PHAROAH SANDERS / “The Creator Has A Master Plan”

It was late 1968, maybe early ’69. I lay on the floor in the crepsecule. Late afternoon, morphing into evening as the sun slowly slid down behind the apartment block. My eyes were closed. The window was open; for some reason I remember the window being open. No one else was home yet. Just me. And the music. This new music. This was one of the most fulfilling moments of my life. pharoah 02.jpg The album was Karma. The artist was Pharoah Sanders. I didn’t know it at the time, but this turned out to be a healthy portion of the music I had been waiting to hear since Trane left the scene. Karma spoke directly to me in both its simplicity and its complexity. There were moments so soothing it was like floating in the calm sea off Barbados’ south coast, round Christ Church way. There were other moments of furious energy that sent me hurtling through the cosmos—the hugeness of Pharoah’s tenor saxophone filling my apartment’s small living room, expanding my neo-African, gone-global consciousness. Later, we would have listening parties. They were like séances. There would be three, four, five or more of us in the room and nobody would be saying anything as our bodies absorbed the vibrations, our imaginations fueled for long excursions into the deeptitude of our most valued dreams. Nothing opened us as wide as did this music, nothing prepared us for the Seventies like this music did. pharoah 06.jpg Pharoah voiced our love and our anger, our most tender moments and our most fierce rage. Pharoah was playing our young, Black lives as we prepared to fight the man and prepared to love ourselves. Even though we were far from naïve, both confronting the system and embracing ourselves would prove much harder to achieve than we ever suspected. Nevertheless, this music was the soundtrack of our efforts. leon thomas 02.jpg Leon Thomas, the co-creator, offered up what might best be described as New-Afrikan scat. My man took what Louis Armstrong started with "Heebie Jeebies" and with a yodel in his throat and the new Black consciousness gripping his woolly head, Leon Thomas gave voice to substantial albeit inchoate feelings we were just beginning to register in our daily lives. Then there was Pharoah Sanders' complete rearranging of the tenor saxophone terrain. The hugeness of his sound. His technical mastery of the upper reaches of the horn. Pharoah’s horn work had been prophesized by Henry Dumas in a famous short story about the afro-horn. (If you don’t know it, I suggest you might want to get to it in order to help get a handle on what was happening in early Seventies nationtime. This was not your usual jazz.) From heavy, African-derived percussion to using two bass players (a la Coltrane) to set up a dancing harmonic bottom to a completely free approach to melodic development, Pharoah was something completely else. The band Pharoah employed was unconventional in line up: Leon Thomas – voice & percussion, James Spaulding – flute, Julius Watkins – French horn, Lonnie Liston Smith, Jr. – piano, Richard Davis and Reggie Workman – bass, Billy Hart – drums, and Nat Bettis – percussion. Everything roared forth from this aggregation during their half-hour-plus sonic excusion. But what struck us most was the energy, the obvious, in-your-face Blackness of this music; both lion and lamb in its warrior stance and lover’s embrace. pharoah 08.jpg The chant “peace & happiness” became our mantra. We understood that we would have to fight, and fight hard, to achieve our ideals. Thus, we saw no contradiction that our love song should contain so much sound and fury. What we sought was the peace after the struggle, the after-battle celebrations. Back when we were changing America, you could hear this music on the radio. Can you imagine hearing this on the radio today?!?! Nobody complained that it was too wild or too raucous or too anything but beautiful. Totally beautiful. Totally us. In the early Nineties, “The Creator” re-emerged as a hit for the Brooklyn Funk Essential (BFE). The three versions in the jukebox are taken from their 7-track The Creator Has A Master Plan EP. BFE produce remixes ranging from a radio-friendly sub-four-minute edit to a bold, nearly six-minute, bass ‘n drum influenced version. Although I dig what BFE did, I am clear that their eye on the dance floor does not encompass the 360° of the original. bfe.jpg BFE is an acid jazz (mixing funk and jazz elements) collective conceived in 1993 by producer Arthur Baker and bassist/musical director Lati Kronlund. Early members included singers Joi Cardwell, Sha-Key and Papa Dee; poets Everton Sylvester and David Allen; DJ Jazzy Nice; keyboardist Yuka Honda; trumpeter Bob Brachmann; trombonist Joshua Roseman; saxophonist Paul Shapiro; drummer Yancy Drew; and percussionist E.J. Rodriguez. “The Creator” (1994) is their best known recording. joi cardwell.jpg The featured vocalist, Joi Cardwell would go on to become a house music diva. This recording showcases her trademark scatting. Fortunately, we don’t have to choose one or the other, we can both meditate to Pharoah’s original (as well as to numerous versions available on Leon Thomas recordings and other Pharoah recordings) and we can dance to BFE’s versions. The music and the message is strong enough that even a piece of it is fulfilling. —Kalamu ya Salaam Cutting up jazz        Not much I can add to that...except maybe some music. Kalamu mentioned that Leon Thomas (the vocalist from the original Pharoah Sanders version) did a couple versions of his own. Here's one, from Thomas' 1969 Flying Dutchman release Spirits Known And Unknown. If you like the feel of the original but it's either too long or too, um, 'out' for you, try this one. The second piece of music is an excerpt from a nearly thirty-minute turntable collage by the one and only Jason “J.Rocc” Jackson of the Beat Junkies. J.Rocc lets it all go on this one, eschewing the usual soul and R&B breakbeats for records like Coltrane's “A Love Supreme” and at least three versions of “The Creator Has A Masterplan”(by Sanders, Thomas and Louis Armstrong). I don't know if it's just me, but everytime I hear J.Rocc cutting up jazz horns, I get a peculiar kind of thrill, like, “Did he just...?!” Yes, he did. —Mtume ya Salaam

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 1st, 2006 at 12:26 am and is filed under Classic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.


5 Responses to “PHAROAH SANDERS / “The Creator Has A Master Plan””

youngblood Says:
October 3rd, 2006 at 5:33 pm

Pharaoh is one of a rapidly decreasing few giants of the saxophone. Because of classics like The Creator Has a Master Plan, Live At the East, Black Unity, every utterance from Little Rock’s Selmer Mark VI takes on added significance because Pharaoh represents the link where “post 60’s hard bop” began to address Black nationalism through a socio-political/spiritual as well as an African centered view of the world. I remember being totally at odds with my parents who were more Martin than Malcolm. While me and my brothers were standing on the verge of gettin it on my mother refused service to our vinyl platter of Malcolm’s Message to the Grass Roots . The Master Plan was something we all could listen and relate to.

Then there were those of my age group who were following The Honorable Elijah Muhammad mainly because of what the minister did to bring forth the awareness of Black economic power and entrepreneurship, some of us were becoming vegetarians, still others were joining the Panthers and there were others who began dealing with more traditional forms of African religion. We all had divergent views on the purpose of and effectiveness of the role of spirituality in “the cause”. Some argued, and still do for that matter, that spirituality doesn’t do anything for the revolution. Others believe that any revolution has to start with a revolution of the spirit.

The Creator Has A Master Plan brings to memory a time when the soundtrack to the dichotomy existing within the Black Power Movement made us stop, listen and re-examine – if only for a moment what the revolution is and how we see ourselves in it, how we relate and respond and where we were headed now that the march was over.

It was as through these new yet familiar sounds, eastern sounds, African sounds reinforced in us a more international approach to how we saw this revolution going down. Ho Chi Men himself addressed the Black soldiers of the Vietnam War asking, “Why are you here? Trust me, that speech was not nor was it considered a propaganda tool. Even when things began to fall apart between the parents of the Civil Rights movement and the children of the Black Power movement we all began to build on the African consciousness that put all our lives in a broader perspective.

The Creator Has A Master Plan from Karma, Black Unity, the title track and only cut from that recording and the Healing Song from Live At the East are but a few of examples of how one man kept a finger on the pulse of what was happening in our lives. A king in the truest sense of the word, Pharaoh is a leader, warrior and healer


Hector Says:
October 7th, 2006 at 3:57 pm

Great site. I am just getting into Sanders and this is a real treat. I put a link on my site to yours cause I love the format and tunes so much.

Thank you


Ekere Says:
December 4th, 2006 at 3:53 pm

All we can say to Pharoah Sanders is yes.
My husband and I saw him live in Oakland five years back or so. Moving. He had Dwight Tribble with him and that brother has a voice that flows and swells and speaks volumes.

Ashe!

one love,
Ekere


Jim Says:
June 3rd, 2007 at 1:27 pm

…the creator has a masterplan … peace and happiness for every man


kaly turner Says:
September 28th, 2013 at 4:16 pm

in the 70’s i had an album I believe was Pharoah Sanders….and what I wouldnt do to hear “in the Key of D”…i cant google it…i cant even find it! I also want to believe that mr sanders played the sound track to the movie “the brothers” about the black panthers…i cant find this movie either! but I kno I had it…and saw it! I want to hear that song again…it spoke to my soul!


Leave a Reply



| top |