In the mood

Pharoah Sanders’ new album provides a pleasant, mostly restful diversion.

At 80, saxophonist Pharoah Sanders has had a remarkable career in and out of jazz. As a young man, he was in rhythm’n’blues bands, then played free jazz with Sun Ra and Ornette Coleman, joined up with John Coltrane in the mid-60s, recorded with Coltrane’s widow, Alice, on her

spiritual albums, worked with Bill Laswell, the Last Poets, Jah Wobble and Terry Callier, and along the way released numerous albums under his own name.

The album Promises, with electronic producer Floating Points (Sam Shepherd) and the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO), finds Sanders in a meditative mood of nine movements that sit somewhere between intelligent ambient and less-banal new-age music, the Coltranes’ spiritual quests and the holy minimalism found in the more esoteric ECM releases.

Floating Points provides harp-like washes and repetitions in the early movements and Sanders’ long, quiet lines gently probe and become hypnotically drawn out towards the middle sections.

In the fifth and sixth movements, there is a palpable increase in Sanders’ intensity, and in the latter – which précises all that went before in its opening section – the

LSO emerge to whip up glorious clouds of sound (swathes of strings that have brief Indian and North African allusions as much as the white-knuckle melodrama of a film soundtrack), then normal service is resumed. Or so you may think.

Then, Sanders suddenly reaches into his searing free-jazz style before the final two sections circle the mood back into dreamy organ-like sections and barely audible passages from Floating Points.

This is quite a trip into the inner realms … but it’s a path frequently travelled. For example, as far back as 1978, keyboard player Harold Budd and saxophonist Marion Brown offered the not-dissimilar Bismillahi ’Rrahmani ’Rrahim on The Pavilion of Dreams album, which came out on Brian Eno’s Obscure label for enigmatic ambient music. So, a pleasant, mostly restful diversion, but not a major work in Sanders’ considerable canon. l

Promises by Pharoah Sanders, Floating Points and the LSO is available now.