“I used to, when Pharoah would come to town, hang out with him and try to talk to him whenever I could. He would stress the importance of tone. Period. He said it all began with tone. All the other stuff, the technical acrobatics, the striptease and the bouncing all over the horn, and all that kind of stuff is all secondary because it’s all about tone first.” So said Detroit saxophonist Faruq Z Bey in a Cadence magazine interview.

Tone, in particular tenor tone, was where Pharoah Sanders was undeniable. Everything else could be debated, but not the sound that came out of his saxophone. Sanders could manipulate the waveforms that he generated with his reed and mouthpiece in ways that had not been heard before. What he could do was put on concentrated display on “Preview”, a three minute solo feature with The Jazz Composers Orchestra recorded in 1968. Had the full orchestra suddenly turned against him, it might not have managed to subdue what he played.

For both good and bad reasons, Sanders’s name remained strongly attached to the jazz avant garde of the 1960s. He was on his way to becoming one of its major figures when, while working with Philly Joe Jones and Vi Redd on the West Coast in the autumn of 1965, the gradual process of joining John Coltrane’s group began. Coltrane was not a musician prone to making expansive public statements, but the presence of Sanders next to him on the bandstand was the strongest silent cosign possible. How could a musician widely regarded as the greatest tenor player need another tenor next to him?

Shortly after arriving in New York from Oakland around Thanksgiving in 1962, Sanders found a gig at a Greenwich Village coffee house that didn’t leave much mark on jazz history, the Speakeasy. The playing that took place there for much of 1963 would nonetheless prove important. Sanders’s colleagues included alto saxophonist Clarence ‘C’ Sharpe, pianist John Hicks, drummer Billy Higgins, and trumpeters Don Cherry and Clifford Thornton.

“Farrell was not as impressed with himself as many others were with him,” tuba player Howard Johnson wrote in the liner notes of his Arrival: A Pharoah Sanders Tribute album. “He thought that he was just a poor imitation of John Coltrane. But what wasn’t like Trane was really original. And I even thought he was advanced of Coltrane in some ways. Nearly no one agreed, but two who did agree were John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy, who often came to the club and listened excitedly. These visits caused the young soon to be Pharoah no end of stress and anxiety.”

Oakland musicians such as Sonny Simmons remembered Sanders under the name ‘Little Rock’, after the Arkansas state capital where he was born Ferrell Lee Sanders on 13 October 1940. Farrell became Pharoah around the time of a brief association with Sun Ra and his Arkestra. In interviews, Sanders repeatedly felt the need to correct the widely held belief that the bandleader was the one who had come up with the new name. It was to no avail. Like much about Sanders’s personal life, down to the spelling of his birth name, some mystery prevailed.

After Coltrane’s death in 1967, Sanders managed, although not without bumps in the road, to become one of the few musicians of the early avant garde to escape the underground. This rare feat put him in the company of Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, but not many others.

What made the transition possible was the soundworld Sanders organised around his saxophone and the paths he chose for himself. “It seems that for me, the more I play ‘inside’, inside the chords and the tune, the more I want to play ‘outside’, and free,” Sanders said in a May 1968 issue of DownBeat. “But also, the more I play ‘outside’ the more I want to play ‘inside’ too. I’m trying to get a balance in my music.”

Sanders found the balance that year with the quintet he put together with bassist Sirone, drummer Majid Shabazz, and pianist Lonnie Liston Smith and vocalist Leon Thomas, who were both major parts of the group’s sound. After extended stints at Slugs and the Village Vanguard and the first of many personnel changes, the group recorded Karma for the Impulse! label in February 1969. Most of the now classic album was taken up by “The Creator Has A Master Plan”, a 30 minute bass heavy vamp that summed up much of Sanders’s future approach.

“I didn’t know it at the time, but this turned out to be a healthy portion of the music I had been waiting to hear since Trane left the scene,” author Kalamu ya Salaam wrote in 2006. “Karma spoke directly to me in both its simplicity and its complexity. There were moments so soothing it was like floating in the calm sea off Barbados’s south coast, round Christ Church way. There were other moments of furious energy that sent me hurtling through the cosmos — the hugeness of Pharoah’s tenor saxophone filling my apartment’s small living room, expanding my neo-African, gone-global consciousness.”

Shortly after its release, Karma entered the Billboard jazz charts, where it would stay for 25 weeks. At its peak, the album also made it to the bottom of Billboard’s Top 200. Impulse!, for whom Sanders had already recorded Tauhid in 1966 on a one-off contract, had the foresight to sign him on a more long term deal. The label did well as Sanders’s recordings for the company until 1973 consistently made it into the jazz charts. Although less well-known, Karma’s follow-up, Jewels Of Thought, spent 20 weeks there in 1970. It was to be the last album to feature Leon Thomas’s unique Pygmy-inspired vocal style, heard to great effect on “Hum-Allah”.

Heard widely, Sanders’s music acquired a cultural resonance beyond what most other jazz musicians of the era could boast. Some were attracted by its mystique and its Eastern echoes. Some searched for something of Coltrane’s unfinished work. Some heard a soundscape of the future. In his history of Black Power, New Day In Babylon, William L Van Deburg wrote of the era’s visions of a post-revolutionary world: a splendid place over which presided new ethical and aesthetic standards, where Amiri Baraka’s words and Sanders’s music spoke of the changes wrought by the revolution.

The soothing, blissful side of Sanders’s music, the pieces and parts that seemed to try to conjure radiance and stillness grew in importance over the course of his work for Impulse!. The thundering drums of free jazz’s early days were traded for soft bells or heavy percussion grooves. At times the power of the tenor was traded for the soprano. This side of Sanders’s music lent itself well to visions of future peace. “Pharoah, the purest spirit is our vision,” poet Larry Neal had written in The Cricket. It also lent itself to criticism, not from enemies of free jazz but from proponents of what it used to be, back in Tauhid’s days.

It did not matter, as by the time the Impulse! period came to an end in 1973, Sanders had already done what he needed to do to become a legend. Had he left New York for the West Coast? Was he living in Detroit? Had he really taught at a university in Cleveland? Had he retired? Had he gone commercial? One thing stands out in early live reports: Sanders was also willing to not play, letting his musicians stretch until he felt things were right, and so be it if that happened to be minutes before the end of a set. But when he did pick the tenor up, that unique tone was heard. “I just come in and start playing,” he told Robert Palmer. “Let it happen. Let it end some kind of way.”

Further reading:
Phil Freeman’s eight page guide to the key records in Sanders's multifaceted career