Pharoah Sanders’ group rolled up all the best qualities from his early-1970s LPs into a newly reissued set that bursts with joy and discovery. It’s a concert that sounds more like a party than a seance.
When Pharoah Sanders played tenor saxophone with John Coltrane in the 1960s, his tone was harsh and wild. Soloing alongside Coltrane on records like Ascension, Om, and Live in Japan, Sanders’ horn would shriek and howl and cry, reaching a pitch of earth-shaking intensity on pieces that pushed jazz to the limits of legibility. But after Coltrane’s death in 1967, Sanders began exploring a different path. Playing with Alice Coltrane on Ptah, the El Daoud and Journey in Satchidananda, and on his own albums for the Impulse! label, his sound was still searching, but now it was lyrical, and his musical settings often included trance-inducing grooves. After a half-decade enduring the blast furnace of free jazz, Sanders’ style grew more spiritual and cosmic and started looking to music from around the globe for inspiration.
The records Sanders made for Impulse! in the first half of the 1970s are marked by intensity and emotional focus but also by accessibility. Solos sometimes included intense overblowing, but sunny melodies and rich instrumental textures bent the music toward peace and light. This is where we find Sanders and his band when they played a show in Paris in 1975. His Impulse! period was behind him, and a few years away were the records for Clive Davis’ Arista, where he’d make deeper forays into R&B and even touch on disco. While he was in this in-between space, Sanders’ group rolled up all the best qualities from his early-1970s LPs into a set that bursts with joy and discovery, positive vibrations radiating in every direction. It captured a gig in a studio at the studios of Radio France with a capacity of about 800 people, the site of live albums by Cannonball Adderley, Freddie Hubbard, and Grant Green. The quality of the sound is exceptional. Given the sonics and the wide appeal of the set, this isn’t a bad place to start for someone new to his work.
The essence of Sanders’ music in this period is the two-chord vamp. This wasn’t the only structure he used and he would occasionally take on standards or tunes by John Coltrane, but vamps undergirded a lot of his most memorable music. Most of the tunes on “Live in Paris (1975)” are built from simple basslines by Calvin Hill, and pianist Danny Mixon seesaws back and forth between two chords, with a few variations. Music that goes on for minutes on end with only two repeating chords creates a special mood. It’s not unlike listening to the sound of breathing. Tension builds and releases with each successive bar, but the feeling is open and easeful, bringing to mind dreamy images—trees moving outside a car window, waves crashing into a shore. A two-chord vamp suggests travel, but it never feels like it’s going anywhere in particular. The journey, rather than the destination, is what counts.
Such a harmonic framework is perfect for Sanders, who stretches out on solos that are melodic and lyrical but still relatively simple, a triumph of tone and phrasing possible only when virtuosity is a given. “Love Is Here,” performed in two parts, mostly centers on a vamp, with Hill playing his bass high on the neck to give the groove an elastic propulsion, as if he’s in front pulling the band behind him. At times, Sanders goes into the fiery overblowing that he made his name with, but these eruptions never last long, and they seem celebratory rather than violent. He also sings through his horn, creating a beautiful bird-like yelp that blurs the lines between voice and instrument. Similar techniques are found in “Farrell Tune,” another classic-sound vamp that bears some resemblance to Sanders 1971 tune “Thembi.”
Sanders’ reins in his most far-out musical conceptions here; it’s a set that sounds more like a party than a seance. The original version of “The Creator Has a Masterplan,” which debuted on Sanders’ 1969 album Karma, ran over 32 minutes. But this take is more focused, keeping the original’s searching melody but simplifying the arrangement. Mixon gets harp-like tones out of his piano, with quick trills on the upper keys that sound almost like strums, and he breaks out for a funky solo. “I Want to Talk About You” is a ballad closely associated with John Coltrane—it appears on both Soultrane and Live at Birdland—and it’s the one change-up on a set that is otherwise quite unified. Sanders gives it a yearning, though relatively straight reading, and the standard’s chord changes offer a welcome diversion from the consistent groove.
Three of the six tracks feature the word “love” and another suggests that God knows what he’s doing, so the overriding mood here is one of comfort and bliss. On the closing “Love Is Everywhere” Sanders sings and chants as often as he plays his horn, sounding like a preacher at a revival leading a call-and-response. Hearing his rough vocals over the impossibly peppy and cheerful music compels the untrained singers among us to join in. The song’s false ending, taking a page out of James Brown’s book, is pure communal ecstasy, filled with an organ swell, crashing drums, and chants that seem to bring every Parisian in the room to their feet. It’s so stirring, it makes you want to look around wherever you are when listening to confirm what he’s singing: Love is everywhere. Could it be? Whatever contrary evidence exists elsewhere in the world, now or any other time in history, Sanders makes a convincing case for its omnipresence on this particular day 45 years ago.
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