Pharoah Sanders has died. The saxophonist was one of the key figures in the avant-garde phase of modern jazz in the 1960s. As his label Luaka Bop announced, the musician died in the presence of his family in Los Angeles.
At the side of John Coltrane, Sanders developed the first forms of free jazz. After Coltrane’s death, the saxophonist continued to work with his widow, Alice Coltrane. The two found inspiration above all in the spirituality and music of African and Asian religions, which is why their joint albums were considered the birth of spiritual jazz.
In 1969, for his album “Kharma”, Sanders composed the piece “The Creator has a Masterplan”, on which the singer Leon Thomas sang a kind of yodelled prayer, and which probably became the only free jazz hit. Louis Armstrong played it again with Thomas in an orchestral version. And in London clubs it became the norm.
Throughout his life he retained the brute stylistic devices of free jazz such as overblowing, the primal scream effects and the walls of sound. Even if he found his way back to more conventional forms in the 1980s. In 2021 he had an unexpected hit with the London electro musician and DJ Floating Points and the London Symphony Orchestra. In the second year of the pandemic, the meditative, nine-part suite “Promises” was exactly the kind of music with spiritual depth and emotional spark of hope that a stricken humanity needed. Now Pharoah Sanders died on September 24 at the age of 81. A detailed obituary follows.