Free jazz — that nebulous and borderless terrain of which Little Rock-born tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders is undoubtedly a sovereign statesman — gets compared to meditation a lot. And the comparison makes sense. Like meditation, Sanders’ jazz was less concerned with doing something and more concerned with being ready for something to happen. Less concerned with making a statement than with making room for a statement — creating the right set of conditions under which a statement might develop and then being present and curious and patient enough to let it waltz into view on its own time. In the avant garde company of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane and Albert Ayler (and, these days, Kamasi Washington), Sanders devoted himself to a form of jazz that valued expression above all else, and which viewed improvisation as The Whole Damn Point, not merely a series of creative liberties to superimpose atop an existing structure — say, the math of Brubeck or the melody of Duke. (What would a “lead sheet” for “The Creator Has A Master Plan” look like? Preposterous!) If there was an overarching rule in Sanders’ music, it wasn’t typically a melody or a set of chords, but a malleable “groove” to linger in and around and above. It was as if he and Alice Coltrane in “Journey in Satchidananda,” for example, had set out not to “perform” a song at all, but to set a scene and make a mood. 

Often, it was much more than a mood; how Sanders managed, for example, in the aforementioned “Creator” to express the whole of the human condition in half an hour on a tonal foundation that, at its core, vacillates between only two notes, I’ll never know. But he did. By whittling away the trappings of verse-chorus-verse in favor of humanity-universe-humanity, Sanders cut straight to the core for his listeners, many of whom liken the piece to a transcendental trip, or a medicinal salve. One YouTube commenter claimed that Sanders’ 1969 album “Karma” cured her insomnia when pharmaceuticals wouldn’t. Another fan, in his late 60s battling throat cancer, said he’d been listening to the record for decades and that it had made COVID-19 “almost bearable.” Another said he’d played it for solace in the barracks as a soldier in Germany in 1970, catching “all sorts of shit from other GI’s.”

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The tenor saxophone, in the wrong hands, has been the weapon behind some musical crimes of the most gruesome variety, rendered synonymous with something called smooth jazz, which hangs out in doctor’s office lobbies and customer service queues and ladies’ department stores. In Sanders’ hands, though, the instrument had not just a “tone,” but a whole personality and voice, one that asked questions and offered up theories and moaned and shimmied and fluttered and floated and threw wild parties. The man spoke little in performance other than to credit his fellow performers. When I saw him in 2018 at North Little Rock’s Pulaski Technical College for the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame’s Distinguished Laureate Series, he was nearly silent except to gesture his permission for the crowd to dance. But what Sanders said through his saxophone, then and ever, felt bigger than a single emotion from a single person. When he soared on a solitary note it felt not like a bird, but a whole flock, and when he undulated and wailed in seemingly unspeakable suffering, it sounded like the suffering of multitudes. (What I wouldn’t give to be there during a satellite jazz radio algorithm fail in the home decor section at Dillard’s, Sanders’ blood-curdling sax screeches midway through “Creator” freaking out the daytime shoppers.) 

A saxophone reed is made from a Mediterranean member of the grass family called “giant cane.” It has a tough job, as it must be strong enough to withstand great pressure but supple enough to phonate and resonate. The reed is thick at its base where it’s secured to the horn’s mouthpiece by a metal ligature, but near where the player’s lips and tongue rest it’s shaved terrifically thin so that it can vibrate under pressure from the player’s airflow. Sanders was known for a throbbing “split reed” technique that produced a harrowing howl. He’d bite the reed, or yell into the horn, or blow so hard into it that the whittled strip of cane would go into vibration overdrive, threatening to splinter into a thousand shards. Sanders had trouble finding the right reeds, he told The New Yorker magazine when he was 79 (he was 81 when he died Sept. 24), often tossing away whole boxes when they didn’t sound right. It’s no wonder; because they’re organic, no two reeds are exactly the same. Then again, no two of his performances were, either. Here’s hoping wherever he is, he’s found a good one. 

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