![]() Ascension, recorded in 1965 and released the following year, was a late-in-life turning point for Coltrane and, by extension, Sanders, who would become known for using his instrument in novel - anarchic and atonal - ways. Sanders' fortunes in New York slowly but surely turned around as he established a solo career, and by 1965 he was a member of what would be Coltrane's final quartet. (Sun Ra, it's said, was the one who encouraged him to take the name Pharoah.) Eventually, he was forced to pawn his horn. Sanders' landing in New York was rocky, however, resulting in intermittent homelessness as he practiced, sporadically, with Sun Ra and his Arkestra. In 1961, Sanders relocated to New York, looking to join the city's fecund jazz scene, where Coltrane was a reigning figure. While there, Sanders first met and befriended John Coltrane, though they wouldn't work together until many years later. After high school - and a switch from the clarinet to the alto saxophone, before finally settling into the tenor sax - Sanders moved to the West Coast around 1959, attending Oakland Junior College, expanding his musical palette and pursuing the horizon, sitting in with avant-garde saxophonists like Sonny Simmons and Dewey Redman. His love of music began at home, through his choir-leading grandfather. Originally split across two sides of the 1969 LP Karma, the track was later issued on CD as a single track, nearly 33 minutes long. ![]() Sanders' single best-known piece of music is "The Creator Has a Master Plan," an expansive performance from 1969 that peaks in wailing cacophony but ends with a buoyant, soulful vocal refrain. Among these albums are Black Unity, consisting of one album-length improvisation, and Thembi, which nudges a post-Coltrane language into the realm of Afrocentric groove. That combination of traits characterized Sanders' defining solo work of the '70s on Impulse! Records, which had been Coltrane's label home, and was still a welcoming harbor for experimentalism. "Sanders has consistently had bands that could not only create a lyrical near-mystical Afro-Eastern world," wrote one champion, the poet-critic Amiri Baraka, "but sweat hot fire music in continuing display of the so-called 'energy music' of the '60s." Spirit was the overwhelming force in Sanders' music: It emanated from his tenor and soprano saxophones in fiery blasts or a murmuring flicker, and it suffused his ensembles, which featured several generations of improvisers equally willing to dig in or soar free. His death was announced in a post on social media by the record label Luaka Bop, which had released his celebrated 2021 album Promises and confirmed by a publicist who worked on the release. Pharoah Sanders, the revered and influential tenor saxophonist who explored and extended the boundaries of his instrument, notably alongside John Coltrane in the 1960s, died on Saturday morning in Los Angeles. ![]()
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