Pharoah Sanders: The Sound That Reaches Other Realms

From the very first second of "The Creator Has a Master Plan" Pharoah Sanders' tenor saxophone enters the frame. Incantatory, throaty, completely captivating, it is a sound that hovers somewhere between our world and another dimension entirely. That sound, sustained across six decades of recordings, is why Sanders remains one of the most important figures in jazz history and why his records continue to find new listeners.

For collectors, the name Pharoah Sanders is inseparable from Impulse! Records, spiritual jazz, and some of the most emotionally demanding vinyl ever pressed. For newcomers, he is the saxophonist on Promises, a 2021 collaboration with electronic composer Floating Points and the London Symphony Orchestra that topped many year-end lists, including TIME magazine's Best Albums of the Year. Both audiences are hearing the same artist. That breadth is the point.

From Little Rock to the New Thing

Sanders was born Ferrell Lee Sanders in Little Rock, Arkansas on 13 October 1940. He grew up playing clarinet in church before switching to drums, then alto saxophone, and finally settling on tenor in high school. After school he relocated to Oakland, California, where he studied art and music at Oakland Junior College and built his chops across the Bay Area jazz and R&B scene. He was known locally as "Little Rock."

By 1961 or 1962, Sanders had made his way to New York City, arriving with little money and, by his own account, struggling to survive. He took odd jobs and moved through unstable housing while embedding himself in the city's avant-garde circles. One early and crucial relationship was with Sun Ra and the Sun Ra Arkestra, who took him in at a particularly precarious moment and helped cement the name "Pharoah."

New York in those years was the laboratory of what critics were calling the "New Thing," a radical extension of jazz's language driven by musicians such as Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, and, most consequentially for Sanders, John Coltrane. In 1965, Coltrane invited Sanders into his band, and the two would work together until Coltrane's death in 1967. Sanders appeared on late Coltrane landmarks including Ascension and Meditations, records now treated as central documents of the avant-garde.

Sanders later described Coltrane's guidance in characteristically spare terms: "He always told me, 'Play.'" In an interview with Jazz Weekly, he elaborated on what working alongside Coltrane actually meant in practice: "He didn't say nothing. He would just do things. He never said nothing or explained nothing. He just would do it and that was it. You were on your own. You had to be very independent being around John." And in an interview from 1999, on why Coltrane had chosen him: "He liked my qualities as a person and that's the reason why he let me play with him. It wasn't what I was doing musically or my instrument or anything like that. He let me play whatever I wanted to play."

The Impulse! Years: Three Records Every Collector Should Know

After Coltrane's death, Sanders threw himself into his own leader recordings for Impulse! Records. The albums he made between 1967 and 1973 form the core of his legacy and the heart of what most people today call "spiritual jazz."

Tauhid (1967) is where the Sanders universe properly begins. Recorded at Van Gelder Studio and released the same year as Coltrane's death, it introduced the combination of elements that would define his Impulse! work: long-form structures, dense percussion, non-Western instruments, and a sound-first compositional logic that moves through texture rather than chord changes.

In the album liner notes, Sanders wrote: "I don't really see the horn anymore. I'm trying to see myself. And similarly, as to the sounds I get, it's not that I'm trying to scream on my horn, I'm just trying to put all my feelings into the horn. And when you do that, the notes go away... Why [do] I want clusters [of notes]? So that I [can] get more feeling, more of me, into every note I play. You see, everything you do has to mean something, has to be more than just notes. That's behind everything I do – trying to get more ways of getting feeling out."

Karma (1969) is the centrepiece. A pioneering work of the spiritual jazz, it has become Sanders' most popular and critically acclaimed album. Dominated by the iconic "The Creator Has a Master Plan," the extended piece is built on a two-chord bass vamp by Reggie Workman, a percussion choir, and the extraordinary presence of vocalist Leon Thomas, whose yodelling interjections became as essential as Sanders' saxophone.

Sanders described his process in a 2020 New Yorker interview: "I'm always trying to make something that might sound bad sound beautiful in some way. I'm a person who just starts playing anything I want to play, and make it turn out to be maybe some beautiful music." Karma is the album that best demonstrates how he achieved that, transforming near-noise into devotional groove over the course of a single extraordinary sitting.

Thembi (1971) pushed the palette further still, incorporating electric piano, balafon, koto, orchestral chimes, with shorter tracks and a denser rhythmic gravity that made it more immediately accessible than its predecessors without sacrificing any of the intensity. Tracks like the tranquil "Astral Traveling" and the beautiful title track, "Thembi" are sweet and lyrical evocations of Eastern mysticism. Songs with a hypnotic, trance-inducing quality that would become Sanders' signature.

These three records form what might be called the essential "first chapter" of Sanders' discography.

A Shared Vision: Pharoah Sanders and Alice Coltrane

The relationship with John Coltrane did not end in 1967 with Coltrane's death. It extended, in a different and equally remarkable form, through Sanders' ongoing collaboration with Alice Coltrane throughout the late 1960s and into the early 1970s.

Alice featured Sanders on three Impulse! albums across that period. His earliest appearance was on A Monastic Trio (1968), where he contributed on bass clarinet on the track "Ohnedaruth." His role deepened considerably on Ptah, The El Daoud (1970), recorded in a single January session and notable for pairing Sanders alongside Joe Henderson as a second tenor voice, with Ron Carter and Ben Riley as the rhythm section. In her liner notes for that album, Alice Coltrane wrote of Sanders: "Pharoah's playing on this album sounds transcendental, reflecting the ancient, sacred sound. I believe that his music is one of the strongest forces of its kind being heard in the world today."

The third album, Journey in Satchidananda (1971), is the one most collectors know best, and for good reason. Named after Alice Coltrane's spiritual teacher, Swami Satchidananda, the studio tracks were recorded in November 1970 at the Coltrane family home studio in Dix Hills, New York, with a fifth track captured live at the Village Gate in July of that year. Sanders plays soprano saxophone and percussion throughout, operating within an ensemble that also includes Cecil McBee and Charlie Haden sharing bass duties, Rashied Ali on drums, and Tulsi providing a tanpura drone on the studio tracks that anchors the whole album in something resembling a continuous Om.

What is striking about these recordings when placed against Sanders' own Impulse! work from the same period is how naturally he modulates his approach to serve Alice Coltrane's compositional vision. The overblowing and harmonic extremity that characterise records like Karma are present but restrained, channelled into a more lyrical and meditative mode that complements Alice's harp and piano textures without overwhelming them. As Chris May wrote: "Musically and spiritually, singly or together, Sanders and Alice Coltrane were on the same page and between them laid down the astral-jazz paradigm."

The Cult Classic: Pharoah (1977)

Released on the small avant-garde imprint India Navigation, Pharoah is sonically intimate, recorded with a low-budget warmth that felt almost domestic compared to the expansive Impulse! productions. Unjustly overlooked at the time of its release, it became a cult classic over the decades, centred on "Harvest Time," a piece of meditative intensity built on minimal harmony and patient phrasing that functions almost as a corrective to the album's original neglect. 

If Karma is Sanders at his most communal and ceremonial, Pharoah is Sanders at his most private. Both modes are essential.

Africa (1987)

Sanders' 1987 album Africa, a soulful tribute to Coltrane showcases a more accessible, melodic and structured side to Sanders. The quartet format strips away the percussion choirs and vocal rituals of the Impulse! era and puts the emphasis squarely on Sanders as an improviser navigating recognisable tune and touch. This album and his Grammy win in 1988, for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance (Group) on McCoy Tyner's Blues for Coltrane: A Tribute to John Coltrane, confirmed his standing within jazz's institutional frameworks, even as the "spiritual jazz" revival was still decades away from becoming a full-blown phenomenon.

The Late Coda: Promises (2021)

In 2021, more than a decade since his last major recorded work, Sanders released Promises in collaboration with composer Sam Shepherd (known as Floating Points) and the London Symphony Orchestra. It was an immediate critical event: named number one on TIME's Best Albums of 2021, shortlisted for the Mercury Prize, and awarded "Beyond Album of the Year" in DownBeat's Critics Poll.

The album works because it respects what Sanders' sound actually is. Shepherd builds space and orchestral texture around the saxophone rather than accompanying it in any conventional sense, allowing Sanders' tone to function as the album's narrative voice. The result is music that feels simultaneously archaic and contemporary, devotional and ambient, deeply familiar to jazz listeners and newly accessible to audiences who had never heard "The Creator Has a Master Plan."

Sanders was 80 years old when Promises was recorded. His playing communicates the full arc of that life: the Arkansas church, the New York sidewalks, the Impulse! sessions with Coltrane, the India Navigation obscurity, and the Hollywood Bowl tribute concerts that followed.

Pharoah Sanders died on 24 September 2022. He was 81. His label, Luaka Bop, announced that he had passed peacefully, surrounded by family and friends. No cause of death was disclosed.

What he left behind is staggering in its breadth: more than thirty albums as a leader, a body of sideman work that shaped the trajectory of avant-garde jazz, and a sound so singular that critics spent decades arguing about whether it constituted music at all, before eventually conceding that the argument itself had missed the point. His reputation, which mainstream jazz criticism was slow to fully embrace during his peak years, has only grown in the time since his death. Reissues of the Impulse! catalogue continue to find new listeners. Promises remains a touchstone for a generation of producers and composers working at the border of jazz, ambient music, and electronic composition. The spiritual jazz movement he helped define in the late 1960s has become one of the most sampled, streamed, and revisited corners of the entire jazz canon.

Asked in 2020 what kept him going, Sanders offered an answer that is both the simplest and the most complete statement of his artistic philosophy: "If you're in the song, keep on playing."

He was in the song for more than six decades.

Shabaka Hutchings, one of the leading voices of the recent spiritual jazz revival, offered the most enduring summary of what Sanders represented: "Pharoah had that vision of what being rooted to such a powerful sound can be, and that powerful sound is something that liberates the function of being a musician from simply being a musician into being a healer."

Equally, the late Amiri Baraka put it with characteristic precision: "The whole musical persona of Pharoah Sanders is of a consciousness in conscious search of a higher consciousness."

For anyone who has ever felt that jazz could reach places that words cannot quite describe, that vision is audible on every record Sanders ever made.