For years, critical opinion on saxophonist Pharoah Sanders has been divided into essentially two schools: Those who miss the fiery and iconoclastic work of his youth and those who admire the serenity of his more mature playing.
Each point of view represents a legitimate response to Sanders’ musical evolution during 40-plus years of recording, for there’s no doubt he has transformed himself artistically several times over.
For this listener, debate on whether or not Sanders has mellowed too much is beside the point. More important is how persuasively Sanders addresses the ’60s musical language he still finds alluring, judging by his Tuesday night show at the Jazz Showcase. On that score, Sanders remains one of the most appealing figures working in an idiom largely defined by music of John Coltrane, with whom Sanders briefly collaborated.
Coltrane’s vast legacy is fertile enough to keep musicians interested for years to come. Many former Coltrane collaborators, such as drummer Elvin Jones, believe that musicians barely have begun to understand the implications of Coltrane’s experiments with advanced harmony, microtonal pitch, stream-of-consciousness soliloquy and so on.
Sanders obviously shares that point of view, for during his opening set he seemed content to work almost exclusively in a late-Coltrane idiom. His use of intense chromaticism, chant-like phrases and generally even-keel dynamic levels evoked Coltrane’s fascination with musical vocabularies and cultural rituals of the East.
Skeptics would be correct in pointing out that Sanders didn’t play a line that wasn’t well within the scope of Coltrane’s melodic-harmonic syntax. But the reason Sanders’ approach worked, bringing the large crowd to a hush, can be summed up in a single word: tone.
From the outset, Sanders produced a penetrating, intensely focused tone that could not help but command attention. Neither extremely loud nor delicately nuanced, Pharoah’s sound on tenor saxophone might best be described as an italicizing of virtually every note he played. This larger-than-life but never shrill timbre suggested intense emotional commitment, and that was the element of Sanders’ playing listeners surely responded to.
So even though Sanders and his quintet opened the show with a tune that either was composed by Coltrane or easily could have been, Sanders’ version proved hypnotic. The incantatory way he repeated phrases, sometimes distinguishing one line from the next with slight melodic alterations, emphasized his fascination with non-Western forms of musicmaking that have entranced jazz listeners since at least the mid-’50s.
In the venerable ballad “My One and Only Love,” Sanders took essentially the same tack, and it proved equally effective. One rarely hears tunes of this vintage played with such smoldering intensity, and Sanders’ version rendered the piece unusually fresh.
He was ably assisted by pianist William Henderson, bassist Alex Blake and drummer Greg Bandy, who provided an appealing but somewhat muted backdrop. Or maybe they just had difficulty matching the fervency of Sanders’ work.
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Pharoah Sanders plays through Sunday at the Jazz Showcase, 59 W. Grand Ave. Phone 312-670-BIRD.
Jazz note: Several of Chicago’s most accomplished musicians will converge on the New Regal Theatre, 1665 E. 79th St., at 7:30 p.m. Friday. “Stompin’ at the Regal” will feature singer Jerry Butler, Ensemble Stop-Time and Ensemble Kalinda. Those two exceptional bands are organized by the Center for Black Music Research, an institution based at Columbia College Chicago. For details and tickets, phone 312-663-7559.
