"I want to take the audience on a spiritual journey; I want to excite them, excite them. Then I bring them back with a calming feeling."
In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, he described his music as Pharoah Sanders, legendary American jazz saxophonist, who died today at the age of 81.
"He left in peace, surrounded by his loving family and his friends in Los Angeles this morning. Always and forever the most beautiful human being, rest in peace," his record label tweeted. Luaka Bop.
A disciple of Jonh Coltrane, one of the fathers of spiritual jazz, Farrell Sanders (this is his real name) was born in 1940 and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he played the clarinet in a school band.
After high school moving to Oakland, California,
where he met Coltrane for the first time.
Moving to New York in the 1960s, where he also worked as a cook, he met Sun Ra (who would give him the name Pharoah) while cooking at a club in Greenwich Village.
Discovering his musical talent, Sun Ra and Coltrane enlisted him as a member of the band, in which Sanders would play until John's death in 1967. Among his most famous albums, 'Karma' and 'Jewels of Thought' (1969 ) in which he opened his music to Afro and Oriental influences.
But Sanders - characteristic in his later years for his long white beard and fez on his head - also approached pop, as in 1971's "Thembi", named after his wife.
In the same year he also performed in Alice Coltrane's' Journey in Satchidananda ', another milestone in the jazz d'
vanguard.
Decades later in 'The Trance of Seven Colors', Sanders collaborated with Mahmoud Guinia, the Moroccan master of spiritual gnawa music and the guembri lute.
With the 1996 album 'Message from Home' he delved into the influences of sub-Saharan Africa.
In 2021 his latest album, 'Promises', was released, recorded two years earlier with the London Symphony Orchestra.