Oregon Music News

There is so much music out there that one feels like a poorly performing hunter/gatherer cast into Zupans. So thank you Portland Jazz Festival and Oregon Music News for directing my attention back to Pharaoh Sanders. Damn, yes! I remember now: “The Creator has a Master Plan”.

Actually, I sought the assignment because in the late 70’s I went to hear Sanders with Jim Pepper at the Northwest Service Center in Portland. Pepper, an old friend of the Pharoah, sat impassively through the concert. At its conclusion, he put his hands on his knees and simply said: “I’ve got to get back to New York. You’ve got to play on that level.” (This piece gets spiked unless I note that Ferrell Sanders was Egypted by Sun Ra.)

That was some band. Am pretty sure the personnel included Sanders, Idris Muhammad on drums, John Hicks, piano, and Walker Booker, bass. As I recall, there was a respectable amount of applause but mainly it was gaping mouths.

An excellent woman who works where I do said she doesn’t much like to listen to sounds like this on record but leaps at the opportunity to hear it live (was ecstatic about the Portland Jazz Festival’s recent presentation of Ornette Coleman).

So this is your cup of tea or it isn’t. Sanders was playing with John Coltrane on “Live in Seattle” and more that one acquaintance of mine considers that to be one the most astonishing experiences of their lives. Pharoah chatter on the Internet includes a rebuttal to Whitney Balliett’s putdown, that it’s noise, not music. Call it what you want, was the rejoinder, if it’s noise it’s noise of surpassing power and frequent beauty.

Sanders, who is verging on 70 years-of-age, was, and apparently still is, one of the deep mystics of improvised music. While it takes some serious woodshedding to become a conduit of the Spirit, at some point one can become a vessel. (Albert Ayler held that Coltrane was the Father, Sanders the Son, and, modestly, he was the Holy Ghost.) Spirit, in this incarnation, seems close to pure aural energy.

After a recent session of listening to Sanders (and, yes, the records are important but it’s harder to get yourself up for the demanding experience on record than it is when you’re there) I was mystified by a refrain which is constantly repeated. It sometimes on three cuts of a single record and in every album it almost always turns up. What accounts for this mantra or incantation? It almost seems as if everything flows from this one musical figure.

The Wikipedia entry on Sanders features an assertion by Ornette Coleman that Pharoah is the greatest living tenor player. Well, my friends who are not friends of this music will say, “consider the source.” I’m perfectly willing to do that.

So, in addition to the constantly iterated figure described above, what else can you expect to hear Sunday, February 28, at 3 p.m. in the Newmark Theater? Sanders, who says he never rehearses a band, may be as interested as you are. Of an earlier concert, he declared: “it’s all going to be new to me.”

Watch Pharoah walking toward you in an abandoned tunnel:

Oregon Music News is happy to be a Supporting Sponsor of the 2010 Portland Jazz Festival.