With Coltrane, Sanders continued to explore the outer limits of saxophonics. This early, uncompromisingly harsh Sanders approach – which he was soon to moderate – can also be heard on Sun Ra & His Arkestra Featuring Pharoah Sanders/Featuring Black Harold, recorded live in 1964 (but not released on Ra’s El Saturn label until 1976). The steaming intensity of Pharoah drew Coltrane to Sanders, and the two went on to record frequently together over the next three years, notably on Coltrane’s free-jazz manifesto, Ascension, in 1965. Some ESP alumni, including Sanders, then progressed to the heavier hitting Impulse! label – most of them, like Sanders, were recommended to the company by its biggest-selling artist and unofficial talent spotter, John Coltrane. It was practically a rite of passage for avant-garde jazz musicians in mid-1960s New York to make their debut recording for the tiny, succès d’estime label ESP-Disk. The following survey of Sanders’ work covers 50 years of vinyl releases, from his 1964 debut through to his 2014 collaboration with cornet player Rob Mazurek’s Chicago Underground and Sao Paolo Underground. During the last 30 years, Sanders has also woven elements of retro rhythm and blues, swing and bop into his music – much as his near-contemporary Archie Shepp, another leading iconoclast of the mid 1960s, has done – but astral jazz remains his umbrella style. Sanders has never entirely abandoned the abrasive, screaming free-jazz that characterised his work with John Coltrane, but in the late 1960s and early 1970s he was a prime mover, along with Alice Coltrane, in the creation of a gentler and more structured aesthetic which became known as cosmic or astral jazz. By 1964, he was gigging with Sun Ra, Don Cherry and John Coltrane, with whom he continued to collaborate right up until what proved to be Coltrane’s final live recording, The Olatunji Concert, posthumously released decades later. Perceived by many as the inheritor of John Coltrane’s revolutionary mantle after Coltrane’s passing in 1967, among those who looked to Sanders for leadership was Coltrane’s widow, Alice, who featured Sanders on three remarkable albums released between 19.īorn in Little Rock, Arkansas, Farrell Sanders began playing tenor saxophone professionally in rhythm-and-blues bands in the San Francisco Bay area in 1959, before moving to New York, then the unchallenged centre of the jazz world, in 1962. A titan of the tenor saxophone, we introduce the astral jazz originator in 10 essential recordings.
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