Pharoah Sanders' Promises Delivers

I first discovered Pharoah Sanders' music when I was in university and I've have loved it ever since. Unfortunately, his recorded output during the last couple of decades has been rather sparse, although he has been playing regularly, and I've seen him in Toronto a couple of times in this millennium. 

So I was happy to hear that he had a new album coming out and signed up to listen to a webcast of the album's premiere last Sunday. I didn't have high expectations; after all, he just turned 80 and how well can an 80-year-old play the sax? Well, I was wrong on that. Promises is brilliant and easily his best album since Message From Home released in 1996, and one of the highlights of his career.

I'm not alone in that opinion. Rolling Stone has this to say. 

Sanders’ latest — like Let My People Go, a team-up with a much younger musician, in this case Sam Shepherd, the thirtysomething electronic composer-producer known as Floating Points — drives home what a master collaborator he’s always been. Picking up on threads from the saxophonist’s late-Nineties and early-2000s work with Bill Laswell, which set his horn against dubby, spacey soundscapes, Promises, out March 26th, places him at the center of an electro-acoustic ambient-classical concerto, composed and arranged by Shepherd and featuring the London Symphony Orchestra strings. Consisting of a single, 46-minute work, the album is both startlingly minimal and arrestingly gorgeous.

Promises hinges on a crystalline melodic keyboard figure, played by Shepherd, that pulsates gently as the orchestra rises up around it. Sanders’ tenor sax murmurs on top, playing slow, searching phrases that weave in and out of the core theme. Sometimes his horn recedes, trading places with burbling synths, glinting organ, sweeping string passages, or even his own murmuring vocalization, but it always returns, adding a flavor of deep-blues pathos to the ethereal surroundings. Only sparingly, such as one during brief, stunning episode about 35 minutes in, does Sanders break into the harsh sax ululation that he’s famous for, but overall, the piece feels like a loving sonic gift to a master from a disciple, and a worthy successor to Sanders’ foundational Sixties and Seventies epics.

Promises is an album that rewards concentration and close listening. Turn down the lights, turn up the volume, and listen. You won't regret it.