Pharoah Sanders after John Coltrane

Pharoah Sanders performing with pianist William Henderson (photograph taken at the Altes Pfandhaus in Cologne, Germany, on February 7, 2008, photographer Hans Peter Schaefer, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

I first became aware of tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders during my student days at the campus radio station for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. My own broadcasts were almost entirely of classical music, but my personal interest in the twentieth century made me more than a bit of an outlier. As a result, when a copy of John Coltrane’s Ascension first arrived, I found myself as drawn to it as I had been to composers like Anton Webern.

One result is that the album introduced me to a more than generous number of jazz musicians whose names had previously been unfamiliar. One of them was Pharoah Sanders, one of the three tenor saxophonists on the recording (Coltrane being one and Archie Shepp the other). Since that time, I have always been aware of Sanders’ name when listening to jazz on the radio; but I never added any of the albums he led to my collection.

Things changed this past February when I received electronic mail from DL Media about a reissue of a Sanders album by the Mack Avenue Music Group on the Strata-East label. The title of the album is Izipho Zam (my gifts). This is also the title of the last of the three tracks on the album, which is about two minutes shy of half an hour. It is preceded by two tracks accounting for about twenty minutes: “Prince of Peace” and “Balance.”

Like Ascension, this is a large ensemble album with a total of thirteen performers. Sanders leads with his saxophone but also contributes to percussion performance. The advance material I received describes the “Izipho Zam” composition as “an exploration of dissonance and harmony with West African percussion and meditative chants.” To some extent that reflects the approach to jazz that Sanders had been taking in his performances with Coltrane; but Sanders’ approach to those meditative qualities is not quite as aggressive as Coltrane’s had been in his work.

For better or worse, “Ascension” assaults the listener with a gut-punch from the opening gesture that never lets up over the course of about 40 minutes. In “Izipho Zam” Sanders comes across as more interested in a ritualistic process that draws the listening into his own perspectives on meditation. Some may be put off by the vocal work by Leon Thomas, but my own reaction was that of yet another perspective on the underlying ritual.

Sanders died on September 24, 2022, meaning that I never had a chance to see him in performance; but I find that I can still appreciate his presence through his creation of “Izipho Zam.”