A Pharaoh’s Religious Awakening

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The New York Sun

Pharoah Sanders started his opening set Wednesday night with a prayer expressed in saxophonic form. You could hear the power of this opening invocation as it filled the Iridium, resonated up the stairwell, and spilled out onto the street. There, it began to travel down Broadway, penetrating, one hopes, the theater next door, where a hideous karaoke musical is perpetrated nightly. Inside the club, it was overwhelming.


The Arkansas-born tenor saxophone player, who turns 65 next week, is one of two horn-playing John Coltrane collaborators still active, the other being Archie Shepp. Both he and Mr. Shepp worked as the second saxophonist in Coltrane’s band, and have always proudly waved the banner of the Coltrane flock. It may be an oversimplification, but I have always thought of Mr. Shepp as the Coltrane protege who picked up on the political aspects of Coltrane’s music, and Mr. Sanders as the heir to Trane’s religious legacy. As the late Albert Ayler put it, “Trane was the father, Pharoah was the son, and I was the holy ghost.”


On Wednesday, wearing a white satin shirt and sunglasses in the dimly lit underground club, Mr. Sanders fully looked the part of a man of the cloth. His opening prayer recalled the introductory passages of Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” and his own “The Creator Has a Master Plan,” except that it was not a lead-in to something else but a complete piece, perfect unto itself. Mr. Sanders’s energy was so powerful that in listening I lost track of time – it could have been two choruses or 20, two minutes or 15. Under the right circumstances I would have surely had a vision. His sound and spirit were so big they seemed capable of filling all of Times Square.


I wish he had stayed in the slow tempo for the whole set. His second number was a fast piece in the mold of Coltane’s “Giant Steps.” Compared with the purposefulness of the prayer, this long piece was merely about hearing Mr. Sanders play fast. He wandered off and on mike, and left the stage for a long spell while his rhythm section of pianist William Henderson, bassist Vicente Archer, and drummer Rodney Green soloed and exchanged fours with each other at length.


For his third and last full number, Mr. Sanders (whose stage name is a riff on his given name, “Ferrell”) got back on track with the beautiful slow ballad “Nancy (With a Laughin’ Face),” one of several that Coltrane learned from Frank Sinatra. Here he seemed reluctant to relinquish the stage or end his opening solo: He just kept finding more and more new things to tell us about Nancy.


This is as good as contemporary ballad playing gets. Although Mr. Sanders’s tone and manner are essentially Coltrane-like, he was primarily playing thematic variations in the Sonny Rollins style, never completely abandoning the melody.Even when Mr. Sanders decorated the Van Heusen melody with such avant-garde touches as altissimo shrieks, he consistently did so at the service of the song – he never honked or squealed just for its own purpose or for shock value.


He concluded with another theme with a decidedly spiritual bent. I kept expecting him to do some of the shrieking he was once famous for, but instead he played a piece which attracted attention for its quietness. He wound up with no sound at all, holding the saxophone bell around the microphone, letting just his fingers and the pads resonate – almost like the sax were somehow blowing itself or if some otherworldly entity were doing the blowing.


In all, it was one of the most iridescent performances ever heard at the Iridium, as the many musicians gathered at the bar would no doubt agree. How fitting to have a Pharaoh playing religious music on Rosh Hashana.


Until October 9 (1650 Broadway at 51st Street, 212-581-2121).


The New York Sun

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