like midnight riptides” – deep and fluid, possessed of powerful force and intent. His singing contains an intensity of feeling – it is devotional in passion and intuitive in delivery. In Love Will Find a Way, for example, the vocals are a lyrical motif that drive the playing itself through emotion, not form.
His singing though, stood in stark contrast to his speaking – in interviews across the decades, journalists despaired at his terseness or apparent lack of interest in answering questions. In most, he spoke in frustratingly general terms. Many of his interviews are from the last 20 years, a time at which he was already a living legend, but in the short answers he does give he is straightforward and unaware of his status. In one he outlines doubts about whether he had been ready to play with John Coltrane; or whether Alice Coltrane liked the way he played.
However, despite being by his own admission a person who didn’t speak much, he impresses upon his interlocutors a sense of what some called majesty, and repeatedly speaks of ambitions to make “beautiful” sounds. “I play one note, maybe that one note might mean love. And then another note might mean something else. Keep on going like that until it develops into – maybe something beautiful,” he told the New Yorker.
There is an unambiguity to Sanders’ music – it is simple in its mission towards beauty, and it is this intent that perhaps endears listeners to Sanders’ early 70s work more than other avant-garde spiritual jazz players that emerged from his milieu. He evokes an open-armed, non-specific spiritualism. When there is a softness to Phraoah’s tone – as on Thembi’s Astral Travelling, or even the modernist looping of the exquisitely paused moment of Harvest Time – there remains an intensity generated by his expansive flights, that has the power to evoke the illumination of painterly shapes, like weather over landscapes. Balancing his melodic motifs was a ferocious and transcendent playing style: knotted to a groove, he would tack upwards with a fiery intensity, heard in the screaming insistence with which he re-enters the fracas on Black Unity, alongside Marvin Peterson’s trumpet.
Like former collaborator Don Cherry, Sanders’ music contained references to a multicultural spiritualism – although unlike Cherry’s utopian communality, the nature of Sanders’ spiritual vision remained fairly elusive – “I look at all religions and just put them all into one,” he said. There were regular references to Egypt, and to karma and tawhid. He wore robes and also incorporated instruments into his music that were more commonly associated with folk and traditional music, from African percussion such as balafon and congas to thumb pianos and wooden flutes. (His collaboration with gnawa musician Maleem Mahmoud Ghania is an essential stop in his discography – an ecstatic fusion produced by the prodigious Bill Laswell.)
After around two decades without a recording as leader, Sanders’ 2021 return with Floating Points (AKA Sam Shepherd) and the London Symphony Orchestra was received rapturously. It paired his playing with ambient electronics and orchestra, in a single-track, nine-movement piece that became his most widely recognised album outside the jazz world – it was described as “breathtaking”, “hauntingly beautiful”, and “enchanting” by both mainstream and specialist jazz reviewers. Crucially, Promises reiterated Pharoah’s living legend status, and brought his music to a younger generation of listeners. Until very recently, he was appearing live, where audience members were equally awed and troubled by his presence and frailness.
Sanders’ spiritual jazz was a church with open doors, and it’s his sound’s luminous, open-armed welcome that made him the son and that endeared him to a broad audience. Like his peers, he glorified a higher spiritual power accessed through the vibrations of music, and if he never quite verbally articulated the nature of that power or spirituality, it is because he was saying everything with his playing. As Clark wrote of Sanders’ early sessions: “his group are playing music, but he’s found the thing itself”.
• This article was amended on 26 and 27 September 2022. Albert Ayler did not play with John Coltrane as an earlier version said, and Coltrane’s “the father, the son and [the] holy ghost” quote was mistakenly attributed to Ayler. This has been corrected. It was further amended to reflect that Sanders never appeared live with Floating Points.
