Pharoah Sanders

ORIGINATION his lungs, i guess
LAST LISTENED TO january
CHANCE OF WAKING TO IT really quite high, considering the quantity of his recordings where i woke
RATING

Saxophonist Pharoah Sanders is one the best known musicians to have been involved in the free jazz movement of the '60s and '70s. He is famed for the sound he produced, which was unlike almost any other before or since. It is a sound that was rich and full of overtones and, when he really let lose with it, he was able to balance on the very point at which tone gives out to noise. It is a breath-taking sound, which sadly many poor fools found unlistenable. That's there loss. The spirit and passion in such playing was and is unmistakable.

This morning i woke with the sound of his playing in my head. Such is the nature of the playing, its very freeness, that finding that one small particular riff in his work is next to impossible. Around the period of his work that i know best (the late '60s to early '70s), he recorded many pieces which stretched whole sides of LPs. In fact, for many of the CD re-issues, i suspect that many of these pieces have been put back together, as they could never have fitted on one side of an LP. So finding a tiny, half second riff in a piece that is over 30 minutes is a task that i will happily fail. Instead, i'm just going to listen to all 32 minutes and 47 seconds of the staggering The Creator Has A Master Plan and let its energy carry me on into my day.