Mark de Clive-Lowe & Friends: Freedom: Celebrating The Music Of Pharoah Sanders

Albums by artists who are best known for their work outside jazz are best approached with caution. Keyboard player Mark de Clive-Lowe's Freedom: Celebrating The Music Of Pharoah Sanders is one such. Before moving to Los Angeles, Clive-Lowe lived in London, where he was prominent in the late 1990s/early 2000s broken beat movement, which, without getting too complicated about it, fused electronic dance music with a little jazz and funk.

Clive-Lowe, however, is no wannabe jazz musician. He has chops, as he demonstrated on Live At The Blue Whale (Ropeadope, 2017), a tribute to Yusef Lateef, Sun Ra and Ahmad Jamal. Freedom was also recorded live at the Los Angeles club, which, sadly, closed in late 2020, a casualty of the pandemic.

A 2 x CD/2 x LP set, Freedom was recorded in January 2018, and why it took so long to get released is unclear. But no matter. It is here now—and it is a cracker. Clive-Lowe assembled a strong lineup for the event: consummate spiritual-jazz vocalist, Dwight Trible, tenor and soprano saxophonist Teodross Avery, who already has a convincing John Coltrane tribute album in his c.v. (2019's After The Rain on Tompkins Square), bassist Corbin Jones, drummer Tommaso Cappellato and percussionist Carlos Niño. The well recorded, ninety-minute package features a dozen tunes associated with Sanders, most of them originals and mostly from his late 1960s/early 1970s Impulse albums, but also including "You've Got To Have Freedom" from 1980's Journey To The One (Theresa).

What appeals about Freedom is not that Clive-Lowe and company set out to replicate Sanders' arrangements and performances but that they purposefully did not. The opening track, "Upper Egypt," sets the band's direction. It cuts almost immediately to the chase with stonking solos from Avery and drummer Cappellato, whereas Sanders' original was all about the lengthy, teasing intro.

Trible is heard on half the tracks, making his entrance on track two, "Elevation," on a reading which begs retitling as "Levitation," and which has Jones putting his acoustic bass down and picking up a sousaphone. Inevitably, the track is as reminiscent of British tenor saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings' Sons of Kemet and its tuba player, Theon Cross as it is of Sanders. But there is an appropriate circularity to that. Trible also excels on "You've Got To Have Freedom" and a fifteen minute "The Creator Has A Master Plan."

And so the fun continues. The penultimate track, the West African-inspired "Ore-Se-Rere," is a fittingly joyous knees-up, preceding the encore "Memories Of Lee Morgan." But it makes one wish the gig had instead ended with Sanders' even more ebullient, yet neglected, nod to West Africa, "High Life." That, along with edits which end a couple of tracks rather too abruptly and the curious, under-three-minute fade-outs of "Greeting To Saud (Brother McCoy Tyner)" and "Elevation," are the only gripes.

They are also minor gripes. Freedom is a great album.