Jazz Articles about Pharoah Sanders

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Pharoah Sanders: Karma

by Trevor MacLaren
October 5, 2005

Pharoah Sanders Karma Impulse! 1969

John Coltrane left behind a legacy of experimental and extremely spiritual work whose timeless quality still reverberates today. After his untimely death many poseurs came out to stake their claim as the next Coltrane. Many tried and many failed. Then in 1969 a former sideman of Coltrane's, Pharoah Sanders, stepped out from the shadow of his mentor and recorded Karma, which bore the soul of Coltrane's musical ...

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Pharoah Sanders: Pharoah

by Rex Butters
August 31, 2005

Recorded in 1964, the same year as Gods on Safari, his Sun Ra recording, and months before Ascension, his first with Coltrane, Pharoah's First pictures the legendary saxophonist Pharoah Sanders at the threshold of his historic and still startling cosmic operettas with John Coltrane. It was originally released on LP as two sidelong jams and has been reissued here as part of the ESP reactivation series with insightful interviews.

Both tracks feature a hard swinging bebop quartet, and ...

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Pharoah Sanders: Pharoah

by Trevor MacLaren
April 14, 2005

With Bernard Stollman opening up the ESP vaults, jazz fans find themselves privy to some of jazz's most interesting and eclectic recordings remastered for the first time. Among the initial remasters is one of ESP's first releases, Pharoah's First, recorded in 1964.

This record has always been a thorn in the discography of saxophonist Pharoah Sanders. The playing is solid, but his legendary ripping chops are extremely subdued, making this disc seem out of place. Not to mention the fact ...

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Legend of the Pharoah

by AAJ Staff
December 8, 2004

By Jennifer Odell After a recent performance of Before the Blues , a new ballet by the Lines Ballet Company, someone from the audience asked choreographer Alonzo King where he got the idea to pair a Pharoah Sanders composition with music by the baroque composer Arcangelo Corelli. “It was odd that people think in such boxes," said King, who has commissioned Sanders to score two other ballets in the past ten years. “It's the ...

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John Coltrane: The Olatunji Concert: The Last Live Recording

by Colin Fleming
July 12, 2004

Composed almost entirely of violently shifting textures and a commitment to dissonance that all but blasphemes melody and musical forms, this document of John Coltrane's last recorded concert from April '67 is decidedly horrific, threatening, and appropriately staggering. Having forsaken his famous “sheets of sound" for a new, overly propulsive medium in the mid-sixties, Coltrane's last phase was nearly anti-jazz or, if one wants, almost anti-music. Yet on this recording it is Pharoah Sanders who truly has his ...

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A Fireside Chat With Pharoah Sanders

by AAJ Staff
March 21, 2003

As a preface, I have been a devotee of Pharoah Sanders (Ferrell Sanders) since I first heard the now legendary John Coltrane recording, Meditations. From Meditations, I came to the storied Ascension session and that furthered my interest to Live in Japan (includes an almost hour long version of “My Favorite Things"), for my two cents, the most unappreciated and critically misunderstood album in Trane's discography. That spawned my purchase of Sanders' Karma, which gave way to Black Unity. For ...

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Pharoah Sanders/ Hamid Drake/ Adam Rudolph: Spirits

by Derek Taylor
August 1, 2000

The New Thing of the 1960s was in many ways an insurgent movement- both building from and at the same time challenging the prevailing traditions in Jazz. Players like Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp were among the most outspoken and recognizable mutineers. But when the fires of insurrection abated in the 1970s, both men were criticized for what many mistook to be an apostasy from their former selves. Shepp returned to jazz tradition, cutting records that relied heavily on readings ...