Pharoah Sanders Quartet: Live At Fabrik

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 sum became greater than its parts.

By June 1980, when Live At Fabrik was recorded in Hamburg, Germany, Sanders had been through half-a-dozen such acculturations. He began his professional life as a honker and screamer in R&B bands, before diving into paintstripping free-improv, first under his own name at style HQ, ESP-Disk, then briefly with Sun Ra and, for several years, with John Coltrane, with whom he also absorbed modalism. When Coltrane passed, Sanders was already developing a less abrasive cosmic jazz with Alice Coltrane, a style he pioneered on his own-name Impulse! debut, Tauhid in 1967. In the mid 1970s he increasingly embraced material from the Great American Songbook and simultaneously ramped up the Africanisms in his music.

All these phases and stages come together on Live At Fabrik, often on the same track. Sanders leads a crack quartet completed by pianist John Hicks and drummer Idris Muhammad, both featured soloists, and bassist Curtis Lundy. The album, which has good audio, is in effect a live performance of material from Sanders' historic Journey To The One (Theresa, 1980), which had been made in December 1979, when Hicks and Muhammad were already in the band and shortly before Lundy replaced Ray Drummond.

All but one of the five tracks on Live At Fabrik were debuted on Journey To The One, the exception being Sanders' evergreen "The Creator Has A Masterplan." Four of the tracks are Sanders originals, the cover is Richard Rodgers' "It's Easy To Remember," a sideways nod to John Coltrane, who included it on Ballads (Impulse!, 1963). The album opens with Sanders' future evergreen "You've Got To Have Freedom," which is given a passionate eighteen-minute workout. It then cools out for thirteen-minute "It's Easy To Remember," and cranks up again for a twenty-minute "Dr Pitt," a tribute to Allen Pitt, founder of the Theresa label, for which Sanders recorded nine albums during the 1980s, beginning with Journey To The One.

The set closes with a foreshortened "Master Plan," half of which Sanders gives over to introducing the band. He had already crafted an unvarying script for such announcements: each musician was "one of world's leading" pianists or "the great" pianist or whatever. Sanders might always have said this, but he also always made it sound like he was saying it for the first time and one sometimes saw musicians grow an inch or two in response as he spoke. The encore is another burner, "Greetings To Idris." Total playing time is just under seventy minutes.

Live At Fabrik is a terrific album. The wonder is it was not released long ago.

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