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

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

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.

― andrew m., Friday, August 15, 2014 10:48 AM (five years ago) bookmarkflaglink

love this tune

― Dokken played here for a Ribfest and people were total assholes (Sparkle Motion), Friday, August 15, 2014 12:15 PM (five years ago) bookmarkflaglink

anyone remember what this was? Link is long gone

Dunno, but I just heard Wisdom Through Music for the first time and the opening track is the nuts:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zbKjU5te2k

The Pharoah & the Underground albums (Sanders guesting with a one-off combination of Rob Mazurek's Chicago and São Paulo Underground groups) are pretty amazing. They're on Clean Feed; one is CD-only, the other LP-only, with completely different music on each.

Just bought a ticket to see him next Saturday at Iridium in NYC. I have no idea who's playing with him. The last time I saw him was also at Iridium, when it was uptown by Lincoln Center. That time, he had Ron Carter on bass and Cindy Blackman on drums. I can't remember who was on piano.

briefly considered flying out to catch one of those shows. couldn’t swing it bc of work. last time he was in minneapolis was 2016 and i doubt he’ll ever make it back. let me know how it goes ? would def be into coming out in spring or summer if he ends up playing some more shows.

lost out on an eBay auction for a vinyl copy of Wisdom Through Music recently, it's a great record

Damn went to finally buy a copy of elevation from Honest John's cos they've had it every time I've been in over the last couple of years and they didn't have it. Shame was looking forward to getting that.
Are all the late 60s lps now available as 2fer cds cos I still need a couple.

The anthology is a good starting point anyway.

Humorist wrote this above in 2014: "Live at the East is also one of the great fake live albums; the story is, bringing recording equipment to the actual East (a performance space and African cultural center in Brooklyn) was prohibitively expensive, so they brought an audience into the studio. There's also applause at the end of Black Unity, which always blows my mind—imagine being in the room for that."

On that subject, I just read this post on the Steve Hoffman Forums:
https://www.forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/pharoah-sanders-how-to-start-collecting.689253/page-6#post-22822977

"Pharoah's performance at the East was recorded for an intended live album. Unfortunately, the recording was quickly recognized as being flawed in such a way as to make it unusable. Not wanting to miss the opportunity, management immediately decided to bring the band and its family members into A&R Studios in Manhattan to record what ended up being a live-in-the-studio album with faux club ambiance. The released recording was made hours after the show at The East. [Note that there is another version of this story in which the album was recorded at A&R Studios because Impulse never had any intention of recording the show at The East.]

Given that Black Unity has the exact same lineup of musicians [including two bassists (Clarke & McBee) and two drummers (Hart & Connors)] as the Live at the East recording, one might conclude that Black Unity (recorded 11/24/71) was recorded in the same session as Live at the East (recording date is listed as November 1971). If so, the band's family and friends were not a part of the recording for Black Unity."

But as noted by Humorist, there IS applause at the end of "Black Unity," giving more credence to the theory that "Live at the East" and "Black Unity" were recorded at the same session.

I emailed Johnathan Blake to see if he'd be on drums; he will. The rest of the band is Benito Gonzalez on piano and Nat Reeves on bass.

That's interesting about Live at the East... I always assumed it was one of those typical live recordings where it sounds like there are about a dozen people in the audience, and in a way I guess that still holds.

It's come to be one of my very favorite Pharoah albums, mostly for S2 and the extended harmonium drone.

man I really need to re-listen to that one, I have the LP but have neglected it

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/if-youre-in-the-song-keep-on-playing-pharoah-sanders-interview

The big takeaway from that interview is just how much Pharoah Sanders hates being interviewed. (Something I already knew from personal experience.)

Just bought a ticket to see him next Saturday at Iridium in NYC.

― shared unit of analysis (unperson), Sunday, December 22, 2019 1:39 PM (three weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

How was this? Would have loved to have seen him with Johnathan Blake. My friend saw Blake perform a few years ago somewhere in Chicago (Hype Park Festival?) and raved about him, so he's been on my radar.

paul, this is unperson's post from the rolling jazz thread:

I went to see Pharoah Sanders at Iridium this past weekend, with Benito Gonzalez on piano, Nat Reeves on bass, and Johnathan Blake on drums. They played three pieces, each one 15-20 minutes long, and honestly, for a lot of it it was the Benito Gonzalez Trio featuring special guest Pharoah Sanders. But when Pharoah was actually playing, he was on. Not doing the whole T. Rex-roaring thing but digging deep into hard bop language, like Coltrane in 1958. On the last number, his son Tomoki came out, also playing tenor, and took a decent solo that was more in a '60s Fire Music vein. I hadn't seen Sanders live in about 25 years, and/but I'm glad I went.

― shared unit of analysis (unperson), Wednesday, January 1, 2020 11:49 AM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

The big takeaway from that interview is just how much Pharoah Sanders hates being interviewed.

strongly disagree with this. not sure what your experience was like, but i feel as if he had a lot of really insightful things to say here

e.g. i found this really interesting:

Would the label give you any direction, or were they hands-off?

They tried to let you know how many songs to play. I just kind of ignored it. Sometimes, I would just play one tune for the whole side. I just kept on playing, like it was a suite. Looking from one thing to another. If you’re in the song, keep on playing.

Did you rehearse?

No, we never rehearsed.

Did you ever do more than one take?

Maybe on a few things we did, something where I didn’t really like the way I first got started up and started out playing. But whenever I heard it back, I kind of liked it, so I said, “Well, I should have kept it.” Anyways, it’s too late now.

It kind of taught me something else. It made me think, Why do I have to do it this way? Let’s keep on playing until it all comes together. That’s what we did. That’s what I always do. You know, try to keep on creating.

also this is a pretty amazing quote

John always loved to play ballads. He played some ballads when I was working with him, when he kind of opened up more freely. On some jobs I did with him, he played a ballad every now and then. Then he got back in his spaceship and took off again.

Live in Paris (1975) is really good

do go on !

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.