Floating Points and Pharoah Sanders and London Symphony Orchestra - Promises (2021)

as expected, my mom loves this album

I enjoyed this more on second listen—it helped to know what I was getting into. The Alice mimicry in 6 grates, and 8 swings too far into aimless noodling IMO. But everyone is otm about how good it sounds, and as Jordan said it's quite impressive in its delicacy.

I've been thinking of it as the Moon Shaped Pool of jazz ('jazz') albums

gilles peteron featuring it right now on bbc 6 music. might just be the part he is playing but theres very little sanders that i can hear. its almost as if its built around sanders, though idk, ive not read how it was made. seems quite excellent though, if a bit too precise (though thats just FP i think).

weird thing gilles said before he played it was that some people apparently said there was no reason to play it as it was already out, which is just weird. id much rather hear it on the radio than as streaming audio on lower bit rates etc.

the synths on this passage im hearing really keep reminding me of daft punk's touch

saw pharoah live a few years back and he totally still had it. FP albums have left me kinda bored in the past tho.

still gotta listen but hope this is less like the spawn soundtrack and more like the judgement night soundtrack.

Promises (To Put You Asleep)

Are vocals involved?

Only very very briefly

Then I’m in!

Are there proper vocals or just mutterings? I dont think I actually want any classic 70s spiritual jazz style chanting in 2021.

xp I'd be curious to hear your take for sure

I really can't emphasize enough how inconsequential the singing is (personally I'd be up for more). We're far from Leon Thomas here

Yeah, it's not full-on Leon Thomas-style yodeling; it's Pharoah kind of muttering and humming to himself (as he does onstage sometimes). It works very well in the context of the whole piece.

Not to be morbid, but considering this could be his final album, I found the vocals quite moving

I'd like to know how it was assembled... cant seem to find any interviews though.

the NYT piece upthread talks about how it started

finding this more pleasant than mindblowing but its better than i expected 2021 pharoah to be and thats good enough. dont get the annoyance at the alice coltrane part. "sounds too much like some of the greatest music ever!" sure its pastiche but idgaf it sounds good.

^^^^^

Amusingly this hasn’t even got a review in The Guardian, so the gate keeping is going really well.

Anyway I tried to listen to this yesterday afternoon but my two small children came in the room and harshest my buzz. So I listened to it last night after my two small children were asleep and it seemed very nice, though I would have liked drums, because I love drums. I’m only aware this exists because I follow FP on Instagram and because my friend from uni, who has three small children and still enjoys a spliff I imagine was raving at me about it over WhatsApp while I was bathing my two small children. I have not seen any reviews of it but I don’t really read the music press anymore, and just rely on social media for ‘ambient’ recommendations that I absorb via osmosis, which is how I listen to most music these days. I’ve listened to the Kelly Lee Owens albums way more than any FP albums because he’s just a bit sterile a lot of the time. I was hoping doing something with a real live jazz person, albeit a hat-wearing one, might have brought some grit and blood to proceedings. This will probably get played in my house quite a bit because I can cook and read to it and I’m trapped here with two small children.

Anything with a hint of spiritual balm about it is quite the spiritual balm these days, to be fair.

Casper, who is three, is playing with Star Wars Lego and singing “boots and cats and boots and cats” from Hey Duggee right now. I wish FP did more “boots and cats”.

You should get your kids to review it.

Amusingly this hasn’t even got a review in The Guardian, so the gate keeping is going really well

Kitty Empire heard the bat signal and rushed one out 50 minutes later:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/mar/28/floating-points-pharoah-sanders-lso-promises-review-extraordinary

All I'll say for now is, wait till the new Sons of Kemet drops in May. There's a poem on the first track that'll set your conservative politicians' heads on fire, if the publicist does their job.

― but also fuck you (unperson), Friday, March 26, 2021 12:50 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

To be honest this is the most exciting thing I've read on this thread...

_Amusingly this hasn’t even got a review in The Guardian, so the gate keeping is going really well_

Kitty Empire heard the bat signal and rushed one out 50 minutes later:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/mar/28/floating-points-pharoah-sanders-lso-promises-review-extraordinary🕸

The fact that the Guardian has a music reviewer who took her pen name from a Big Black song is pretty amusing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rw6e9gCpCdE

Xpost not all music has to set heads on fire to be good.

I was hoping doing something with a real live jazz person, albeit a hat-wearing one, might have brought some grit and blood to proceedings.

I know "spiritual hat" is an ILM meme that I myself invoked earlier, but implying that it would be surprising for Pharoah Sanders to bring "grit and blood" to something compared to other jazz players makes me think it's not really useful as shorthand

Remember, he is 80! I saw him 20 years ago, and he was definitely good and vital, but the show wasn't exactly the return of Tauhid and Karma.

I know. I'm just objecting to "albeit a hat-wearing one," which implies spiritual jazz has no grit or blood, an assertion I find generally wrong but particularly so in a discussion of Sanders

i.e., if Scik had said "albeit an 80-year old" I wouldn't have posted

"spiritual jazz hat" is not an ilx-ism btw
https://www.instagram.com/spiritualjazzhats

forks, the phrase is "spiritual hat"

JAZZ IS LIKE HEROIN TO ME ! ! ! ~~~~ ILM POST-1945 JAZZ ALBUMS POLL - THE RESULTS COUNTDOWN (now counting top 25!)

suggesting it's a derivation thereof but maybe i'm wrong? i've heard it in the wild.

I mean, sure, other people in the world have noticed the hat thing, but I think that phrase has a specific resonance on the borad. Happy to never talk about this ever again though :)

deal

listening to the record and it’s making me think of The Pavilion of Trees by Harold Budd

The Pavilion of Dreams*

for the record: Poll of SPIRITUAL HATS

I find this record quite frustrating. Some beautiful playing from Sanders, which makes me wish he had better material to work with. I don't mind that it's a pastiche, but it is nowhere near the level of the stuff it is imitating. With Alice Coltrane's or Sander's own compositions, the music might have repetition but it is always developing, always shifting the pulse, always colouring the harmonies with new variations.

By contrast, Floating Point's harmonic palette feels bland and restricted. And above all else, I find the sheer rhythmic squareness to be quite grating. The central motif is beaten into the ground again and again and tarnished through lack of development. It's a pity, because Pharoah is in good form, and he is a musician I always enjoy listening to. But I can't say I enjoy Floating Point's arrangements very much, they seem marred by a certain kind of neoclassical sensibility that is terrified of letting anything dissonant or strange into the music. The final result is a great musician in a pedestrian package, some nice moments but not quite transcending that.

This is spot on Mirostones. I think your point about a neo-classical sensibility is particularly astute. The strings reference Alice Coltrane in the most obvious way, and while the heavy atonalism of her arrangements on World Galaxy wouldn't be appropriate here, there's none of the complex harmony or intensity you get with even her most serene pieces. It feels very much like a jazz equivalent of middlebrow contemporary classical, referencing more radical stuff while making it politely bourgeois. I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up in the same kind of earnest chill-out pantheon as Max Richter's Sleep, although obviously the presence of Sanders instantly makes it 1000 x more interesting and affecting than any of his posh muzak.

I must say I'm surprised it's not been reviewed in the Graun yet, but the Observer has published a review, so the daily will surely follow. Just hope we don't get a Petridish effort that patronises the readership by making centrist dad digs at avant-garde jazz.

in the record's defence, i think it flirts with something much more interesting - on "Movement 2" for instance, which is kinda sublime - but some of the valleys (like "movement 6" iirc) are close to schlock.

People throwing around words like "schlock" ITT have clearly never heard Pharoah's version of "The Greatest Love of All."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZFXpnpM5nk

Someone upthread mentioned not being able to think of another jazz record utilizing a central motif so strongly...and while some might not consider it so, I'd argue that Gania's use of the guembri forms the absolute backbone of one of my favorite records of all time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaPnidEujwM

Brotzmann's stuff with the gnwana musicians is fantastic. Last year's Catch Of A Ghost was brilliant too. William Parker's Double Sunrise Over Neptune is another one with some great riffs/motifs underpinning the tunes. Obviously they're doing a very different thing to PS & FP - a more forceful kind of trance music, with much more spontaneity and dissonance. And a drummer like Hamid Drake - who's on both those projects - can find infinite variation in a groove, so it never gets dull. FP is going for a more serene, blissed out thing, and I get why people dig that, but I just find his version of that to be predictable and polite. That harpsichord motif, and the overall lack of harmonic development or spontaneity, gets monotonous.

Gnawa!

Stew, totally. I guess I was just trying to raise an example of 'spiritual jazz' that relies on singular motifs running through a whole record, with the WELS concert being a good example off the top of my head. (I also just plug this record at every chance I get, it changed my perspective about 16 years ago when I found it in a forlorn freeform bin at my uni radio station).

I will also say— I like this FP + PS record okay, but the description of it as 'polite' is exactly right. It also doesn't go in many unanticipated directions...While that isn't necessarily a bad thing, since the sound is so lovely, it's certainly more 'supper time' music than I was expecting.