The Creator makes but one demand: vote for your favorite Pharoah Sanders album

I have the Impulse! albums and always find Black Unity to be the best! The two basses taking center stage, on a cushion of dense percussion, really make it... and the studio audience applause at the end really is hilarious. There is a mostly lame book about Impulse! records that has some good Pharaoh stories. I guess after Karma was an unexpectedly hit he ends up with a huge entourage of camp followers and his album sessions were overflowing with people, performing and not.

Side one of Village of the Pharaohs would be my second favorite thing - it is one long wigged out caveman/jazz/psychedelic tune and is built on what has to be one of the most badass bass ostinato figures ever set against a tambura drone. Cecil Mcbee is just unreal and the music just levitates whenever he is in the group. It's a shame the rest of the album is sorta a grab bag of random stuff not really thematically related to the main suite!

All the Impulse! albums have a lot to recommend and each has its own flavor. Tauhid is wonderful, very evocative and primitive in the best possible way. It feels like a reaction to the late Coltrane stuff, Pharaoh going in the opposite direction of his mentor, very restrained and evocative stuff. Deaf, Dumb, Blind is joyous and energetic percussion-overload. Thembi is introspective, mellow and beautiful, a real hidden jewel... and so on!

Never really did a close listen to anything post-Impulse! I have a lot of time for Elevation but the songs seem to be getting shorter and more smoothed out at that point which is less interesting to me than what he'd been doing up until then.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y6JFM5B5lw

Yeah a top 3/5 poll or something. Just seemed like this could end up looking more conclusive than it really is. But going by the responses perhaps not.

I'm still torn, Summun Bukmun Umyun is really good and I need to re-listen to Village and Thembi

Ha, I can't vote for my favorite Pharoah records! Don Cherry's Where is Brooklyn, Coltrane's Live at the Village Vanguard Again! and Sharrock's Ask the Ages...hmmm I'm not sure what my fave leader record of his is...maybe Tauhid?

IZIPHO ZAM!!!

tauhid v thembi for me.

though to be 100% honest i think 'journey to satchidinanda' is the best work pharoah ever did. possibly his most lyrical playing

not a huge fan of izipho zam, think i ended up selling my copy? not sure. i can't really dig the yodelling

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Balance on Izipho Zam is astonishing IIRC. I don't have copy so I'm not all that familiar with the rest.

The thread-relevant material is at 12 minutes (smooth jazz era Pharaoh with a smooth jazz all-star band playing Thembi and sounding gorgeous) but watch the whole video because it's amazing This show used to be onAmerican network television. I was late for class every Monday morning because I went to school on it every Sunday night. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STxPWECmOGo

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

IMO more like a #5 or #6

would rate all these higher

izipho zam
thembi
deaf dumb blind (summun bukmun umyun)
tauhid
journey to the one

I'm just happy Journey to the One didn't get shut-out of the love

Really, anyone who gets upset over the results of a Pharoah Sanders poll has missed the point of living

eh who's upset

tauhid is so good!

sonny sharrock is next level on tauhid

sharrock's contribution to tauhid always sounds very velvet underground-y to me, not that i'm suggesting any direct 'influence' either way, more like there was something in the air

One of those gems drizzled among lesser albums, I am in love with this song right now. The way the harmony horns emerge to complete and resolve the main melodic phrase just KILLS me every time. Chills for real.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2p2eZS5d_ng&list=ALBTKoXRg38BCu9wYhsitCuDWy26by2Gul

love this tune

Oh, happens that our local weekly, Arkansas Times, in last week's issue, ran a nice article on his early life around here. He may be called Little Rock, but he grew up in NORTH Little Rock, about 3 miles from where I type. As a fellow North Little Rocker, makes me wonder if he ever corrected them when he got to California. "That's North Little Rock." "Whatever, Little Rock!"

http://www.arktimes.com/arkansas/where-were-you-on-pharoah-sanders-day/Content?oid=3410064

This month's Wire has an in depth primer on Sanders

I'll have to read that.

I love everything I've heard of Sanders, which amounts to all his records with Coltrane, "Preview" on The Jazz Composers Orchestra, and Ask the Ages. But I've never heard any of his solo records.

Recommendations on where to start?

any of the first six at the top of the poll, really

otm

This month's Wire has an in depth primer on Sanders

By me! Thanks for reading!

And Burns, yeah, the top seven albums in the poll are all great, and so is Live at the East.

Cool, thanks. I shall begin with Karma.

Omg you are gonna flip!!!

Ah, horse, didn't realise this was by you. Seriously smashing stuff.

Karma is an excellent introduction. I raided my grandparents' (RIP) record collection while clearing out their flat in Paris earlier in the year. Huge jazz fans, and I managed to salvage copies of Tauhid and Jewels of Thought. I'd say Tauhid is fast becoming a favourite. Something so exuberant about Sanders' compositions; a joy and wonder I feel over and above a large majority of jazz players. Jewels of Thought is much more abstruse but not without its interesting parts.

last night's Global Village (good stream from Wichita) started off with title track from Brown Rice. perfectiy followed by some from last year's Beyond The Ragasphere. I got to thinking again about Cherry, Condona, Shakti, and Live At The East. looking for more like the last, came across this, by Allmusic's Thom Jurek:

The aesthetic and cultural merits of Eddie Gale's Ghetto Music cannot be overstated...one of the most obscure recordings in Blue Note's catalog -- paid for out of label co-founder Francis Wolff's own pocket...seamlessly blends the new jazz of the '60s -- Gale was a member of the Sun Ra Arkestra before and after these sides, and played on Cecil Taylor's Blue Note debut, Unit Structures -- with gospel, soul, and the blues. Gale's sextet included two bass players and two drummers -- in 1968 -- as well as a chorus of 11 voices, male and female...Soloists come and go, but modes, melodies, and harmonies remain firmly intact. The beautiful strains of African folk music and Latin jazz sounds in "Fulton Street," for example, create a veritable chromatic rainbow. "A Walk with Thee" is a spiritual written to a march tempo with drummers playing counterpoint to one another and the front line creating elongated melodic lines via an Eastern harmonic sensibility. Does it swing? Hell yeah! The final cut, "The Coming of Gwilu," moves from the tribal to the urban and everywhere in between using Jamaican thumb pianos, soaring vocals à la the Arkestra, polyrhythmic invention, and good, old-fashioned groove jazz, making something entirely new in the process...succeeds because it concentrates on creating a space for the myriad voices of an emerging African-American cultural force to be heard in a single architecture. This is militant music posessed by soul and spirit. All that??? Hope so!

Yeah that's a great album, especially love the song "The Rain" that starts like Linda Perhacs before heading into a Ra-like chant with horns blazing away

I'd say if you're looking for a starting point the 2cd Anthology: You've got To Have Freedom is a great place to start since it covers most of his best material in edited form.
If you enjoy that you can go out and buy the individual lps. You'll probably want to hear the full length versions. But the shorter edits which are 9 minutes to about 15 is good starting point.

That Wire Primer does look like it'll help you get a grounding too.

Oh yeah, just saw the new Jazzwise on the racks of the local chain newsagent yesterday and that's talking about a new John Coltrane Quintet release that's just come out. Sounds like it should be worth investigating. There's a several page article and a review in that magazine
http://www.jazzwisemagazine.com/

Do you mean Offering?
http://www.resonancerecords.org/release.php?cat=B0019632-02

I have the grey-market release of (part of) this show, and it's tremendous, easily on par with Live in Japan (and maybe better).

Yeah, Offering is really great. I'm particularly amazed by the sound quality they were able to achieve, considering they were working off a two-track tape recorded with a single mic positioned center stage. Granted, Coltrane drowns everybody out when he's soloing, but you get to hear way more of the band than I expected to be able to hear. It's definitely worth picking up if you're a late-Coltrane obsessive. Shouldn't be anybody's first (or even fifteenth) purchase, though.

Yeah that's the one.

just got Elevation used from the local store. oh my god side 2.

feels like a new experience outside of spotify+earbuds

looks like Izipho Zam is getting reissued on LP via the Everland Jazz label

finally!

can anyone comment on the sound quality of the new reissues (tauhid / jewels of thought / summun bukmun umyun)?

i heard they were bad :-(

They're not bad.

i don't know, tauhid sounded okay but the sax on the title track from summun bukmun umyun seems a little ... strangled

i'm going to A/B it with a CD but i'm not sure that's a fair comparison

Re the above - I got the Thembi / Black Unity (2015). Thembi is much more... forthright than the 1998 digipak version which gently wafts out of the speakers.

I don't know if it's bad, I kind of like it but it's very different and probably not at all like the original record.

CD by the way. "Dynamic range" number freaks will no doubt consider it a travesty and sometimes I'm in line with that but tastes change and this stuff is close-miced and mixed anyway so not like it ever had the verisimilitude of a room sound.

I just spun Black Unity the other day for the first time in a long while. Like Live at the East it's another one where S2 goes into this deep, mellow harmonium-driven drone. What a sound!

Since Black Unity is just one pauseless track, how does that work on vinyl? Does it fade out at the end of side 1 and fade back in on side 2?

yeah all the big epics are that way

Yeah, I went in with low expectations 'cause it's "just" a quartet rather than the two basses and however many percussionists of Live at the East, but it's really, really good. The pianist/organist is great.

do you know anything about the band ? i’m not sure i’m familiar with any of the other players.

it just came out last week, I'm surprised it hasn't been released before

the sound is much better than I expected, even on Spotify ... it's subtitled "The Lost ORTF Recordings" which I guess refers to this miking method: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORTF_stereo_technique

I found it very soothing earlier today, I think it's time to play it again

ORTF is the French equivalent to the BBC - it stands for Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française.

I find it almost nihilistic, by the way, that it's on Spotify but the label won't sell the digital files - you have to buy the LP or you get nothing:

https://transversales.bandcamp.com/album/live-in-paris-1975

(As a non-turntable-owner, I got it by other means, obviously.)

kinda jazz critic are you anyway, no turntable !

what was the mini book that came iwth teh 2013 edition of teh Elevation cd like?
I just picked up a cheap copy of the previous release I think and wonder if it is still something I would find essential to get for the book thing. Haven't been able to find a phot of it online that shows contents.

Wow, good timing, I'm 1:43 into "Live at the East".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SvS_Yi6_IQ

Pharoah is 80 today so here's a levitatinng track from Montreux in 1978. Not sure if its quite as good as he was earlier in the decade but it's getting there.

BIt of him from 1968 too
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8rX54ZhweU

think I'd love to find stuff from 70-72 but these 2 will do for now maybe.

Amazing videos, cheers Stevo

Shame looks like that video from Montreux in 1978 has gone

Was looking for it to share in tribute to him since he just died

Tauhid deserves more attention, I'm pretty sure that's the one I've listened to the most overall.

Everything from Elevation through Naima ranges from disappointing to dire.

What the hell, Elevation is awesome.

JUst watched this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joieeBqeNoM
I think I saw a 10 minute section a while back but this has an hour and 20 minutes and cuts out a couple of times so it's difficult to see how much could still be missing. From the footage itself anyway,
Very good stuff.

Do wish that Montreux 78 thing would reappear cos that was amazing. THis is Antibes.