Saxophonist

Pharoah Sanders declared in a 1971 Down Beat interview, "I play for the Creator...And my music talks for me. " The jazz saxophonist's prodigious body of work—including, but not limited to, his work with trailblazer John Coltrane—encompasses a wide variety of styles, yet it has always been a reflection of his spiritual searching. With his mastery of "circular breathing" and a variety of other techniques, Sanders has helped to expand the range of his instrument as well as the parameters of "free" or avant-garde jazz. "I don't separate what I do musically from my spiritual life," he insisted to Boston Phoenix columnist Ted Drozdowski. "I can't. So it's always about what's most pure, always striving for perfection."

Sanders was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, to a very musical family. "My grandfather was a schoolteacher; he taught music and mathematics," he related to Martin Williams of Down Beat. "My mother and her sisters used to sing in clubs and teach piano. For myself, I started playing drums in the high school band. Then I played tuba and baritone horn, clarinet and flute. In 1959, I started playing tenor saxophone, still in the school band." It was the sound of the tenor sax that most captivated him, though at first he played primarily rhythm and blues, not jazz. His school band teacher, Jimmy Cannon—whom he has always credited as a major influence—introduced him to jazz. Even so, Sanders envisioned a career not in music but in commercial art. It was to this end that he headed off to California to study at Oakland Junior College.

Seduced by Burgeoning Jazz Scene

It soon became clear to Sanders that his heart was in music. As he told Down Beat, "I had fallen in love with the tenor." He moved to nearby San Francisco and began playing any gig he could get, most of them rock and roll or blues jobs. At the same time, he gravitated toward the burgeoning jazz scene; it was a particularly exciting period for the form, which had expanded upon the free-form possibilities suggested by bebop, venturing into even more sonically adventurous territory. Saxophone innovators Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Omette Coleman and others presented new possibilities for jazz, and Sanders wanted in. He started to expand his technique. "When I was living in Oakland," he told Seconds, "there was a guy who taught at a music school and he taught me a whole lot about the overtones, how to play more than one note at a time. I practiced how to control that for years and years, and a lot of the time I can just about tell what's going out before I play it."

Eventually, Sanders decided to go to New York City, where most of the jazz innovation of the period was taking place. On his arrival in 1962 he hoped to phone John Coltrane but found out that his number had changed. Though he played gigs with some notables, including Don Cherry, Coleman, and Sun Ra's Arkestra, he was impoverished. While playing with Ra's band, he recollected to Martin Johnson of Down Beat, "I didn't have my own place, so when I left [the Arkestra], I was out on the streets. It was hard times. Everyone who stayed in New York City struggled till daylight came. I used to give blood to make five dollars. Since a slice of pizza was only 15 cents and a candy bar cost a nickel, if I had a dollar, that would take care of you and me all day long!" Sanders also held short-term restaurant jobs for little or no pay, slept on subway cars or under tenement stairwells, and often ate only the wheat germ he kept in a jar in his saxophone case. He reflected to Johnson that he "should have waited to come to New York, but I came and waited it out."

Explored "Out" Jazz with Trane

He found Trane—as tenorist John Coltrane was known—playing at a club called the Half Note in 1963. Despite his destitute condition, he was invited to play with his idol. The two musicians, both devout Muslims, also became friends, as Sanders informed Martin Williams in a 1968 Down Beat profile: "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." Coltrane famously described Sanders as "very strong in spirit and will"; together they began exploring the outer reaches of "out" jazz, utilizing dissonance and otherwise shattering the established rules of what constituted "music" in the name of emotional truth; they often outraged purist critics and fans in the process. "If Trane was well on his way out of this world before he met Sanders," opined Vibe writer Greg Tate, "the two of them boldly took African-American improvisational music where no music had gone before. " Some of their stops along the way were Coltrane's albums Ascension, Meditations, and Expression.

Tate further noted that Coltrane was rumored to have put down his sax and screamed at times during gigs, as if the instrument couldn't adequately vent his feelings Yet "Sanders never had to do that because his sound—which involved heavy use of multiphonics, a technique in which several tones are blown simultaneously, creating a dense, squealing sound like a thousand pigs being gutted at once—was such that no single human voice could match its intensity." Coltrane died in 1967, and with him died a great deal of critical interest in the avant-garde; even so, Sanders was only beginning his own odyssey. He had recorded his debut solo release, First Album, on the avant-garde label ESP in 1964; beginning in 1967 he recorded a slew of albums for ABC's cutting-edge Impulse! label. Among his most celebrated work during this period was "The Creator Has a Master Plan," from the 1970 disc Karma.

"My playing has a lot of energy," Sanders averred to Jazziz magazine. "Some people ask why my tunes are so long," he said, adding, "I don't think the tunes are long enough." He has employed a number of special techniques to find unique sounds. After hearing a record recorded at the Taj Mahal—an ornate, ancient mausoleum in India—and marvelling at its echoes, Sanders told Drozdowski of the Boston Phoenix, "I had a dream of trying to get that effect—of playing in a big cathedral or something—by circular breathing." This tactic allows him to fill his sax with air and continue to work the valves and produce sound even when he removes his mouth.

Drozdowski complained that in the 1980s Sanders "made a string of albums so lightly arranged and jazzpop flavored, so easily digestible, they seemed like pablum." Yet Sanders himself has never expressed concern about pleasing those who expect "out" experimentalism in every recording. Indeed, he refuses even more general labels. "I have never said I was a jazz player; I'm just a player," he asserted to Johnson of Down Beat. "I get jobs with whoever calls me, you know, and I perform in whatever the situation may be." Even so, many fans of his more venturesome work saw Sanders's contributions to Ask the Ages—the 1992 album by guitarist Sonny Sharrock, who'd played on some of the sax player's early solo work—as a return to form.

Recorded with Gnawa Musicians in Morocco

In 1994 Sanders revisited his debt to Coltrane with the album Crescent with Love, though he has been cautious about dwelling on this part of his career; he also contributed a track to the Red Hot + Cool AIDS benefit album. When offered an opportunity to travel to Morocco to record an album with native musicians there, he jumped at the chance. Producer Bill Laswell set up the date for his experimental fusion label Axiom; Sanders would meet and record with Gnawa musicians, descendents of West Africans who were brought to Morocco as slaves. The Gnawa specialize in music as a healing ritual; this particular group was led by singer-musician Maleem Mahmoud Ghania. Just before Sanders departed for North Africa, he heard that his friend Sharrock had died; as a result, one piece on the album—the elegiac "Peace in Essaouira"—was dedicated to his memory. "I felt like he was there when we were making the record," Sanders told Drozdowski.

"Ever since I first listened to Pharoah years ago," Laswell recalled in Pro Sound News, "I heard tones that go back very far, beyond time. I always felt his sound came from somewhere else, and that relates to Gnawa music. He's always had that presence. He sounded very old when he was really young. I never thought of it as jazz or as the saxophone: it was another kind of energy; it was spiritual music." The result of Sanders's collaboration with the Gnawa players, The Trance of Seven Colors, was released late in 1994. "Highly improvisational and daring," the recording "goes beyond jazz, roots and folk music into a territory charted more by spiritual movement than physical moment," enthused College Music Journal, concluding by calling it "simply brilliant." While a Down Beat reviewer felt that the project yielded "mixed results," Trance was named Disc of the Month by CD Review, which ventured, "Ghania and Sanders achieve a musical collaboration that sounds very old, yet entirely new."

Pharoah Sanders has never garnered the recognition that many of his colleagues have, yet he has continued to explore the possibilities offered by free-form jazz for over three decades. Practicing yoga daily and experimenting with boxes of mouthpieces in search of just the right sound, he still seemed—at the age of 55—an enthusiastic youngster. "I'm just trying to get my music where it's supposed to be and not worry about other things," he affirmed to Jazziz. "I believe in one God but have no formal affiliation with religion. Nor with politics. I'm musically involved with all cultures. I think everyone has something to say musically."

—Simon Glickman