Pharoah's Tale by Martin Williams

Martin Williams interviewed Pharoah Sanders for Down Beat magazine in late 1967 or early 1968. By then Sanders had been living in New York for five years and more recently had been closely associated with John Coltrane, and had released one solo album with Impulse Records. Before his move to New York he had been living in the Bay Area of California. What's clear is that Coltrane knew Sanders before he moved East. He and Trane became closer after the move, and he first sat in with Trane's group in January 1964 at the Half Note. Surprisingly, Sanders says in the interview he never became part of John Coltrane's group. However, it could be said that after the classic quartet, Trane never actually formalised another band. There was just too much fluidity. In a 1970 taped interview with Alice Coltrane, she talks about Sanders, 'who was in John's band.'

Pharoah Sanders by Don Schlitten

Pharoah's Tale by Martin Williams

Pharoah Sanders is 27 years old, and, surprisingly, that is young enough so that among his earliest musical idols were John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman.

Sanders was born in Little Rock, in 1940, and although his given name has sometimes been confused in print, it is Pharoah.

"My grandfather was a school teacher; he taught music and mathematics. Mother and her sisters used to sing clubs and teach piano. For myself, I started playing drums in the high school band. Then I played tuba and horn, clarinet and flute. In 1959, I started playing tenor saxophone, still in the school band," he says.

"At the same time I was listening to Jimmy Cannon, my band teacher, who played jazz. Richard Boone, the Count trombone player-he's from Little too. He would sometimes sit in the concert band.

"In my own playing I was more or less into rhythm and blues. I liked Earl Bostic a lot."

At the same time, Sanders had become interested in art and wanted to be any kind of artist, painter or commercial artist, just to do art work.

"When I finished high school in 1959, I was supposed to take either a music or an art scholarship. I didn't want to stay in Little Rock so I left for the West Coast. I went to Oakland Junior College for a couple of years, and then moved over to San Francisco. I majored in art. But I was getting some rock 'n' roll gigs playing tenor. I also played alto, flute, clarinet, and baritone whenever possible, but I had fallen in love with the tenor.

"On those blues jobs, I played mostly by ear, but I had some private lessons in Oakland which taught me about harmonics.

"By this time I was listening to Sonny Rollins, who was a big influence at first; John Coltrane, who was a later big influence; and Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Booker Ervin, Hank Mobley and Horace Silver's group. I loved Benny Golson on Moanin' with Art Blakey.

"When I heard Coltrane's Blue Train LP, I really didn't know what he was doing. I had never heard anybody play tenor like that before, with that range Most of the guys played just in the middle register.

"When I first heard Ornette's music I liked it-really, it was something! I seemed so natural, as if he weren't limiting himself, as if he wanted to let himself just go to the music. I remember talking to Ornette in 'Frisco. I don' know whether he remembers me from then.

"By that time I had begun to try to play that way myself. Sonny Simmons, and a lot of people I was playing with in Oakland at the time, were playing a lot freer. They had been playing that way before I came to California They heard me and invited me to come down and play sometime. I was kind of sceptical about it because up to that point all I had been playing was rhythm and blues. What they played had a good feeling, but I was wondering, what are they doing? Were they crazy? But it felt good. So, I just fell in with it too," he said.

"Later, I started playing jazz more conventionally and studying the basics -getting my chords and my scales." The mention of the basics sets Sanders to reflecting. "Actually I have never had a jazz gig of my own long enough to see what I can really do on conventional tunes. I would like to get one for at least six nights a week so I could try to express myself fully 'inside' and see both sides of it. I still take different kinds of jobs. I play rock 'n' roll for dances, usually in Brooklyn. It's a big help financially, and my profession is music, so it's my business to be able to play any kind of music."

Returning to his days in the Bay Area, Sanders remembers, "Once when John Coltrane came out to San Francisco, he was asking around about mouthpieces. So I told him that I had a bunch of mouthpieces, and that he could try them. I also said I would take him around to the different places in town if he wanted to try some more. I never thought he'd take me up on it, of course -he was a giant to me then. But he showed up one morning, saying, 'Are you ready, man?' I was really shook up! At the time, my own horn was in the repair shop and he offered to pay the bill so I could get it out. All day long we went around to pawn shops and more pawn shops, trying out different mouthpieces."

SANDERS ARRIVED IN New York in 1962. He had driven across the country with a couple of musician friends in a car which constantly broke down, but somehow they made it. He had absolutely no money. "I slept in the subway-the police didn't bother me-or in tenement hallways under the stairs. And I pawned my instrument," he recalls.

"I think my first gig in New York was one in a coffee house in the Village called the Speakeasy, with C Sharp and Billy Higgins . . . We made $8 a night. The job lasted almost a year. I used to live on wheat germ, peanut butter and bread-I still carry a jar of wheat germ in my instrument case. It's good food.

"I began seeing a lot of Billy Higgins. We would play together, talk, eat; might be together all day long. If he wasn't playing on his drums he would play on the table, or glasses with spoons or whatever else he found.

"I took some other jobs. Once I was a combination cook, waiter and counter-man, and all I got was what I ate. Then I caught on that I should be paid, and I split. I was just trying to survive, and it is harder to survive in New York than in Oakland or San Francisco. If I wasn't thinking about trying to survive, I was thinking about music. I didn't think much about commercial art by this time.

"A friend of mine who lived in Brooklyn, someone I had known in San Francisco, invited me to stay at his place. That's where I met Don Cherry, and we began rehearsing and playing together. We got one job at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. There was an exhibition of student art work and they wanted some of our kind of music along with it. I had to get my horn out of hock for that one, and the other guys in the group helped me by putting up the money.

"When I play, I try to adjust myself to the group, and I don't think much about whether the music is conventional or not. If the others go 'outside,' play free,' I go out there too. If I tried to play too differently from the rest of the group, it seems to me I would be taking the other musicians' energy away from them. I still want to play my own way. But I wouldn't want to play with anybody that I couldn't please with the way I play.

"Anyway, Don Cherry seemed to like what I was doing. I was getting different sounds out of the horn then. For my part, I was just trying to express myself. Whatever came out of the instrument just came out, as if I had no choice.

"Naturally, you have elements of music and musical skills to work with,but once you've got those down, I think you should go after feelings. If you try to be too intellectual about it, the music becomes too mechanical. It seems that for me, the more I play 'inside,' inside the chords and the tune, the more I want to play 'outside,' and free. But also, the more I play 'outside' the more I want to play 'inside' too.I'm trying to get a balance in my music. A lot of cats play 'out' to start with. But if I, myself, start off playing 'inside' and then let the spirit take over, wherever it goes, it seems better to me.

"I'm not trying to do something that is over somebody's head. My aim is to give people something. When I give them something they can give me something, the energy to continue."

The first time Sanders played with John Coltrane was at the Half Note in New York. "We had become pretty close and had been talking a lot. He would call me and we would talk about religion and about life. He was also concerned about what he wanted to do next in his music, about where he was headed.

"We got pretty close and sometimes he would say,'Come on down and play something with me tonight,' almost as though we were continuing the conversation. So I would just come down and start playing.

"By that time, I thought of him not just as a great musician but also as a wise man. But I was still a little self conscious and wasn't sure what to do with him musically. I thought maybe I was playing too long, and on some numbers, I wouldn't play at all. And sometimes I would start to pack up my horn. But he would tell me not to. Anyway, I'd never play as long as he did because, you know, he might play for an hour on one tune."

Sanders says he was never asked officially to become a member of Coltrane's group. He would just play with Coltrane from time to time, whenever he was asked to. "Then later, he might say,'I have a job down in Washington for a week. How about coming on down with me?' Or, he'd say he had a record date coming up and would I like to play on it too.

"Always, it was like a communication through music, like he knew some things that I wanted to know that he could express musically, and that I maybe had some things to contribute too. It's hard to talk about it, except in spiritual or religious terms, actually.

"Still, he had a lot of things on his mind musically. He wanted to decide what he should turn to next, and he needed time to find out. He was a perfectionist, and he wanted to grow, always. Whatever he did,he wanted it to come from inside himself, and he did not want to hold anything back, or hide anything he found there. Good or bad, it had to be expressed. Once he asked me what I thought he should do next, what he should work on-how could he create something different. I told him maybe he should try to better some of the things he had already done, go back and try again on older tunes. I don't really know if that was any help to him; I don't know whether that was what he was looking for or not."

Returning to the subject of his own playing, Sanders says, "In a group, I like to play with anyone who really wants to play, who really wants to put out the energy. If the players don't put out the energy it takes away my own."

If he is asked about the meaning of his music, Pharoah Sanders replies, "I don't like to talk about what my playing is about. I just like to let it be. If I had to say something, I would say it was about me. About what is. Or about a Supreme Being.

"I think I am just beginning to find out about such things, so I am not going to try to force my findings on anybody else. I am still learning how to play and trying to find out a lot of things about myself so I can bring them out."