By Post Staff
Jazz saxophonist Farrell ‘Pharoah’ Sanders, a pioneer of ‘spiritual’ jazz who lived in Oakland for a time before gaining renown in Latest York with John Coltrane’s band within the Nineteen Sixties, passed away in Los Angeles on Sept. 24, 2022. He was 81.
“We’re devastated to share that Pharoah Sanders has passed away,” family representatives tweeted Saturday morning. “He died peacefully surrounded by loving family and friends in Los Angeles earlier this morning. All the time and perpetually essentially the most beautiful human being, may he rest in peace.”
Tributes like this from on YouTube by nbaccess were seen on social media.
“Pharoah was like John Coltrane. So soft and tempered within the day by day life and human interactions but incredibly powerful and soulful when he blown this horn…he was a very Spiritual Man, just as John. Ornette Coleman famously said that Pharoah might be ‘the very best tenor saxophonist on this planet.’ I don’t think we are going to hear such sort of artists for a protracted, very long time…RIP Pharoah. Your music is your true essence and won’t ever die!”
“My beautiful friend passed away this morning. I’m so lucky to have known this man, and we’re all blessed to have his art stick with us perpetually. Thanks, Pharoah,” said San Shepard, whose stage name is Floating Points.
“A visionary amongst visionaries. Pharaoh perpetually.” Thurston Moore Tweeted.
Born in Little Rock, Ark., on Oct. 13, 1940, Sanders showed early aptitude for music, playing several instruments including drums and clarinet before he settled on the tenor sax in highschool.
“I used to be all the time attempting to work out what I desired to do as a profession. What I actually desired to do was play the saxophone — that was one in all the instruments that I actually loved,” Sanders told The Latest Yorker. “I might rent the varsity saxophone. You possibly can rent it daily in case you desired to. It wasn’t an excellent horn. It was kind of beat-up and out of condition.”
Nevertheless, Sanders played in Little Rock’s Black clubs and sometimes from behind curtains at white venues within the segregated city. At 19, he moved to Oakland and attended Oakland City College while collaborating with local jazz greats including Dewey Redman and Sonny Simmons.
“I never owned a saxophone until I finished highschool and went to Oakland, California. I had a clarinet, and so I traded that for a recent silver tenor saxophone, and that got me began playing the tenor.”
John Handy encouraged his talent, advising him to maneuver to Latest York, which he did in 1961.
There Sanders was often homeless, pawning his horn and sleeping on the subways before he recorded his first album in 1964. He eventually got the eye of John Coltrane and joined his band in 1965.
In keeping with Sanders’ site, “(Coltrane and Sanders) music represents a near total desertion of traditional jazz concepts, like swing and functional harmony, in favor of a teeming, irregularly structured, organic mixture of sound for sound’s sake.”
“Sanders has consistently had bands that might not only create a lyrical near-mystical Afro-Eastern world,” wrote one champion, the late poet-critic Amiri Baraka, “but [also] sweat hot fire music in continuing display of the so-called ‘energy music’ of the ‘60s.”
Exploring spiritual jazz — which Coltrane had begun to do before his death in 1967 — Sanders would go on to play with, Alice Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra. It was Sun Ra who supposedly suggested Sanders change his given name from ‘Farrell’ to ‘Pharoah.’
In 1969, Sanders recorded the album “Karma,” featuring “The Creator Has a Master Plan.”
It was his most famed work, but Sanders was comfortable moving out and in of genres. He earned a Grammy for his 1987 album with the pianist McCoy Tyner called “Blues for Coltrane.”
A decade earlier, he recorded with singer Phyllis Hyman in what may very well be called the pop 1977 album “Love Will Discover a Way.”
Sanders would go on to guide and collaborate with jazz musicians here and abroad, record and tour through the Nineteen Nineties.
A composition by British electronic music producer Floating Points prompted Sanders to search out a collaboration within the 2010s. The album, “Guarantees,” was recorded with the London Symphony orchestra in 2019 and released in 2021 to positive reviews.
It was his first album in ten years and his last.
Services for Sanders haven’t yet been announced.
Sources for this story include The Guardian, YouTube, The Washington Post, The Latest York Times, The Los Angeles Times, People magazine, National Public Radio, Facebook and Pharoah Sanders’ website.
