Rather than risk a rocky start, Shepherd began alone, “rushing around LA finding instruments and synthesisers, and I spent a couple of days writing”. The tense 1976 session for Pharoah ended with Sanders at loggerheads with label boss Bob Cummins, and so frustrated that he virtually disavowed the album. Sanders hadn’t always gelled with collaborators in the studio. “He’s like: ‘So what do you want to do?’ I was like, well, I’ve never produced an album before.” He asked Sanders to offer ideas. “Even quite late into life,” Shepherd says, “he was still talking about an okra curry we had: ‘Is that place still there?’”īy 2019, Shepherd was an established electronic producer, DJ and musician with a background in jazz, but he was still caught off-guard when Sanders suggested they collaborate. They sealed their friendship when Shepherd showed him around London a few years later. Sanders and Shepherd met through a mutual friend in 2015. In the past decade Sanders’ ideas have inspired new generations of musicians, particularly on London’s booming jazz scene. His 1977 album Pharoah, one of the jewels in his discography, is being reissued as a box set and explores what the sleevenotes describe as “a sense of openness that would have been deemed indulgent during the bebop and free jazz eras”. He would become best known for his string of late-1960s and 1970s solo jazz albums, including Karma, Thembi and Tauhid. Sanders’ work with Coltrane and his widow Alice was dynamic and meditative, a reflection of a spirituality that fuelled his music. With a humming saxophone vibrato that seemed to originate in the Earth’s core, he got his start in the early 1960s as a member of Afrofuturist jazz visionary Sun Ra’s Arkestra before joining John Coltrane’s band in 1965. Promises was the culmination of a remarkable career for Sanders. Pharoah Sanders performing at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in 2014. There are oceans of strings washing within waveforms and countermelodies whose ingredients include rickety upright piano, harpsichord, celeste and vintage synthesiser – and Sanders’ breathy, expansive tenor sax and brief, glorious vocalisations. Mostly instrumental, Promises ebbs and flows, propelled by Shepherd’s patient, luxurious arrangements. The contemplative, 46-minute, nine-movement suite ended up being the spiritual jazz titan’s final recorded exhalation. The previous year, Shepherd (under the name Floating Points) had released one of the decade’s most acclaimed albums, Promises, in collaboration with Sandersand the London Symphony Orchestra. We were playing music in the room for hours, just listening to music that Pharoah liked.” “It felt like he was truly there with us, just in his usual meditative state. “I was pleased that we could see him with his spirit leaving him slowly, because he just seemed so peaceful,” he says. When he finally reached Sanders’ bedside after a flight to the west coast, he felt comforted. Shepherd had left a DJ gig in New York halfway through when he heard that the titan of spiritual jazz had suffered a stroke. On 24 September 2022, Sam Shepherd arrived at a hospital in Los Angeles a few moments after the saxophonist Pharoah Sanders died, surrounded by members of his family.
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