Remembering Pharoah Sanders, Who Sought Divinity on Earth

The legendary saxophonist, who died at 81 this week, saw music as a route toward holiness.
Pharaoh Sanders in 1985
Pharaoh Sanders in 1985. Photo by Frans Schellekens/Redferns.

To hear Pharoah Sanders tell it, he spent his six-decade career reaching for something that was always just beyond him. From the ecstatic flights of his playing, and the sometimes explicitly religious iconography he employed to contextualize it, it is clear that the something he sought had a spiritual dimension. But for all his yearning toward a higher plane, the giant of jazz saxophone—who died on Saturday at 81 years old—also remained rooted in earthly things. 

In his final published interview, a January 2020 conversation with the New Yorker, he spoke of music as his life’s work: sometimes in the manner of a minister discussing scripture, and just as often in the manner of a mechanic discussing a truck. The interviewer asked him if there was any recording in his vast discography that truly satisfied him. There was not. From his answer, it’s clear that on that day, the something on his mind was not theoretical or abstract or ineffable—not only, at least. “I have a problem,” he said, “with finding the right reeds.”

Sanders belonged to a cohort of musicians who, in the middle 20th Century, threw open the doors of jazz to allow for fierce dissonances, extended instrumental techniques, and a new style of improvisation oriented toward freeform collective expression rather than individual solos. Born in 1940 in Little Rock, Arkansas, he was at least a decade younger than the players who ushered in free jazz’s first wave, a generation that included John Coltrane, his greatest collaborator and mentor.

Whereas this first generation arrived at free jazz through complex elaborations of tonal harmony, the system of relationships between notes and chords that had undergirded bebop and earlier forms of jazz and classical music, Sanders and peers like Albert Ayler sometimes seemed to leave the precepts of harmony and melody behind entirely. At its most impassioned, their playing arrived in outbursts of pure sound—shrieks, sighs, thundercracks—that traditionalist critics and contemporaries of the era dismissed as unmusical. “I listen to things that maybe some guys don’t,” Sanders said in the New Yorker interview. “I listen to the waves of the water. Train coming down. Or I listen to an airplane taking off.” After Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Cecil Taylor broke down the wall, Sanders and the second vanguard were free to explore the territory on the other side.

Sanders’ playing on late-1960s and early-‘70s albums like Karma and Thembi is visionary and intense; critics, in some sense, were not wrong to hear a hard break from the music they knew. But it is also tender, hopeful, and generous. There are big, buoyant grooves and warm, communal melodies. In the shifting inflection of a single note, he can move you from joy to anguish, terror to beatitude. Short of Coltrane himself, no saxophonist had access to further extremity of feeling. Awful pain, simmering defiance, burning need, sweet consummation—if you’ve ever felt it deep in your spirit or your gut, it’s there somewhere in Sanders’ music.

Sanders cut his teeth playing R&B as a teenager in Arkansas and later in Oakland. He moved to New York City in his early twenties, when he decided to commit himself to jazz. He was homeless for a while, and he occasionally sold his blood in order to eat. His fortune began to change after encounters with two legendary figures of the avant-garde: Sun Ra, who encouraged him to ditch his given name—Farrell—for the honorific he carried with him for the rest of his life, and John Coltrane, who became his close friend and artistic North Star. Sanders had a brief tenure in the Sun Ra Arkestra, and a more substantial one in Coltrane’s band, which lasted from 1965 until Coltrane’s death two years later. Each man influenced the other, but their voices remained distinct, with Sanders’ solos providing a raw and urgent counterpoint to Coltrane’s, which retained a certain mathematical elegance and precision from his mastery of bebop even as he embraced the new music’s possibilities for open-ended expressiveness.

Sanders had released one album as a bandleader before joining with Coltrane, but his recording career began in earnest with 1967’s Tauhid, his debut for Impulse!—the same label that nurtured and distributed Coltrane’s music in his later years. With serpentine guitar lines from Sonny Sharrock, an array of percussion from around the globe, and patiently unfolding compositional forms driven by timbre and texture rather than chord changes, Tauhid was an early entry in the canon of what we now call spiritual jazz. 

The style first emerged on late Coltrane albums like Om, but found its fullest expression in the work that Sanders and Alice Coltrane released after John’s death, further advancing his ideas about music and meditation as pathways to the divine. Alice Coltrane and Sharrock would remain important collaborators for Sanders in the years to come: Alice’s early albums Ptah, the El Daoud and Journey in Satchidananda feature Sanders at his most lyrical; and Sharrock’s 1991 swan song Ask the Ages showcases the saxophonist, then in his early fifties, at his most volatile.

Even as Sanders is reaching dizzying heights of rapture and dissonance—even, perhaps, as he is most closely apprehending the elusive something he sought—it is still possible to hear his roots as an R&B player and a guy who saw music as a means to keep food on the table, as well as a route toward holiness. Listen to his playing on the introduction to “The Creator Has a Master Plan,” a nearly album-length odyssey from 1969’s Karma that has a strong claim to the title of his finest work. His incantatory tone, throaty and rich with overtones, seems almost ready to escape the vessel of the saxophone altogether, on a flight to the great beyond. But it also points earthward, at dancing bodies and nightclub walls and Arkansas; it sounds not altogether unlike something you might hear on a Fats Domino record.

“The creator has a working plan/Peace and happiness for every man,” sings vocalist Leon Thomas, just before he begins yodeling and speaking in tongues. The ecstatic and the ineffable are important elements of Sanders’ music, but so is the working part. Unlike the Coltranes, who at times in their playing could begin to resemble embodiments of the divine itself, Sanders resided always in the sweat and substance of the here and now. 

Albert Ayler’s famous formulation went like this: “Trane was the Father, Pharoah was the Son, I am the Holy Ghost.” The Son lived among men, his feet planted on the ground. For Sanders, transcendence didn’t exist only in some rarefied other realm; it was something you worked at here on Earth, with your lungs, and your lips, and a good reed if you could find one.