Pharoah Sanders
Pharoah Sanders, actually Ferrell Sanders, ( born October 13, 1940 in Little Rock, Arkansas) is an American jazz musician, tenor saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist. The stage name Pharoah gave him Sun Ra, with whom he early 1960s appeared together in New York.
Life
Sanders grew up in a musical family, his parents were music teachers. He first learned the clarinet and later rose during high school on the tenor saxophone around and made themselves familiar with the Jazz. His early models were Harold Land, James Moody, Sonny Rollins, Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. As a teenager he played at local blues gigs in Little Rock, and he earned his pocket money. After high school, he moved to Oakland ( California), where he studied music. During this time he played in clubs in the San Francisco Bay Area jazz and rhythm & blues, and made himself as a musician a name.
In the early 1960s he moved to New York, where he tried to take as a professional musician foot. However, until 1965, he was able to achieve any significant success, so he was forced to take several part-time jobs and even had to pawn his instrument. During this time he played together with some representatives of free jazz as Sun Ra and Don Cherry. In 1963 he founded his own band with pianist John Hicks, bassist Wilbur Ware, and drummer Billy Higgins. The group attracted the attention of John Coltrane, so that Sanders was asked in 1964 to perform with Coltrane's band. The joint appearances became more frequent until 1965, although Sanders never officially considered as a member of Coltrane's band. Sanders' and Coltrane's music from this period raises the traditional jazz formulas and functional harmony overboard and instead focuses on sounds, as they are to hear, inter alia, on Coltrane's Ascension album of 1965.
After the death of Coltrane Sanders worked mostly with his own ensembles but also with Alice Coltrane. After a debut album for the label ESP with pianist Jane Getz, he published from 1966 to 1973 recorded several albums for the label Impulse!, Followed by a trip under Arista. From the late 1970s until 1987 appeared his albums for the small independent label Theresa. Since 1987, he published under the labels Evidence and Timeless, with Evidence Theresa took over and his albums published from this time. Appeared in 1995 "Message from Home ", which was produced by Bill Laswell, on the major label Verve.
Sanders is considered one of the founders of the Ethno - Jazz, where he often would embrace Islam and the spiritual traditions of Africa in his work and made the subject of his music.