Pharoah Sanders

Pharoah (Ferrell) Sanders was born on October 13, 1940 in Little Rock, Arkansas. Sanders is a world-renowned jazz saxophonist with a sound that ranges from raw and abrasive to graceful and serene. He played with John Coltrane’s group in the mid-1960s and is known for his iconic overblowing, harmonic, and multiphonic techniques as well as his use of “sheets of sound,” a term used to describe the improvisational style of Coltrane.

Sanders learned how to play music at an early age, playing church hymns on the clarinet. His initial artistic accomplishments were in the visual arts, but when he was at Scipio Jones High School in North Little Rock, Arkansas, Sanders began playing the tenor saxophone. After finishing high school in 1959, Sanders moved to Oakland, California. He briefly attended Oakland Junior College, where he studied art and music.

Sanders moved to Oakland after high school in 1959, just five years before Coltrane would ask him to sit in on his band. In Oakland, he could play in both black and white clubs. People called him “Little Rock” because he maintained his Arkansas roots. He moved to New York in 1961, where he struggled to make ends meet. He lived with Sun Ra, a free jazz luminary with whom he performed as well. However, Coltrane discovered Sanders in 1963 at New York’s Village Gate, and near the end of 1964, he asked Sanders to sit in with his band.

Sanders was practically launched into the world as a musician as he was born into a musical family. His mother taught music privately. His first instrument was the clarinet, but he switched to the tenor saxophone in high school under the guidance of his band director, Jimmy Cannon. Cannon was the one who exposed Sanders to jazz for the first time. Sanders was a fan of Harold Land, James Moody, Sonny Rollins, Charlie Parker, and, of course, John Coltrane. As a teenager, he played blues gigs around Little Rock for $10 to $15 dollars a night, backing such blues greats as Bobby “Blue” Bland and Junior Parker.

Haunts:

• Sanders performs around the world, and one of the places that he has performed at in the SF Bay Area is Yoshi’s (510 Embarcadero West, Oakland, CA 94607). Yoshi’s was founded in 1972 as a sushi restaurant in North Berkeley by three best friends. Since then, Yoshi’s has become one of the world’s most respected jazz performance spaces. Its 17,000 square feet and 310 seats are nestled in the heart of Jack London Square in Oakland, California. Sanders had a show at Yoshi’s on November 29, 2019.

• Grace Cathedral (1100 California Street, San Francisco, CA 94108) is another one of Sanders’s haunts. Its current cathedral began undergoing construction in 1927 following the destruction of the previous building in the 1906 earthquake. The gothic cathedral was completed in 1964, and it is the third largest Episcopal cathedral in the nation.

• Another haunt of Sanders was an old, abandoned tunnel in the Marin Headlands near the Golden Gate Bridge (Battery Construction 129, Sausalito, CA 94965). It was decommissioned near the end of WWII and finally sealed off in 2011. Sanders would perform with Paul Arslanian on the harmonium, and the tunnel created deeply resonant, haunting acoustics. You can listen to a video of the music here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7EGQzn8e1k.

~ by Hannah Parkins ~

External Links:

https://blog.sfgate.com/chroncast/2006/04/19/saxophone-giant-pharoah-sanders/

https://brooklynrail.org/2019/04/music/Pharoah-SandersSpirit-Ascending

https://www.arts.gov/video/nea-jazz-masters-tribute-pharoah-sanders

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNaQ5yS27bU