On June 28, 1965, four months after the assassination of Malcolm X and just a few weeks before the Voting Rights Act became law, John Coltrane assembled his largest-ever ensemble to record Ascension. A beautiful and harrowing listen, the album’s sole piece extends across 40 minutes of thundering, screaming, and meandering free jazz, radically breaking from the formal elegance and tight group interplay he had epitomized with his “classic quartet” on A Love Supreme, released earlier that year. The album also marked a changing of the guard, with Coltrane welcoming into the spotlight a scrappy, untested generation of iconoclastic players, many of whom were beginning to embrace emergent strains of black-power philosophy in their music. Among them were such soon-to-be luminaries as Archie Shepp, Marion Brown, John Tchicai, and a young, unknown tenor saxophonist named Pharoah Sanders.
Sanders had arrived in New York a few years prior, struggling to get work and often living on the streets. Early collaborations with Sun Ra and Don Cherry helped him find his footing in the burgeoning free-jazz community; it was Sun Ra that suggested changing his name from Farrell to Pharoah. But it was his work alongside Coltrane that set him on the course he would follow for the rest of his career. Starting with Ascension, Sanders became an invaluable foil for Coltrane’s virtuosic, divisive deconstructions. “Sometimes I didn’t know whether Pharoah was doing the growling or John,” said Frank Lowe, a contemporary of Sanders who played alongside Alice Coltrane. “You know, you don’t stand next to a man and copy him—so Pharoah was pushed into other areas.”
Despite the prestigious alliance, with Coltrane publically praising him as a man of “tremendous spiritual reservoir,” many critics balked at the viscera of Sanders’ solos. Whitney Balliett, writing for The New Yorker, decried his playing as “elephant shrieks... [which] appeared to have little in common with music,” while the San Francisco Chronicle dismissed him as “primitive.” As the 1960s wore on, with the Vietnam War entering its second decade, the Black Panther Party forming in 1966, and the rise of a “turn on, tune in, drop out” youth culture, the beloved post-bop of only a few years prior seemed trampled underfoot by a disorderly new generation of squawking, honking interlopers.
What’s astonishing is how rapidly Sanders developed from a wildcard sideman into a confident bandleader after his mentor’s untimely passing, in 1967. Albert Ayler famously declared, “‘Trane was the father. Pharoah was the son. I was the holy ghost”; Sanders’ seven-year, 11-album run for Impulse! Records directly builds on the core premise of Ascension, stretching Coltrane’s templates across a string of masterpieces. These three invaluable reissues showcase the young Sanders confidently guiding a steadily growing panoply of “fire music” MVPs, uniting their disparate voices and egos to create a powerfully cohesive group sound: elegant, adventurous, warm, and ferocious all at once.
Tauhid, from 1967, is his debut for the label, and it plays like a mission statement. At the helm of an all-star sextet that includes Henry Grimes on bass, Dave Burrell on piano, and Sonny Sharrock on guitar, Sanders leads the group through three pieces that transcend the traditional “head/solo/head” structure (where, following a quick introductory melody, each player gets a turn in the spotlight before the piece returns to the “head”). On Tauhid, the pieces are suites that play like seances, with movements billowing and unfolding of their own accord. The group’s unity is powerful, creating a spiritual atmosphere that casts a spell from the opening bars.
Opener “Upper Egypt & Lower Egypt” takes the “Acknowledgement” section from A Love Supreme as a starting point before Sanders launches his group into the stratosphere. Where Coltrane kicked off his album with a quick 30 seconds of fanfare before diving in, Sanders lets Burrell and Sharrock lead with almost five minutes of roiling piano and guitar, backed by bells, thrumming bass, and cinematic tom rolls. It doesn’t take much to imagine a sacred rite of initiation performed in a darkened room filled with the scent of frankincense. This gives way to a bowed bass-and-piccolo duet between Grimes and Sanders that owes more to Toru Takemitsu’s fusion of European modernism and traditional Japanese music than New York’s jazz nightclubs. Nine minutes in, Grimes finally settles into a groove and the group falls into place, vamping on two breezy chords. When Sanders eventually joins in, just shy of the 12:30 mark, his opening notes tweak Coltrane’s introductory solo on A Love Supreme; it’s half homage, half breadcrumb trail, giving wary jazz heads enough of a reference point to stick things out while Sanders breaks bold new ground.
Less than four minutes in length, “Japan” follows, a lovely pentatonic march with Sanders on the mic. A gently swaying hymn with no particular flash (and no solos), it reinforces the group-hug friendliness that defines Tauhid’s softest moments and tempers its most aggressive. The album closes with the three-part “Aum / Venus / Capricorn Rising,” a suite that flexes the ensemble’s avant credentials. In the first minutes, Sanders makes good on his reputation, ripping through the foreground while Sharrock darts in and out of the fray, carving proto-punk shapes that anticipate no wave by almost a decade. Soon, though, he’s wrenching yearning melodies out with an undeniable expressive force. The group pivots right with him, tapping into a sound that’s as sophisticated as it is primal.
Jewels of Thought develops this dichotomy further, with a benevolent love-in on the A-side and a somber, dissonant astral voyage worthy of Sun Ra’s Arkestra on the flip. Leon Thomas’ vocal contributions are, for many, an acquired taste. With his earnest monologue on “Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah”—about a “universal prayer for peace” where “all you have to do is clap your hands, 1-2-3”—and his propensity to yodel, he has about as much gravitas as a summer-camp counselor. If you liked what you heard on Tauhid and were hoping for more, this addition may blindside you—it’s no surprise jazz yodeling failed to catch on. Yet despite the lingering dweebiness of Thomas’ performance, the piece soars. By allowing soulful prettiness alongside more vicious passages, Sanders opens the album up, connecting the dots between joyful communion and unflinching catharsis. A squalling solo toward the end of the side sounds like a cry from the deepest, most tortured part of his soul, but it’s supported by an unerringly mellow piano accompaniment (and answered by still more yodeling, now comfortably chilled out in the back of the mix). It’s a moment of deep vulnerability in a genre can often devolve into macho blowing contests.
If “Hum-Allah” is the sugar, then “Sun in Aquarius” is the medicine it helps get down. After an intro of reedy, North African-cribbing winds, thumb piano, and gongs, it yawns out like a terrifying chasm before letting Lonnie Liston Smith’s piano boil over for the better part of five minutes. Sanders is in devastating form, screaming through his tenor. Even after a mid-side comedown and a breathtaking bass duet from Cecil McBee and Richard Davis, he leaps back in undeterred, firing out one of his heaviest solos like a machine gun.
His fourth release for Impulse!, Deaf Dumb Blind (Summun Bukmun Umyun) may be Sanders’ finest work from this era. The album is split into two side-long sessions, and the group, now an octet, breathes as one like never before. Coming off of a busy touring schedule, the players were locked in, often building songs out of loose ideas or hints of an arrangement. If the title track finds the players in a joyous, near-telepathic groove, “Let Us Go Into the House of the Lord” is simply spiritual jazz of the highest order. Aching with emotion, it stands alongside Alice Coltrane’s “Prema” and Albert Ayler’s “Our Prayer” as a devotional masterpiece and a fulfillment of free jazz’s promise. Many of the same musicians from Jewels of Thought remain, and you can hear how subsumed they are in the music. They play on top of, around, and in between each other without ever making a wrong move. The song’s title couldn’t be more apt; the music exudes so much sorrow, hope, compassion, joy, and humanity it seems to truly reach for a home beyond our world.
The decades that followed saw Sanders’ career take different turns, never quite reaching the ecstatic highs of this era, and much of his early work fell out of print. What’s remarkable about these reissues is not only how timeless the music is, but how relevant it feels today. Many of his contemporaries seemed to be pushing forward to see how far out they could go and who could get there fastest. Sanders went straight for the source. By pursuing a spiritual approach, he created a body of work that responded to its own historical moment without being time-stamped by it. Shortly after Coltrane and his group recorded Ascension, LA was engulfed in the flames of the Watts riots; by the time Jewels was released, Martin Luther King, Jr., had been murdered. This turmoil and anguish is clearly audible in Sanders’ playing, and today, as the nation once again feels like it’s splitting at the seams, Sanders’ agonized cries resonate, as expressive and important as ever.
