[From the Ithaca Times, Sept. 16]
When Pharoah Sanders took the stage at Cornell’s Bailey Hall on Sunday, Sept. 16, the performance offered a chance for Ithacans to experience one of the most renowned, and controversial, saxophonists in the history of jazz. Last week I had the chance to speak with Sanders by telephone from his NYC hotel (he lives in Los Angeles), and rather than belabor the usual questions about his past work with John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Don Cherry, and numerous others, I took the opportunity to ask about his approach and musical thinking today, in the year 2007, some 40 years after the maelstrom of his 1960s-era work.
Disarmingly humble, Sanders spoke emphatically about his next recording project, which is currently in the works, “I don’t know if it will be this year, but it is in the making… It depends on what the concepts will be, and what musicians I would like to use for those particular concepts… but I hear it.”
Interestingly, Sanders does not consider himself a jazz musician. “Well, I never looked at myself as a jazz musician when I was coming up. You know, I play all kinds of things, you never know about me,” he says, laughing heartily. When asked if he has a favorite album in his celebrated discography, Sanders refuses to name even one, offering only this: “I’m very, very critical when I listen back to my own recordings.”
One notion that Sanders reiterated again and again was the desire to avoid repeating himself. Not surprisingly, Sanders still practices every day and continues to search for new sounds and techniques. “I spend a lot of time finding different things on my instrument. I try to invent things, it’s still coming,” Sanders says. As an example, he mentions a technique that he’s been working on lately: getting his horn to sound more like a stringed instrument. “I hear the saxophone, but I want it to sound more like — to express myself more like — the sound of a stringed instrument. Rather than a reed instrument. I’m still working on it.” When I ask if this approach affects note selection or timbre or both, he answers, “It’s just a certain way that I have to think and play. I can’t even think as a saxophonist, I have to think as another instrument.”
For those who saw the performance on Sunday, Sanders’ interest in extended technique was evident: he concluded two pieces with the microphone enveloped by the bell of his tenor saxophone — an effect that created a kind of microphonic feedback that faded as he fingered the keys with the mouthpiece disjoined from his mouth.
When queried about his quest today in comparison to his explosive work as a young man in the 1960s, Sanders chuckles warmly, and interjects, “I’m still a young man! And I’m still trying to deal with it. I’m never satisfied with things.”
Inevitably the conversation turned to Sanders’ experiences playing and recording with John Coltrane in 1965-1967. I wanted to ask if he still viewed that period, from today’s vantage point, as a revolutionary time, or as a more organic outgrowth of his own musical journey — which has continued to unfold substantially in the forty years subsequent to Coltrane’s death. “I didn’t think as much about concepts then as I do now… I mean, I knew that John liked my playing, but maybe there were some of my own things that I put aside when I started working with him.” Sanders says that he wants to explore those as-of-yet untapped areas in his next recording, and we look forward to the results.