In the Land of the Pharoah

In the May 1978 issue of Black Music & Jazz Review, Pharoah Sanders featured - on the back of the release of his album 'Love Will Find a Way'. Chris May wrote a two page spread on the Sanders story to date. Compared to other older Sanders' retrospectives in the blog, it's a different style, and perhaps a little lazy on Pharoah's post-Impulse output. However, it does have new information. The first paragraph I find strange in retrospect - that in 1977 and 1978 jazz was such a vigorous and influential force in popular music. And compared to 1968. Perhaps jazz had lost some of its cool then, but was it really so huge and influential ten years later ?

Pharoah Sanders' latest album, 'Love Will Find A Way' has just been released. Chris May discusses his story so far.

During the last two years jazz has become so vigorous and influential a force in popular music — commanding an audience of such unprecedented size and youth — that it's easy to forget the pitiful condition it existed in a mere decade ago. In 1968 the vast majority of "progressive music" fans, in both Britain and the States, looked on the style as a reactionary, sterile anachronism — something for middle-aged advertising executives to get juiced by in rip-off Maf night clubs.

Jazz, most definitely, was Not Cool. And then again there was Pharoah Sanders. As '68 turned into '69 you found saxophonist Pharoah's 'Tauhid' and 'Karma' albums turning up in more and more monolithic Grateful Dead-Spirit-Jefferson Airplane-statutory Ravi Shankar and/or Last Poets-Quicksilver Messenger Service collections. For though Pharoah was coming out of the same free-jazz bag as Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler and Sun Ra, he somehow wasn't perceived as a jazz musician.

And not without cause. Unlike most of his contemporaries Pharoah's music was so melodically accessible, so colourful, so mystical and so gloriously percussive that it effectively dodged the jazz stigma.

Post-Coltrane jazz it certainly was, but a stream so totally idiosyncratic as to defy conventional stylistic categorisation — wordless Sufic chants; pastoral topline lyricism; rampaging tenor solos which fused booting R&B grossouts, avant garde stream of consciousness atonality, overblown harmonics, guttural bass eruptions and one-voice chord clusters; electric guitars, clarinets and batteries of African drums and tuned percussions; rocking motor rhythms and free-rhythm collective breaks. Seemingly full of incompatibilities but actually synthesising with shattering, glistening unity. A trance inducing, harmonious discord. And a sound ideally suited to the pungent Afghani vibe of '69.

Pharoah's music, as his wife Thembi said at the time, "is a way of cutting across the field of music as a whole; it is not compartmentalized. He plays for everybody. He doesn't separate the music."

While jazz's mainstream breakthrough may not have come about until the advent of jazz-rock years later, Pharoah's contribution to the campaign, though generally unrecognised, was considerable.

Before looking in more detail at Pharoah's solo output from 'Tauhid' to date some necessary biographical fax 'n' info. Born Farrell Sanders in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1940 Pharoah first picked up music from his grandmother, who taught him piano. At school he learnt to play drums and clarinet before concentrating on sax and flute in his mid-teens. He was gigging with local R&B groups and sitting in with visiting bands (including Bobby Bland's) by the time he was 17.

Two years later he moved to Oakland, California and became deeply influenced by the early records of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy, gigging with Huey Simmons, Monty Waters, Philly Joe Jones and Dewey Redman among others. 1962 found him in New York (virtually penniless, he had to pawn his horn on arrival). Discovering Sun Ra, Pharoah took a dishwashing job at the GreenWich Village Playhouse in order to catch every night of the Solar Arkestra's residency, and at the end of the year he replaced John Gilmore (who'd quit the Arkestra to go on an overseas tour with Art Blakey).

He worked with Rashied Ali's and Don Cherry's groups before joining Trane's band in 1965, just in time to be featured on the groundbreaking 'Ascension' album, and remained a recording and gigging member of the group till the leader's death two years later. He also recorded with Ornette Coleman, Alice Coltrane, Don Cherry, The Jazz Composers Orchestra Association, Gary Bartz and Leon Thomas.

He formed his own band in 1965 and went on to cut his first name album for Bernard Stollman's trailblazing ESP label (also responsible for breaking other important new talents, including Sun Ra and Albert Ayler, with non-cult audiences). But it wasn't until he started recording for Bob Thiele's equally courageous Impulse label (thanks to the lobbying of Trane) that his name work came to its first maturity — on 'Tauhid'. By 1970 Pharoah was a major name on the jazz circuit and was doing well enough to have moved into an upper West Side town house. He continued recording for Impulse till the mid '70s, and recently signed with Arista.

At the Village Gate in NYC, with Richard Davis

Of the many ingredients in his music which contributed to Pharoah's assimilation by "non-jazz" audiences, beginning with the release of 'Tauhid', two are of pre-eminent importance: The spiritual mysticism which pervaded both his lyrics and his instrumental approach, and the multi-cultural idiom through which he communicated his message. Both were in matchless synchronicity with the prevailing atmosphere and aspirations of the 'alternative society" of the late '60s.

Though Pharoah drew on many cultures for instrumental colouring and texture - from Japan to India to South America- it was North and West Africa to which he looked in the main.

Egyptology had long been one of Pharoah's fascinations (as his very name suggests), and as interest in black African culture swept through Afro-American free-jazz circles in the '60s he also began to take an interest in Nigerian and South African music.

Many of the titles on his early Impulse albums evoked Africa - and even though Pharoah had never visited the continent he succeeded in conveying, through some strange process of transmitted osmosis, uncannily accurate atmospheric experiences of the music. In strictly structural terms these songs had little resemblance to the folk music of Africa; yet of all the jazzmen who were similarly inspired - notably Ahmed Abdul Malik, Sun Ra, Yusef Lateef, Archie Shepp, Trane, Art Blakey and Art Farmer (some of whom had actually been to Africa) - it was Pharoah's impressionistic portraits which most vividly captured the spirit of the various styles."Upper And Lower Egypt" ('Tauhid'), "Ore-Se-Rere' ('Elevation') - not one of them bore any melodic or rhythmic resemblance of note to, respectively, the Sudanese, Xhosa, Ghanaian and Nigerian musics they were inspired by (even "Ore-SeRere", which was actually written by Nigerian juju bandleader Ebenezer Obey, had only the most tenuous connection with the actuality of juju). But through his own use of African instruments (thumb pianos, bells, gong-gongs, cow horns, balaphons, shekeres and reed flutes) and the inclusion on his albums of pianists, guitarists and percussionists who had either visited the continent or worked with African musicians in the States Pharoah captured the vitality and colour of his subject matter with striking effect. And tangible sincerity.

It was, similarly, the patent sincerity of the mysticism in which Pharoah's music was seeped which made that Pharoah's releases under his own facet so compelling and infectious. Lacking all artifice, sectarianism or obscuranticism his message - essentially a simple plea for universal peace and harmony - remains even today among the most heartfelt and uplifting ever recorded in any field of popular music. Coltrane, himself a profoundly religious man, once said of Pharoah "he's a man of huge spiritual reservoir. He's always trying to reach out to the truth. He's trying to allow his spiritual self to be his guide . . . . it's been my pleasure and privilege that he's been willing to help me, that he is part of the group."

The spirituality and non-literalist global inspiration of Pharoah's music were not only honest but closely linked, each elevating the impact of the other. Pharoah eloquently tied the two together when he wrote "we all try to play from high energy. We look at music spiritually - where it's all coming from -not by theory or styles, just the high energy. We can play church, rock, African- anything we want to feel ... What comes to me is truth. The music takes in everything . . . I try to expand the territory of music so that when it leaves the club or concert hall it goes into the universal. I play for the Creator. And my music talks for me."

The most deeply satisfying are those cut for Impulse between 1967 and 1971; five consistently innovative, immensely inspired albums which display a steady build-up of emotional intensity, creative vision and spiritual profundity 'Tauhid' (1967), 'Karma' (1968), 'Jewels Of Thought' (1969), 'Summun Bukmun Umyun' (1970) and 'Thembi' (1971). It was on 'Summun' that Pharoah first brought all the seemingly disparate ingredients of his music together with faultless, thoroughly centred perfection. His composing, performing and arranging talents had by now fully blossomed; as had the rapport between himself and the trio of sidemen who formed the backbone of the group pianist Lonnie Liston Smith (a highly percussive, extrovert player and a master of the African thumb piano and balaphon), bassist Cecil McBee (a gloriously hymnic stylist who'd previously worked with Yusef Lateef) and drummer Clifford Jarvis (another ex Lateef sideman, who'd also worked with Pharoah in the Solar Arkestra, and an African orientated cross-rhythm adept equally at home propelling the band with surging all-over-the-kit atomic explosions or delicate cymbal and cow-bell patterns). 'Thembi' took the music to an even higher level, one which Pharoah has never regained, and in "Bailophone Dance" offered a five minute distillation of his music which, if any one track can be so described, is the final consummation of all that had been achieved in the sequence of albums.

The period 1972 to 1976 saw a gradual decline in the overall quality of Pharoah's work - none of the albums released during this time are as consistently satisfying as those which culminated in the chef d'oeuvre 'Thembi', though most of them include tracks which recapture some of the magic. Pharoah appeared to be marking time, going over previously explored territory, and in an attempt to re-engergise himself chopping and changing his sidemen with bewildering (and often counterproductive) frequency. 

'Wisdom Through Music' and 'Village Of The Pharoahs', however, (both recorded in 1973) compare not unfavourably with 'Karma' and 'Jewels Of Thought', still achieving much that was fresh and exploratory.

From 1976 to date it has to be said that Pharoah has failed to come up with the goods, though it would be dangerous to say that a talent as big as his has burnt itself out once and for all. Indeed Pharoah does appear to be groping towards a new direction - but he's far from reaching it yet.

His latest album, 'Love Will Find A Way' (Arista), is an uncomfortable mishmash of varying styles ranging from rather routine crossover jazz to technically faultless and superficially pleasing soul numbers (including an instrumental version of Marvin Gaye's "Got To Give It Up"). The future certainly doesn't look any too bright - but I for one am still keeping my fingers crossed. 

Recommended Listening

'Tauhid'(ABC-ImpulseA-9138) 1967

'Karma' (ABC-Impulse A-9181) 1968

Jewels Of Thought' (ABC-Impulse AS-9190) 1969

'Summun Bukmun Umyan' (ABC-Impulse AS-9199) 1970

Thembi' (ABC-Impulse AS-9206) 1971

'Wisdom ThroughMusic'(ABC-Impulse AS-9233) 1973

'Village Of The Pharoahs' (ABC-Impulse AS9254) 1973

'Elevation'(ABC-Impulse AS-9261)1974

Ref : Black Music & Jazz Review May 1978. Photographer unknown.