Pharoah at the Festival de jazz de Châteauvallon, August 17, 1977

Pharoah Sanders at the Festival de jazz de Châteauvallon in the South of France, August 17, 1977.

First published in the French quarterly magazine Jazz Hot, this photograph of Pharoah captured his first performance of a brief but intense tour that he took throughout Europe in August 1977—at the fabled jazz festival outside of Marseille.

What made this tour unlikely but important in Pharoah’s life is twofold: For Pharoah, European tours were rare—they were difficult to organize, and expensive. And, as this one took place just a few months after his latest studio recording, Pharoah, he was playing music from this fairly unheralded and, at the time, underground album live.

But he wasn’t traveling with the musicians he recorded the album with—he was with a different group: The drummer Clifford Jarvis and the bassist Hayes Burnett, who both cut their teeth with Sun Ra, and the pianist Khalid Moss, who had spent a few years avoiding the Vietnam War and running from the FBI. 

The full spread from Jazz Hot, 1977.

As some of you know, we’re putting Pharoah out again in September as a box set, and we’re going to be including two previously unreleased versions of his beloved piece from that album, “Harvest Time”—both of which he played during this tour with this group. Not only do these live versions sound nothing like the original, they also sound starkly different from each other.

We’ll be sharing more of our research from this tour over the next week, as Pharoah and his band made their stops.

Pharoah is out September 15.