Message from Home
Pharoah Sanders
Verve through Polygram
Reviewed by Norm Dixon
This album shows Pharoah Sanders — Coltrane's cosmic, Afrocentric fellow traveller — is at 57 as cool and relevant as ever. Message from Home places Sanders squarely in the 1990s and will bring him to the attention of young people newly discovering jazz through the sometimes roundabout route loosely known as "acid jazz". Sanders unashamedly sets out to appeal to this audience.
What he delivers is not the shallow fusion of '80s easy listening, '70s disco and '60s James Bond soundtracks that has come to dominate this genre. Sanders' music is challenging "free-funk" — free jazz that is accessible, danceable and deep. It combines what made his late '60s recordings so magnificent with a contemporary funk beat.
Sanders' is most celebrated for his 1965-67 collaboration with the late John Coltrane — documented on albums such as Meditations, Ascension and the recently released 2-CD Live in Seattle. After Coltrane's untimely death in 1967, Sanders continued to explore.
On his late 1960s albums, Tauhid and Karma, Sanders' saxophone was jazz's answer to Jimi Hendrix's guitar: wild, uncontrolled, yet optimistic and inspirational. His radical egalitarian mysticism was in tune with young people's experiments in ideas and lifestyles and his search for an Africa-centred faith and philosophy reflected the rise of an increasingly assertive African-American population.
Through the '70s and '80s, Sanders kept a low profile. In the '90s an army of young bands and DJs, especially in Europe, dug through the vaults for jazz riffs to sample in their dance and hip hop tracks. The hip high priest of free jazz emerged as an underground cult figure. His tracks "Om Allah Om" (sampled by Galliano on "Prince of Peace"), "The Creator has a Master Plan" and "You Gotta Have Freedom" became staple acid jazz samples.
His majestic image graced the cover of the 1994 AIDS-awareness jazz-meets-hip hop album, Stolen Moments: Red, Hot and Cool, on which he also collaborated with former members of the militant Last Poets to recreate their classic "This is Madness". The album includes an innocuous rendition of "The Creator has a Master Plan" by some of his admirers.
At the same time, Sanders continued his exploration of African and Eastern music, philosophy and history. He travelled to Morocco in 1994 to record with the Gnawan master musician Maleem Mahmoud Ghania. The result was the mesmerising The Trance of Seven Colours (Axiom through Polygram). The Gnawa are descendants of slaves from Mali and Guinea. They play extended trance-inducing music with traditional wind instruments and percussion. Above this Sanders blows with searing gusto.
Message from Home begins with an extended Afrocentric acid funk romp, with rootsy percussion and swinging sax. "Our Roots Began in Africa" is the insistent chant and the song's title. "Nozipho" is melodic and free, raw and emotional. It has an exotic grandeur that is most reminiscent of the cream of Sanders' '60s free jazz. The electronic keyboards are little too lush. "Tomoki" is a Caribbean-flavoured soother that is everything pseudo-"ambient" music claims to be but ain't.
"Kumba" is a traditional African tune that features the kora (the traditional west African harp or lute) playing and vocals of Foday Musa Suso from Gambia. Sanders adds his sublime soprano sax and flute to what is without doubt the best track. The last track is based on the pop rhythms of southern Africa. Sanders begins with some sugary, almost-Kenny G sax, which winds itself into one of the most pulse-racing sound storms you'll ever hear.
This album confirms Pharoah Sanders' jazz icon status.