Pharoah Sanders Harmony Holiday

 I posted last month about the release of Pharoah Sanders' new album, Promises. It's a wonderful album and a perfect balm for these troubled times.

I'm not the only one who likes it. Here's an appreciative article about Sanders and the new album from 4columns.org.

On Promises, Pharoah—alongside Sam Shepherd (Floating Points) and the London Symphony Orchestra—sounds as lucid dream–driven as on Thembi and as reverent as on Ascension (1965). Composed by Shepherd and on the label Luaka Bop, the album has been five years coming, an idea born in 2015 in Los Angeles and realized in a ten-day recording session at LA’s Sargent Studios in the summer of 2019, and then another socially distanced session in London’s AIR Studio, where the LSO recorded Shepherd’s arrangements in 2020. The outcome is nine movements, forty-six minutes that begin with a huddled dirge-like and embryonic quality, gradually brightening into cheerful resignation, with the help of Pharoah’s tonal insistence, a goodbye to all that.

A looping shimmer of Fender Rhodes chords in the shape of lurking, about-to-press footsteps opens the suite and becomes its constant refrain, repeating so often that its initial softness smudges; we cannot tell if we’re being soothed, warned, or taunted by the inescapable pulsing of sweetness against menace. Pharoah enters and cuts through the Rhodes loop a minute and a half in, but the refrain never dissolves—it dangles and coddles us every few bars, movement after movement. The loop is part of what is promised, the coaxing familiarity we must face to reach the greater unknown here. Pharoah becomes oracular onlooker. He withholds, refuses, returns in rollicking bursts while the loop steadily marches in search and in spite of him. You long for the reprieve and fluidity of the tenor, but much of Promises plays to its absence, to its potential—chasing it, then alienating it.