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Pharoah Sanders, spirited tenor saxophonist, dies at 81

By RON SCOTT

Special to the AmNews

Pharoah Sanders, the tenor saxophonist who progressed the spiritual jazzness of John Coltrane and influenced a string of aspiring saxophonists along the way, died on September 24. He was 81.

Sanders’ record label, Luaka Bop, shared the news on social media. “We are devastated to share that Pharoah Sanders has passed away. He died peacefully surrounded by loving family and friends in Los Angeles earlier this morning.” The cause of death was not shared.

Of the many times I was fortunate enough to see Sanders perform, the most memorable will always be that night in 1966, in the east Bronx at the Monterey Bar, a small neighborhood spot on Bronxwood Avenue.

My friend and I couldn’t believe it: what was he doing playing at this little joint on a summer’s night? Maybe it was another Pharoah, maybe he wouldn’t show but no, there he was standing near the bar. We quickly paid our five dollars and took a table two feet from the tiny stage.

The joint was empty but then again, it was basically a bar that presented local talent on the weekends, R&B funk groups or reggae bands. For the entire evening not more than ten people were in the audience. For us it was a dream come true sitting two feet from “Pharoah” as his tenor hawked, screamed, hollered, he extended the boundaries of normal tenor notes going up and beyond, that was some powerful soul.

As the years scurried on and my jazz palate advanced, no one can ever tell me on that summer’s night, Pharoah played the best show ever. I mean we could hear him breathing through his horn and see steam appear, we were that close. No, that was more than a performance, it was a galactical mesmerizing experience, it was a blessing.

My unforgettable experience took place during the period Sanders was recording with John Coltrane from 1965’s ”Ascension!” to 1967’s ”Expression.” Following Coltrane’s death in 1967, Sanders briefly performed with his widow Alice Coltrane (including her classic album “Journey in Satchidananda” and “The El Daoud”) before moving on to create his own path. He released his now renowned masterpiece “Karma” in 1969, on the Impulse! label, which was home to Coltrane’s groundbreaking releases. The album featured one of his most famous compositions (that even today fans can name after two notes), “The Creator Has a Master Plan.” Even today its lyrics are extremely relevant: “The creator has a working plan/Peace and happiness for every man,” sings vocalist Leon Thomas, just before he begins yodeling. His other albums on Impulse! are “Black Unity,” an album of roaring improvisation, and “Thembi.”

“Many great things must come to an end and I spent the first few days on my first tour with Pharaoh dreading the day my days of playing with him would come to an end. One night in Hamburg, Germany we played a show that was so amazing I forgot about the audience—the energy went beyond the venue,” said drummer and composer Will Calhoun. “Pharaoh was smiling after that show and gave me a very noticeable nod of affirmation. I went to bed that night thinking it’s best I celebrate every moment with Pharaoh rather than waste time thinking about the last time we’ll play together.”

During the 1970s and ’80s Sanders continued his steady output of music, both as a leader and sideman for fellow jazz musicians like McCoy Tyner, Sonny Sharrock, Idris Muhammad, Kenny Garrett, Ornette Coleman and Will Calhoun. The NEA Jazz Master won a Grammy Award in 1989 for best jazz instrumental performance for the collaborative album “Blues for Coltrane: A Tribute to John Coltrane.”

Last year, Impulse! released the definitive jazz invocation recording “A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle,” recorded a few months after “Ascension.” It features Sanders as a crucial addition to Coltrane’s quartet, expanding on his musical statement. (“Live in Seattle,” a separate album recorded during the same engagement). Albert Ayler’s famous formulation went like this: “Trane was the Father, Pharoah was the Son, I am the Holy Ghost.”

Sanders was an organic musician. We can call him an avant garde warrior or a spiritual source, or a performer of the African diaspora. He played all of that but his music, like Coltrane’s, flowed from a spiritual force, a Black experience that reflects the Black church, cotton fields plantations, the call and response, the shoutin’ moanin’ wailin’ from the ancestors, who Randy Weston always referenced with pride.

The saxophonist did become a spiritual elder which was reflected in his music and way of life. His natural force of expressiveness surely influenced a younger generation of musicians like Kamasi Washington and Nubya Garcia, who are transforming his music into yet another context of the diaspora.

In 2021, he returned to the studio to record what would be his final album, “Promises” (Luaka Bop label), in collaboration with the electronic musician Sam Shepherd, who records as Floating Points, and the London Symphony Orchestra, that was instantly hailed as one of the year’s best.

Pharoah was born Ferrell Sanders on Oct. 13, 1940, in Little Rock, Ark. His love of music was inspired by his grandfather, who led the church choir. After high school, he switched from the clarinet to the alto saxophone, before finally deciding on the tenor saxophone. Sanders moved to the West Coast around 1959, attending Oakland Junior College, where he often sat in with saxophonists like Sonny Simmons and Dewey Redman. While there, Sanders first met and befriended John Coltrane, though they wouldn’t work together until many years later.

In 1962, Sanders relocated to New York, looking to join the city’s fertile jazz scene, where Coltrane was a reigning figure. Sanders’ landing in New York was rocky, however, resulting in intermittent homelessness as he practiced, sporadically, with Sun Ra and his Arkestra. (Sun Ra, it’s said, was the one who encouraged him to take the name Pharoah). In 1965, he joined Coltrane’s band. “I couldn’t figure out why he wanted me to play with him, because I didn’t feel like, at the time, that I was ready to play with John Coltrane,” Sanders said. “He always told me, ‘Play.’ That’s what I did.”

Pharoah Sanders in December of 2006 (Dmitry Scherbie New York https://commons.wikimedia. org/wiki/File:Pharoah_Sanders_photo.jpg), „Pharoah Sanders photo“, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/bysa/2.0/legalcode)

18 • September 29, 2022 - October 5, 2022

THE NEW YORK AMSTERDAM NEWS

A R T S & E N T E R T A I N M E N T

Reopening of Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall kicks off with ‘San Juan Hill: A New York Story’

Two large promontories, on the east and west corners of the First Tier overlooking the Grand Promenade, are designed with additional bars to provide prime people-watching.

By NADINE MATTHEWS

Special to the AmNews

On Oct. 8, the new David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center will open with the premiere of “San Juan Hill: A New York Story.” A mix of music and strong visuals come together to tell the story of the dynamic neighborhood of old where Lincoln Center now sits. Leading up to the premiere is a series of programs at the David Rubenstein Atrium that dig deep into the soul of San Juan Hill, a melting pot of Indigenous, Caribbean, and European denizens out of which grew a rich cultural music legacy that includes such greats as Thelonious Monk and Benny Carter that has until now, been hidden. See below for the programming schedule and details.

San Juan Hill Day; Connecting at the Seams

Thu, Sept. 29 at 7:30 p.m.

David Rubenstein Atrium FREE

Once home to the largest Black community in New York City and later a significant Puerto Rican population, San Juan Hill was demolished between the 1940s and 1950s as part of the “urban renewal” plan that created the Lincoln Center campus and other major developments. While many families were displaced to other neighborhoods in New York City and beyond, a sizable number of residents moved to the nearby Amsterdam Houses. This multi-part celebration of the inheritors of San Juan Hill’s history brings Amsterdam Houses’ elder residents to the Atrium to publicly build creative oral histories in collaboration with Sydnie L. Mosley Dances. Following an afternoon brainstorming session, SLMDances will perform these new works with emcee support from Lincoln Center’s inaugural poet-in-residence, Mahogany L. Browne. (Presented in collaboration with Sydnie L. Mosley Dances)

DJ Logic

Fri, Sept. 30 at 7:30 p.m.

David Rubenstein Atrium

FREE

Bronx-born champion of the city’s musical memory, DJ Logic is a specialist in connecting the threads between NYC’s rock, jazz and rap traditions. He is currently collaborating with the trumpeter and composer Etienne Charles on a Lincoln Center-commissioned work inspired by the San Juan Hill story that will reopen the David Geffen Hall when it is premiered in October in collaboration with the New York Philharmonic. At this celebratory dance party, DJ Logic will continue tying art to location for a nonstop hip hop jam with selected music from New York artists only. Come out and dance to hits and deep cuts from emcees and DJs representing all five boroughs to the fullest!

Is This Land Our Land?

Sat, Oct. 1 at Weeksville Heritage Center & Mon, Oct. 3 at 7:30 p.m.

David Rubenstein Atrium

FREE

The Unanswered Questions is a conversation series presented in collaboration with the New York Philharmonic and John Jay College of Criminal Justice exploring complex social topics raised by the Orchestra’s programming. The series’ season begins with Is This Land Our Land? —a discussion on the history of the San Juan Hill

and Weeksville neighborhoods, NYC communities of color that thrived with culture and tradition but were systematically dismantled, leaving behind a heritage of displacement and erasure that echoes to the present day. Weeksville Heritage Center’s President Dr. Raymond Codrington moderates a conversation with SUNY Binghamton professor and scholar Dr. Jennifer Lynn Stoever, and Etienne Charles—the performer and composer whose Lincoln Center-commissioned work inT:5.68 in spired by the San Juan Hill story will reopen David Geffen Hall when it is premiered in October in collaboration with the New York Philharmonic. Visit www.lincolncenter.org/ venue/david-geffen-hall/san-juanhill-773 for more info.

The reimagination of David Geffen Hall will welcome all who visit with generosity, warmth and fun. Vivid colors, patterns and textures that mirror the spirit and vibrancy of performance will enrich its public spaces. (Images courtesy of Lincoln Center)

THE PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING PLAY Returns to Broadway for its 20th Anniversary Production

COREY HAWKINS

YAHYA ABDUL-MATEEN II

T:4.31 in

DIRECTED BY KENNY LEON

Scene from “A Jazzman’s Blues” (Netflix photo)

By SUNIL SADARANGANI

Special to the AmNews

Set in the late 1930s into the 1940s, the story of “A Jazzman’s Blues” unfolds through a series of letters exchanged between two lovers, Bayou (Joshua Boon) and Leanne (Solea Pfeiffer), doomed from the moment they meet in a small town in the deep South. Bayou and his family are gifted blues singers and jazz musicians but live in poverty, with Bayou’s mother, Hattie Mae (Amirah Vann), running a clotheswashing business. When Bayou’s father Buster (E. Roger Mitchell) and brother Willie (Austin Scott)—who both ridicule a more talented Bayou—suddenly leave for Chicago to try their luck in the blues club circuit, the road gets bumpy. Add to the boiling pot, Leanne’s mother finds out about her and Bayou and whisks Leanne away to a better life. Leanne is born light-skinned, and her mother has plans for her. Bayou enlists to join the war, and though he and Leanne keep writing letters to each other, they never receive them because Leanne’s mother intervenes. Postwar, when Bayou returns home, he discovers Leanne has married the sheriff’s brother—who is to be mayor of the town. Passions re-ignite, and Bayou and Leanne revive their forbidden romance. Willie returns home with his talent manager, but all is not well. As tensions between the brothers grow and the manager discovers Bayou’s beautiful singing voice, Leanne’s mother finds out about the clandestine romance. Bayou escapes with Willie and his manager to Chicago, saved from being lynched by the sheriff and his racist mob. In a reversal of fortunes, Bayou’s singing voice is discovered, and he becomes the star attraction at a swanky jazz and blues club in Chicago, while Willie is left in the shadows. When Bayou decides to go back home to see his mother and hopes to see Leanne again, a secret is exposed, putting Bayou’s life in danger and ultimately killing him.

For Tyler Perry, “A Jazzman’s Blues” is a personal and all-heart creation. Speaking to the audience at the special screening of the film at the Netflix Tudum Theater in Hollywood last weekend, Perry said: “Twenty-seven years ago, I snuck in to see the August Wilson play, ‘Two Trains Running,’ mid-way, because I couldn’t afford to go to the theater. Completely blown away by the second half because I didn’t see the first half, I met Wilson after the play, who encouraged me to write what I felt from my heart, as I was unsure about my writing ability. So as I sat down (in a public space) and began to write, I heard someone say, ‘my name is Bayou’—and that’s where ‘A Jazzman’s Blues’ was born.”

You can sense Tyler Perry’s heart and passion written throughout the film. As a director, Perry extracts bravura performances from the cast, especially Joshua Boon and Amirah Vann. Special mention to Milauna Jackson, who plays Sissy, Bayou’s childhood friend. With lush visuals, Perry transports you back to ’40s America, where racism was the fabric of society and molded and shaped African American lives. Amplifying the ’40s era of jazz and blues music and dance, Perry gives the film its soul and is the most substantial aspect of the movie. A New Orleans native, Perry is deeply rooted in Black Southern culture, and he creates a vivid palette of love, yearning, ecstasy, and pain— all tied to music. The soundtrack vibrates and includes performances of jazz standards like “Rocks in My Bed,” “Pallet on the Floor,” and “It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).” These old favorites are synced with a new song from Terence Blanchard, “Paper Airplanes,” which is sung as a jazz ballad by Bayou in the film, and then at the end, during the credits, as a deep soul-stirring tune sung by the brilliant Toronto-based singer Ruth B. Both are intricately and cleverly mixed by Blanchard, who also arranges the jazz standards in the film.

Although the narrative has a few impediments and is a tad long at 127 minutes, this is a Tyler Perry film long-in-the-making, a young man’s first ever story he wrote. This young man’s spirit came alive again as he mingled and connected with every guest, from his heart, at the pre-screening reception of his film—finally made for the screen 27 years later.

SEP 30 – OCT 1 ROSE THEATER WYNTON MARSALIS: THE SHANGHAI SUITE

The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis opens the 35th Season with the U.S. Premiere of Marsalis’s The Shanghai Suite.

OCT 7 – 8 ROSE THEATER CHUCHO VALDÉS: THE CREATION

Legendary pianist and composer celebrates his 81st birthday with this four-movement suite exploring the story of creation according to the Santería religion, featuring elements of ritual music, West African music, and the blues.