The Return of The East! Pharoah Sanders Came Back to Brooklyn

Back in the seventies, Pharoah Sanders recorded a classic live album at a long-gone cultural center called The East in Brooklyn. Brooklyn, which I am proud to call my own home, has always been a home to a particularly fertile brand of African-American culture. Cross-pollinated by waves of immigrants from the southern U.S., from the English-, French- and Spanish-speaking islands of the Caribbean, and even from African countries; and sharing space with communities routed in other, different immigrant waves from Europe and the Middle East, Brooklyn's African-American community has been self-conscious, politically aware, and culturally ground-breaking for decades. The East seems to have been a showcase for Afro-centric, progressive, and independent jazz musicians; among the other ground-breaking albums recorded there is Mtume's legendary Strata-East label rarity, "Alkebu-Lan, Land of the Blacks."

The organizers of last night's concert wanted to recreate the vibe of The East in 2010, and so the 11th Annual Central Brooklyn Jazz Festival presented "Pharoah Sanders Returns To Brooklyn" at the Boys & Girls High School in Bed-Stuy. The concert opened with a performance from the Yoruba folkloric ensemble Omi Yesa. Lead by akpwon Amma McKen, the group of singers and drummers (on bata and cajon) played some of the liturgical songs of the Yoruba/Lucumi/Santeria religion. (Amma McKenn can be heard on her excellent album "Alaako Oso.") It was a little odd for me to hear this music--indeed these singers--outside of a ritual setting: one of the singers, Ola Dejean, in fact sang at my own initiation into the religion back in 1996. Maferefun Obatala. Anyway they had two excellent dancers and a narrator explained the context of the music nicely.

Omi Yesa was followed by some recitations by the poet Louis Reyes Rivera. His closing poem, "Place I Never Been" about the assassination of Malcolm X was devastating. (You can see him reciting this poem a few years ago on Youtube.)

Longtime activist, and one of the original founders of The East, Jitu Weusi spoke about continuing efforts to keep Brooklyn and African-American educational institutions meaningful to the community they serve.

After the intermission, out came Pharoah Sanders. He was joined by his longtime bassist Alex Blake and longtime keyboard player William Henderson; and by three drummers: Greg Bandy on traps, Abdul Sabor on hand drums and percussion, and Neil Clarke (also, by the way, a Yoruba priest) on congas and percussion. As a previously unannounced guest, legend and fellow seventies ground-breaker Gary Bartz joined the band on alto sax for about half the show. (Bartz was a veteran of The East as well; he's featured on the "Alkebu-Lan" album).

As I mentioned yesterday, despite my long affection for Pharoah's music, I had never seen him perform. My favorite of his albums are his run of Impulse! albums from the late 1960s to the mid 1970s, and while his albums of more traditionally jazz-focused standards of more recent years are pleasing, I really wanted to see him perform in a setting outside that of a quartet. Last night I got my wish.

It was an incredible evening. The band opened with the slow strains of John Coltrane's "Welcome," and moved into a terrific version of a Broadway show tune that John Coltrane first forever transformed, "My Favorite Things," which segued into another chestnut "Clear Out of this World." My fear of Pharoah playing standards was completely unjustified. The percussionists added color and depth and groove, and all of the musicians were in fine form. "My Favorite Things" was Coltrane-esque, yet taken to a still newer place by the presence of congas and Afro-Latin percussion. Pharoah let out a couple of his trademark screeches, and did something I'd heard about but couldn't previously imagine: He keeps playing his tenor sax after he takes it out of his mouth, pushing every bit of wind and breath dawdling inside that horn out. When the air is finally gone his fingers turn the keys of the sax into tiny percussion instruments. It was unspeakably amazing; joyous.

The band played non-stop. Solos and melodies came and went. Pharoah wandered around and occasionally off the stage. While at some point the band focused in on Pharoah's "Save Our Children," from one of his later albums, the set list became amorphous and irrelevant. I think there was a bit of something like "Stairway to the Stars." There were a couple bars of "The Creator Has a Master Plan." But it just became music. There were a lot of bass solos from Alex Blake. There were rounds and rounds of band introductions. Pharoah sang, and chanted, and led the audience in calls-and-response. He played air-guitar on his sax. He deferred to the talents of his partners and then he soloed and showed off his trademark quirks and distinctions. I mean this in a completely good way: the music became a kind of blur, ebbing and flowing; it stopped mattering which song was being played; it was just something to experience. His years of playing Nigerian highlifes and playing with the Gnawa musicians of Morocco were all evident. "Save Our Children," which I was once a little unimpressed by, has stepped up in my list of favorite modern Pharoah tunes.

I think what I found most unexpected was how playful the concert was. The musicians seemed to be having a great time, and especially after being joined by Gary Bartz, Pharoah seemed to relish his role in the collective magic taking place on stage. I loved the audience. All the energy sent into the room by the band was sent right back by the audience. It clapped when it was time to clap, but it sang when it was time to sing, and people called out when something amazing or wonderful happened, which was often. Perhaps it was because I was lucky enough to be in the front row (off to the side), it didn't feel like a large impersonal venue; it felt incredibly present and intimate.

It was a great homecoming; I feel lucky and blessed to have been able to attend.

(Both photos are from last night's event; the top one by me and the one of Sanders and Bartz together taken by Jesse. P.S. I assume this was being recorded; if anybody knows of the availability of that recording, drop me a note in the comments)

Pharoah Sanders Returns to Brooklyn

Cosmic Jazz superstar Pharoah Sanders is returning to Brooklyn tonight, and I get to see him. I'm embarrassed to admit that I've never seen him perform before: I'm just too young to have seen him when he performed regularly in the early 1970s, and I've passed up more recent club dates where he seemed to be doing the "old freaky jazz guy rediscovers the standards" shtick that he and so many other seventies players have done in the past few years. Guests at the concert tonight include a poet and a Yoruba music ensemble, so I'm imagining this will not be Pharoah plays "Stardust" and "Misty." Above is a performance from a couple years ago of Pharoah appearing on David Sanborn's TV show. It's a little shocking seeing Pharoah play with somebody so completely at the opposite end of the spectrum, but it's a completely enjoyable clip. They're playing "Thembi," originally on a Pharoah album of that title from way back in the day.

Surprise! AMG Gets it WRONG - The Pharoah Sanders Album That Doesn't Exist

I have long been Pharoah Sanders' Number One fan. I've been haunted by an item allegedly in his discography that I know nothing about. The mainstream source for discographical information on the web is the All-Music Guide, and it clearly lists a 1974 album for Pharoah, on the Capitol label, called "Voyage to Uranus." If you google this album, you'll find pages of listings seeming to verify the existence of this album. One or two them include people claiming they like this album or have used parts of it in their mixes. But I have never seen this album. Ever. I did hear an album a few months ago called "Voyage To Uranus," by Clive Stevens' Atmospheres, featuring among others, the fine guitarist Ralph Towner. It's a pretty decent obscure fusion album, worthy of inclusion in the Kozmigroov canon.

I started asking some of my music blog friends about this alleged Pharoah Sanders album. And then I remembered the name of the Atmospheres album. Damnit! It was issued on Capitol in 1974. And then my blog friend Cheeba pointed out that the Capitol number for the Atmospheres is the number AMG claims for this Pharoah album and that AMG is used as a feed for the majority of automated music websites. Eureka! We may never know how AMG ascribed this album to Pharoah in the first place, but here is the clear creation of an internet myth. By snowballing a mistake, AMG has seemingly created a rarity that some have claimed to have heard, and nobody seems to have ever doubted.

Let it be said clearly: While "Voyage to Uranus" is a fine album, it is not an album on which Pharoah Sanders plays.

AMG has a lot of useful information. It also has at least one completely clueless gatekeeper and reviewer, Scott Yanow, who doesn't actually like 1970s jazz, and so pretends that 1970s jazz either doesn't exist or is not worth listening to. Musical taste is so completely subjective that one can't be blamed for not liking something. But it seems bizarre that someone who only likes straight-ahead jazz artists who cover lots of standards would be an arbiter of taste, attempting to review a decade of music known for breaking the rules of jazz, breaking the rules of category and genre. It's not surprising under those circumstances that an error like this would be made. Hey AMG, want a music reviewer who actually loves the sound of the seventies? I'm available!

My First Record Store or, Go Ahead Judge an Album By Its Cover

I went to college at the University of Chicago, located in the idyllic integrated enclave of Hyde Park on deeply segregated Chicago's south side. I spent only my first year in a college dorm, in a tiny room with a succession of odd roommates: we were all uncomfortable with each other in that dorm, from weirdly diverse cultural backgrounds and all suffering some kind of cultural shock. It was 1976 and how I, a radicalized Russian language student arrived too late for the student revolution and itching to come out of closet wound up surviving with a farmboy from southern Indiana, a jock from Michigan, a failed Jesuit student from lord knows where, and a motley crew of nerds, managed to hang on to sanity I'll never exactly know. Before I fled the dorms for the warmer geniality of shared apartment life the one thing I discovered was that my brand new mushroom-shaped plastic stereo record changer with an 8-track deck built in could transform my dreary dorm room into a private oasis with music no one else I knew could stand.

I had discovered my first record store. In high school I ordered plenty of records from Columbia House (where I was destined to work years later), and was developing the rudiments of my taste. But I lived in a suburb without a record store and didn't have much money.

I had always wanted a Joni Mitchell album: somebody I knew used to play "Court and Spark" for me all the time, but I didn't own it. When I got to college and found that nearby record store I'm pretty sure the first thing I got there was "Hejira," Joni's jazzed up album with Jaco Pastorius that turned her into an enemy of her longtime folk fans and made me a lifetime Joni worshipper. The trippy composite photography on the gatefold sleeve sucked me in. It was the first thing I played on that record changer, and this record has remained a favorite. Her tales of change and longing became a refuge for me; someplace to sink in and retreat from the stresses of the world.

On my next trip to the record store they were playing this crazy record from some singer I had never heard of. She was Brazilian, named Flora Purim, and "Nothing Will Be As It Was...Tomorrow" was like nothing I had ever heard before. It had Al McKay, the guitar player from Earth Wind and Fire on it--I loved them!--and what I heard in the store won me over completely. Again, a completely trippy album cover with a giant bird and some naked lady covering her face with a mirror. I bought the record and put it on my record changer. Flora Purim was queued up second. As I was doing school work expecting to hear the record drop instead I heard something dragging catastrophically on the record needle. The stereo was sitting in the window and the sun was shining; before the record had dropped the sun had wilted my new Flora LP like a floppy hat. I rushed it back to the record store after trying to straighten the disc out before it hardened again. "Hey! This album is warped!" I complained back at the store, and got a new one. Believe it or not I went home and, stupidly, repeated my mistake. The store clerk eyed me suspiciously when I returned my second "warped" copy for a third one. But I learned my lesson. "Nothing Will Be As It Was" never melted again, though it soon became my favorite album.

I was really hooked on the record store. I would listen to the albums I had bought and just get lost staring into the artwork. Those 12-inch cardboard sleeves are more satisfying than a tiny CD booklet could ever be. Anyway, I was convinced that trippy album artwork was the ticket. On my next trip to the store I saw the wall covered in $1.99 cutouts, most of which were from the Impulse! label, which had just collapsed. I picked out Sun Ra's "Nubians of Plutonia" with its epic imaginary Plutonian landscape and reclining nude goddess. The price was certainly right. Oh my God. When I got this home I had no idea what I had discovered. It was unlike anything I had ever heard. For years I would put this album on for new friends. It made many people run from the room, but for me its crazy off center jazz beats, afro-drumming and weird chanting transported me. It usually transported my roommate out of the room, which was convenient as well.

It took me a while to understand that this incredibly modern and avant-garde music had actually been recorded in the late 1950s: it was a long time before I understood how Impulse! had licensed and repackaged Sun Ra's original catalogue. Impulse!'s marketing completely won me over. Every time I went back to that record store, it was straight to the Impulse cut-out wall. I wasn't ready for all of Sun Ra, I know I picked up one and couldn't make it through the dense and screechy wall of cosmic sound. But "Angels and Demons At Play" became my second Sun Ra score. It sounded almost like what most people called jazz, but with a freaky freaky edge that sucked me in.

Next up was a two-record set: Alice Coltrane's "Reflection on Creation and Space, a Five-Year View." Who was this lady with the distant stare? This album really changed my life. I didn't understand it. I didn't understand what she was talking about on the liner notes for this or the other Alice Coltrane cutouts I proceeded to buy. But it was incredibly compelling stuff. She's playing Indian music; she's playing jazz; she's playing the harp for chrissakes. She's doing these incredible string arrangements; she got advice for one of them from Stravinsky's ghost. If John Coltrane's version of "My Favorite Things" from the early 1960s was a musical revelation for a generation, and a kind of violent retribution against "The Sound of Music" and the saccharine world of showtune innocence and the cult of the jazz standard, imagine what it was like for me to hear Alice's version of John's version first. There's that percussive carnival organ she played; there's her cosmic harp and the strings that always seem to want to soar off into outer space.

My next attack on the cutout wall was Pharoah Sanders. I grabbed "Elevation" and "Village of the Pharoahs," which, this being the cutout wall, were generally not considered to be his A-list. Listening to the bells and flutes of "Mansion Worlds" or "Memories of Lee Morgan" on "Village of the Pharoahs" or to Joe Bonner's rhythmically percussive piano playing on "The Gathering" on "Elevation" transported me. I didn't even smoke weed to this music to become completely high on its deep spiritual vibe. Being able to push myself through the inevitable cacophony on a Pharoah Sanders or Alice Coltrane record became the most rewarding challenge: I couldn't always do it at first but when I mastered the art I could practically feel my mind expanding. None of my peers could tolerate this stuff, but to my satisfaction some of the slightly older guys I soon met among the radicals I had begun to hang out with dug it all too.

Sure my taste expanded and diverged afterwards. When I moved away from Hyde Park up to the north side, and eventually away from Chicago, there were new record stores and new musical directions. I got pretty hooked on disco, and even some rock. But I remained a sucker for a trippy album cover, and honestly, I don't think that has lead me wrong too many times. It's sad that record stores are such a thing of the past, and sad that album art has gone from being a 12" gatefold wonder to a 5" booklet, and now to a two- or three-inch jpg in the corner of iTunes. But all the music is still there, and that's not so bad.

Thankfully, the music mentioned here has all made it to the digital age and isn't too hard to find on CD. Jazz Supreme has lots more info on the Impulse! artists and cosmic jazz. There's some Sun Ra, including a compilation I created, on my music blog Ile Oxumare, with links to downloads.