'The best tenor player in the world.' Pharoah Sanders at 80.
Happy birthday to Pharaoh Sanders, from The Los Angeles Times.
Best known for his transcendent work with John Coltrane in the mid-1960s and for an astounding eight-year solo run for Impulse Records starting in 1966, Sanders helped define the so-called spiritual jazz movement. Merging percussion-heavy free jazz with meditative ideas influenced by Eastern religion, chants and Sanders’ dynamic, smooth and occasionally skronky tone, his music on albums including “Karma,” “Tauhid” and “Black Unity” stormed psyches with a set of complex, structurally fluid instrumental ideas. Decades later, Sanders’ output continues to resonate with generations of creators, most notably the L.A. scene that birthed Flying Lotus, Kamasi Washington, Madlib, Carlos Niño and Terrace Martin.
“He’s probably the best tenor player in the world,” fellow horn player Ornette Coleman told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2006.