Pharoah – Pharoah Sanders
By Miles Silverstein
On 24 September, 2022, the world lost Pharoah Sanders. The celebrated jazz saxophonist lived a complete life, beginning in the bands of Eric Dolphy and John Coltrane and ending with a masterful late career oeuvre alongside Joey DeFrancesco or Floating Points. Sanders is widely heralded to have reshaped the jazz zeitgeist, revitalizing subgenres at will. His work with late-career John Coltrane is said to be the catalyst through which free and spiritual jazz absorbed one another. His time with Alice Coltrane helped bring Eastern understandings of tonal structure to the forefront of jazz experimentation. Most notably of all, however, was his inimitable solo career. As a bandleader, Pharoah Sanders stood at the front of experimental jazz for nearly two decades. Releasing classics like Karma and Thembi, he was a cemented mainstay of jazz in its most free-thinking years. Like any other artist with a career lasting decades, Sanders’s music underwent great change from record to record. Every step of Pharoah Sanders’s artistic journey was widely available for any fan keen on the Pharoah Sanders deep dive – every step except one.
This is the story of Pharoah Sanders’s 1976 lost album, Pharoah.
In 1974, Pharoah Sanders released Love in Us All, a polarizing free jazz Coltrane tribute replete with dynamism and experimentation. However divisive the album was, it was to be expected from a man with such a penchant for jazz experimentation. In 1977, however, the next release from Sanders was Love Will Find a Way, which existed completely in opposition to the catalog up until that point. Not in that it was a new take on jazz experimentation, but that Sanders had, in effect, made a commercial pop record! Here was the new Pharoah Sanders album, ditching the overblown saxophone and machine-gun drumming for big band funk arrangements, slap bass, and a Marvin Gaye cover. Where did this come from? What prompted this sharp left turn?
As it turned out, Love Will Find a Way was not the direct successor to Love in Us All. There was a record released between the two, in 1976: Pharoah. Pharoah did so poorly, however, that it only ever saw the one debut printing. It was the missing link; a record full of electronic experimentation that laid the groundwork for Sanders and his band to pivot to a more commercial pop orientation. In the years since its release, its status as an incredible flop has caused collectors and bootleggers to gravitate to it and thus, a mythos was born.
For forty years, this record was unfindable. Before digital rips and bootlegs, the only way to hear something from Pharoah was to find someone with the original record from 1976. Scalpers and collectors made sure this was no easy feat, with copies of the album going for hundreds of pounds apiece. And so for years the record was lost, and with it went the bridge between Sanders’s experimental and pop periods. When music went digital, bootleggers uploaded the record to YouTube, SoundCloud, and anywhere else copyrighted material can live under the radar for free. It became easier to access the record, but it still only ever sounded like a rip – even in hi-fi, the bootleg was an obvious shadow of something else, something greater. It was still only accessible through unofficial channels, and thus harder to find than anything else he had recorded.
On 15 September, 2023, a week short of the one year anniversary of Pharoah Sanders’s death, a remaster of Pharoah was officially released for the first time since 1976. It was available in all formats, both streaming and physical, with extra features for the diehards where appropriate–the physical LP was a box set containing journal entries, extra live performances, and outtakes. The world was finally able to appreciate this obscure entry in the discography of Pharoah Sanders, and the jump from free jazz to pop-funk at last made sense.
Pharoah opens with a psychedelic guitar loop joined by an inoffensive bass ostinato at about thirty seconds. When Sanders enters the fray, he is in rare form, playing wispily over this loop as if to let the new sounds flourish on equal footing with him. Gone are the days of overblown, divine-seeking yearns flowing from the bell of Pharoah Sanders’s tenor sax. He is here, unrecognizable and anew. Never once in the twenty minutes of the first track does a drum get hit – it is an entirely sedated meditation on what the future may hold for him.
The record exists in contradiction. Though it opens calmly, the maintenance thereof begins to evoke an uneasiness–something is afoot and a mystery is to be inferred between the lines of this amorphous soundscape. It is at once human and nonhuman, meshing the loop of an almost-unrecognizable guitar and bass with the human imperfections of the tenor saxophone. It is said that the tenor sax is the instrument which most closely resembles the human voice, and nowhere in the experimental jazz canon is that clearer than here on Pharoah’s opener, ‘Harvest Time’. Sanders is whispering lethargically through his instrument, nestled in between his own notes. He creates most meaningfully through the absence of tone, the lack of substance being the utmost substantial. After twenty minutes of Sanders and his band embracing contradiction, ‘Harvest Time’ fades out as easily as it came in, as if to remind the listener of the fragility of contradiction, and to infer that that is where the real beauty lies.
Tracks 2 and 3 bring a fuller band into the mix, moving the needle from curiosity about ambience to experimentation with orchestration – Sanders even lends his own soulful vocals to ‘Love Will Find a Way’, a song which was later polished and re-recorded for his next LP. More wild exploration takes place in the final track, ‘Memories of Edith Johnson’, where Sanders nestles back into gospel orientations, including organs and spectral syllabic vocalizations in his arrangement. This final track is far more traditional Pharoah Sanders than anything else on the record, but only clocks in at just under 6 minutes, implying the real substance of the record lies elsewhere, in the innovation of the two preceding 15+ minute suites.
Pharoah is an album we are lucky to hear. This pivotal step in the evolution of one of the most important figures in the jazz canon is as fresh and forward thinking today as it was forty years ago. May it also serve as an important reminder that contradictions are crucial to expression, that the human experience is not about perfection or imperfection, but rather the experimentation with the space in between.