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Pharoah Sanders: Love Is Here The Complete Paris 1975 ORTF Recordings
by Jack Kenny
The saxophonist Pharoah Sanders was often described as an enigma of jazz, once famously characterized as “a mad wind screeching through the root-cellars of Hell." That “mad wind" is absent on Love Is Here: The Complete Paris 1975 ORTF Recordings, but the enigma remains. This pivotal album captures Sanders stretching out, away from his Impulse! Records contract, exploring a sound that moves beyond late-stage John Coltrane and places a greater emphasis on tone, melody, and lyrical expression. Recorded ...
Continue ReadingStrata-East, James Brandon Lewis & Phil Haynes
by Maurice Hogue
Back in the '70s and '80s, flicking through the LPs at a favourite record store and finding the latest Strata East releases made the trip worthwhile. Established by trumpeter Charles Tolliver and pianist Stanley Cowell, the label that was dedicated to spiritual jazz and social consciousness was releasing music by some of the most important artists of the day. Now a new partnership between Strata-East and Mack Avenue Records is bringing the opportunity to newer generations to check out this ...
Continue ReadingAlice Coltrane: The Carnegie Hall Concert
by Mike Jurkovic
The most perfect of time machines, with no errant destinations and no abrupt landings, The Carnegie Hall Concert transports one to a time when artists took their art seriously, when it was sacrosanct. Alice Coltrane's harp comes on like the siren lure of angels, like a missionary, calling all to stop their labor. It seems to say, “Come to listen, come to wonder, come to rest, don't be afraid." And Coltrane wasn't, not ever. Here she was with ...
Continue ReadingPharoah Sanders: Upper Egypt & Lower Egypt
by Chris May
This little beauty, all sixteen minutes of it, is the opening track of Pharoah Sanders' first own-name masterpiece, Tauhid (Impulse!), recorded in 1966, released in 1967, and the blueprint for Sanders' style of astral jazz. Remarkably, many jazz enthusiasts, including Sanders fans, seem not to have heard Tauhid--and one leading tenor saxophonist on London's alternative jazz scene had never even heard of the album until it was brought to their attention in an interview a couple of years ago. Sanders ...
Continue ReadingOn Minimalism: Documenting A Musical Movement
by Ian Patterson
On Minimalism: Documenting A Musical Movement Kerry O'Brien and William Robin 449 Pages ISBN: 9780520382084 University of California Press 2023 Much like jazz, the origin story of minimalism is messy and hard to pin down to a date. And like jazz, definitions of minimalism can be rather slippery or downright contentious. Such challenges, thankfully, have not stopped editors Kerry O'Brien and William Robin from colourfully depicting a movement(s) in all its weird and ...
Continue ReadingPharoah Sanders: Pharoah (Box Set)
by Chris May
With the passing of Pharoah Sanders in September 2022, almost a year ago at the time of writing, and bearing in mind advances in sound-restoration technology, we can anticipate a stream of previously unissued Sanders recordings being released in the years ahead. If this outstanding 2-CD / 2-LP box set is anything to go by, bring it on. Disc One is a straight reissue of Sanders' oft pirated 1977 album Pharoah (India Navigation), albeit with much improved ...
Continue ReadingPharoah Sanders Quartet: Live At Fabrik
by Chris May
One reason Pharoah Sanders was such a special artist was the prismatic nature of his music. When Sanders lit on to a new avenue of investigation, he did not in the process reject what he had been doing up until that moment. Instead, he wove the new perspective into the existing structure, enriching rather than replacing it. The result was a rainbow in which the joins between what might have been, in lesser hands, incompatible instead became inaudible, and the ...
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