OK, let's remove our impaled selves from the swollen genitals of British Rock musicians -- and the putrid stench of our fallen aspirations to nationhood not rooted in the violent, meta-deceitful dehumanization of "the other" from our olfactory apparatuses -- for a spell, and get ready for a whole bunch of posts from me as we approach July's end, beginning with this one celebrating an anniversary of a truly transcendent concert.
This 53+ minutes of astral travel was taped, like so many are in the summer, at a festival. It was recorded 47 years ago tonight and features one of the leading lights of the music of our age leading one of his greatest bands.
Those Pharoah Sanders records of the late 1960s and early 1970s are, for me, as good as music of any genre gets, and this here hour of power is going to do precisely nothing to dispel that reality for anyone in possession of any familiarity with their contents.
It's hard to choose but one. Karma, Thembi, Black Unity... they're all the pinnacle to me. For me, no single LP of his stands above the rest and they all provide the perfect illustration of this man's aesthetic approach and of the spiritual heights he is capable of attaining.
Which brings us to this tape, from the Nice Jazz Festival around the time of Thembi. This is likely the last recorded document of Pharoah alongside keys wizard Lonnie Liston Smith, who would soon venture forth on his own to stardom and acclaim, and who someday needs his own post on this page.
It includes Pharoah's most beloved composition -- extrapolated and interpolated by the assembled ensemble to nearly 22 minutes -- and a 25+ minute take on LLS's epic Let Us Go Into the House of the Lord, one of my personal favorite tunes of anyone's.
Fortunately, this one was rebroadcast on the France Musique digital channel overseas in 2016, so we get to hear it about as clean and static free as it may ever get.
Sad to say, you'll hear performances like this one re-aired on American radio at roughly about the time "Senators" Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and all the other representatives of the Church of Ziontology find a way to display even the slightest loyalty to a country other than Israel, so this pristine 256/48-sourced version will have to do for now.
I should mention that there is a slight bit of station-ID announcer talkover, lasting about 5 seconds each time, in the first and third tracks, but these do little to distract from what's happening onstage so I made no attempt to remove them.
Pharoah Sanders Quintet
Festival de Jazz
Nice, France
7.18.1971
01 The Creator Has a Master Plan
02 Jameela
03 Let Us Go Into the House of the Lord
Total time: 53:07
Pharoah Sanders - tenor saxophone
Lonnie Liston Smith - piano
Cecil McBee - bass
Jimmy Hopps - drums
Lawrence Killian - congas
digital capture of a 2016 France Musique rebroadcast
285 MB FLAC/July 2018 archive link
This one kicks off a whole bunch of consecutive posts from me, with even more vintage festival gigs from the distant mists of time on the way.
And yes, you'll note the complete absence of that word from this screed. Why do white people insist on reducing the seminal contributions of nonwhites to a lexicon of bodily fluids, anyway?
Must be the same reason elected officials of alleged democratic republics -- by any metric rooted in objective reality, they are but slave colonies that play democracies on TV -- legislate solely on behalf of their masters in other places for the proverbial 40 pieces of silver. Similar motivations, at any rate.
It doesn't matter. Just dig the music and the brazen, oligopolist traitors will take care of themselves eventually, right? They might be skilled at blowing Binyamin Netanyahu's mutilated penis, but I bet none of those AIPAC-colonized toadies-to-genocide can blow tenor like Pharoah Sanders.--J.
