FREEDOM, REFLECTION, INTROSPECTION AND SPIRITUALITY
THE ESSENCE OF PHAROAH SANDERS ON A LONG OUT-OF-PRINT COLLECTION
Sanders’s discography from the 1960s and ‘70s is well-represented in the canon, but his recordings from the 1980s on Theresa Records, a small but ambitious San Francisco Bay Area label, remain overlooked, misunderstood and underrated.
The Complete Theresa Recordings of Pharoah Sanders captures the saxophonist in transition, brokering a compelling truce with the jazz tradition without mortgaging his avant-garde bona fides. Sanders embraces the blues imperative, melodic interpretations of the Great American Songbook and jazz standards.
His group features fiercely swinging, post-bop rhythm sections. Among the A-listers on board are pianist John Hicks, bassists Ray Drummond and Walter Booker and drummers Idris Muhammad and Billy Higgins. Top-tier guests making cameos include vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, trumpeter Eddie Henderson, drummer Elvin Jones and vocalist Leon Thomas.
The Complete Pharoah Sanders Theresa Records Limited Edition Box Set
In your earliest years of performing, you’re called in downbeat magazine “the damnest tenor player in the English language” by A. B. Spellman, one of the country’s top critics, who 57 years later still recalled the “sounds that he had made on his horn that wouldn’t leave me. Sounds that were exclusively his, sounds that seemed thrown out of the bell with a jet force and a shrapnel edge.”
At the same time, the noted New Yorker jazz writer Whitney Balliett compares your sound to “elephant shrieks,” and Dennis Hunt, in the San Francisco Chronicle, calls it “primitive” and “nerve-wracking.”
In other words, you’re making an impression. You’re Pharoah Sanders, you’re 25 years old, and you’re already considered one of the most consequential jazz musicians in history. A few years later, as a leader, you release “Karma” with its masterwork, “The Creator Has a Master Plan,” widely deemed among the most important jazz records of all time. You’re still not 30 year old.
So then what?
A More Mature, But Still Smoldering, Voice
A decade after his signature contributions to Coltrane’s band, and his own groundbreaking work on Impulse! records, Pharaoh Sanders was still exploring, still re-defining, and still raising eyebrows and quickening pulses live and on record. Some have chosen to describe his later recordings — which included standards as well as interpretations of popular music — as his “rethinking period,” with the possible connotation that he was turning away from more passionate, hard-edged music.
Some critics don’t understand the nature of the creative process, which can involve embracing new ideas without turning away from earlier pursuits. In fact, many musicians who had fallen in love with the freedom avant-garde music provided found themselves looking back at the music traditions that preceded their careers.
In the case of Sanders, his life-long exploration brought him to Theresa Records and the albums he made from 1980 to 1987. Fans of Sanders’s earlier work will find in those recordings plenty to satisfy and remind them of the music that made his name — the spiritual themes, the inclusion of non-Western instruments, the dense backdrop supporting his ravishing horn work, and his unbridled passion.
But other tracks remind us that Sanders was similar to his former boss and mentor John Coltrane in that he could bring you to tears with a ballad, or breathe new life into a song you know from the radio. The two strains in his work were all within Sanders. While some would say he softened, others praise his later work for the potential it provides for inexperienced listeners to immerse themselves in the saxophonist, and work their way back to his earlier dates.
Sanders’s work for Theresa Records gets unjustly ignored, but hopefully that changes with the Mosaic release of The Complete Theresa Recordings of Pharoah Sanders. Pharoah Sanders remained brave and free, while also finding ways to express himself on more approachable material.
