Pharoah Sanders - Karma

First, a bit of a backstory.

In January 1991 while the world was on the verge of seeing America go to war with Iraq, I was living alone in a bedsit in Herne Hill in London while (supposedly at least) studying at University.  It was very cold, very damp, and if I dare admit it, probably a bit lonely and boring - I didn't have a lot to do.  What I did have was a decent hi-fi system which the previous week I had added to with a “tuner” (that’s right kids, if you wanted radio on a proper hi-fi, you had to go and shell out for a tuner).  So there I was skipping around the South London pirate stations when I stumbled across something intriguing.

I heard music that was in turn simple but challenging.  Earthy but somehow spacey.  It had serious (and I mean “furrowed jazz brow” serious) sax on it alongside yodelling.  Yes really, yodelling.  The lyrics to the track playing spoke of peace, and the music itself I found sublimely peaceful on a miserable January Saturday morning.

I inserted a cassette into my tape recorder and hit record (a That’s MGX90 if anyone’s interested), the mysterious jazz was recorded for prosperity but faded out after a few minutes to be replaced by the LP version of The Isley’s “Harvest For The World” with the slow intro, between the intro and the main song the DJ uttered a sentence that I have no problem remembering to this day, “The message to George Bush and Saddam Hussein is, take a chill pill, you are listening to Gilles Peterson’s Vibrazone on Jazz FM.”

The Isleys did their thing, then we were treated to A Tribe Called Quest, some Organized Konfusion, Ernest Ranglin’s “Surfin” and many more delights.  The show blew my mind, but I never heard Gilles on Jazz FM again, his contract was terminated, or as Time Out magazine put it the next week “DJ Sacked For Playing Peace Music.”

It turned out that despite Gilles' calls for peace, from that weekend Iraq had a war on it’s hands, but on the home front I had developed a love of Pharoah Sanders, for it was him with the serious sax and peace yodelling, and I delighted at having my ears opened to so much more.

Here’s what I know about Pharoah without googling.  He used to be called “Little Rock” and was a contemporary of Coltrane.  He has accompanied many of the important Strata East and Impulse label players of the late 60s early 70s including playing with Alice Coltrane but also with jazz funkers like Norman Connors.  Pharoah has never stopped gigging, I was lucky enough to see him at Bristol Temple Meads church circa 1995, the closest I have ever come to a godly spiritual experience.  Bizarrely, Grace Jones once claimed that she was found, “Moses style” floating down the Mississippi in a basket by Pharoah Sanders.  I don’t know how mainstream music critics pigeon hole the great man, Free Jazz? Avant Garde?  I don’t care.  I care about what I hear, and right now I’m listening to the LP “Karma” by Pharoah Sanders.

The LP only has two songs, though one song is split in two if you have the vinyl original.  “The Creator Has A Masterplan” opens the album with a cacophony of free jazz blowing.  Pharoah has a very distinctive style, close to Coltrane or Ornette Colman but more melodic than both if not as technical.  The horn sometimes screams and grumbles like it is at the point of being broken but always remains soulful.  This opening salvo only lasts a couple of minutes before dying down and letting the bass take over with a very simple repetitive riff that remains a feature for the next half an hour. Also a feature (and recurring theme across Pharoah’s work to this day) is the sound of African shaker percussion and the sound of someone playing a piano by strumming the strings “harp like” behind flute (James Spalding) and piano (Lonnie Liston Smith).  This track credits both Reggie Workman and Richard Davis on bass, it sounds to me like a classic Ron Carter line, buy his credit is saved for the second track on the LP “Colours.”

It says something about the music that I lose my sense of time in it.  Terrible cliché “losing yourself” in music, but I really do.  For the sake of this blog, I’ve checked the clock, and it is around about 7 minutes 30 seconds that we hear the first vocals, Leon Thomas repeating his little poem, chanting and yodelling.  Don’t like yodelling?  Get over it you big snob, it’s great to sing along to too, altogether now…….

The track takes another couple of turns before it ends, first to return to the opening theme and later to go a bit “free” with the whole band (including Thomas) playing very hard indeed.  It is here the music is at it’s most challenging and likely to send non-jazz lovers running to the hills clutching their ears, but stick with it for “out of the strong came forth sweetness” as Grace Jones might have said, because when the vocal and bass riff return to finish the song, it all makes perfect sense.

The Second and final track on the LP is “Colours” again featuring Lonnie Liston Smith on keys and Leon Thomas taking the vocal responsibilities.  It is a very contemplative track, the childlike joyful lyrics juxtaposed against the rather sad vocal delivery and very melancholic playing.  Jazz experts could probably immediately identify what it is that allows this song (and so many others by Sanders) to set such a unique mood, they’d probably speak of minor chord changes, or modes or scales.  Others might suggest that Bob Thiele’s production or the way the studio was set up for these Impulse cuts was influencial.  I don’t know, all I know it that hearing Pharoah in a lonely attic bedsit as the world was about to go to war was very influencial on me.

20 years later and you may know already that Gilles did alright for himself.  He went from Jazz FM to Kiss and then onto his current gig on Radio 1, he is currently regarded as one of the worlds “tastemakers”.  Lucky devil.  My That’s MRX90 cassette however, does not have such a happy history.  I left it around my parents house and lost it for over a decade.  Imagine my excitement when I found it a few years ago.  Now imagine how I felt when I rewinded it expecting to hear Pharoah, only to find my dad had recorded country music over the top.  He doesn’t even really like country music.

Still, I’ve got my memories, and a whole load of Pharoah releases that every now and again, when I need that “spiritual” experience, I dig out and play “end to end.”

King Canute, January 2011.


Tracklisting (from discogs, CD version)


1 The Creator Has A Master Plan 32:45
2 Colors 5:37

Curtis Mayfield - Curtis/Live!

“Now ladies and gentlemen, the Bitter End is proud to announce, Curtis Mayfield.”

(gentle applause)

And so begins what I regard as both the most intimate live LP, and the most perfect document of where an artist (who is already midway through a long career), and his band “are at” at the precise time it was recorded.

I love “Curtis/Live!”  It is not the most accessible record ever pressed, it is not so much a “grower” as a flawed machine that requires an experienced operator to get the best out of.  That is the reason I’m starting the blog with this LP, “dipping in” will only frustrate, but live with this creation and you will be glad you invested the time.

Back to that intro, as the applause subsides, the band start with “Mighty Mighty (Spade and Whitey)” which I now know is (like many others on the LP) an old Impressions song, but was new to me when I discovered this LP in 1989.  Curtis raps his way through the socio-conscious lyrics but the crowd are hardly appreciative, even to the superb Conga solo by “Master” Henry Gibson.  I know little of the history of the LP and deliberate avoided googling before writing this, but I like to think Curtis is experimenting with an audience, seeing how the concepts are received as much as putting on a performance for the paying punter.

It is the aforementioned little solos, bass runs, bits of guitar feedback (great screech after “I Plan To Stay A Believer”), asides to the audience about politics (how many other live LPs name check Spiro Agnew?), the mixing of extracts of verses from other Curtis songs into the performed song and other treats that make this LP so rewarding on repeated listens.  I’m not afraid to admit that I actually mime Curtis’ “talky bits” like some Python nerd quoting “Life of Brian.”  These nuances have become part of language between me and my fellow “Live!” admirer and friend Nic.  Can you imagine such a thing?

“What congregation, with better relations, would demand more respect from society?”  The next song, "I Plan To Stay A Believer" allows Curtis to demonstrate a skill I think he shares with Smoky Robinson and Bob Dylan, the ability to create great rhymes, something he is rarely credited for.  He mixes into this song a bit of “Keep On Pushing” and “We’re A Winner” but the LP sleeve make no mention of this on my copy, but does on others?  What the sleeve does reveal is the unplastered brickwork of “The Bitter End” nightclub.  It has also convinced me that if I had the money to spend on an original US Fender guitar, I’d eschew the ubiquitous Strat for a Telecaster.  If it is good enough for Curtis…..

By the start of “We’ve Only Just Begun” the band have built up a bit of a momentum, but judging by the applause, the Bitter End audience are not yet ready for a mix of Black Power and Carpenters covers.  Their loss, it’s a superb earthy version of a great song and in 2011 sounds like a choice of ironic genius.  Bet Curtis chose it for the sentiment, the rhymes and the chords.  A man without prejudice.  Curtis quickly moves on to “People Get Ready” even then he probably would have known that the Impressions track would become a staple for his live performances for years to come, but it is when this ends that the LP (and performance) starts to get more serious.

“Stare And Stare” is moody and dark and speaks of prejudice borne out on bus rides.  Importantly it is the perfect mood changer for the next offering “Check Out Your Mind” (another Impressions song) takes on a hard, funky and psychedelic tone that the studio group version never had.  Joseph “Lucky” Scott’s bass bubbles away in the background before taking a run behind Curtis’ guitar solo, while Tyrone McCullen hammers the beat down hard.  I love this band.  The funked up Impressions material continues with “Gypsy Woman.”  It is the rest of the LP that outlines Curtis Mayfield’s artistic integrity and musical talent.  He must have been capable of knocking out crossover soul hits in his sleep and if employed at Stax or Motown he would have done.  Instead he remained independent (at least through the Curtom label) and in his solo material ploughed a less fertile furrow of playing at places like “The Bitter End” with a musical edge that challenged rather than pacified.  “The Makings Of You” is a tender love song that many writers would envy but could be overlooked here, falling as it does, between the drug critical “Check Out Your Mind” (Superfly was coming soon) and “We The People Who Are Darker Than Blue,” the latter being another chance for Curtis to show off some superb rhyming couplets and talk frankly about “grown up shiftless jiggers”  I’ve bought a few records over the years and I haven’t found any other (pre hip-hop) that comments so concisely on race related cival rights, I’ve heard plenty of “Black Power” type posturing, and of course a whole folk movement, but nothing as candid as Curtis.  The track takes a very funky turn and winds the crowd up perfectly for “(Don’t Worry) If There’s a Hell Below We’re All Gonna Go”.

The crowd took a bit of warming up, but by now they are in Mr Mayfield’s pocket.  The “Don’t Worry” bassline driving forward as “Lucky’s” congas must drip with palm sweat.  Curtis teases the crowd in this and the final track, another little quirk that makes this LP irresistible to me.  The final track is my least favourite but has some genuinely funny moments and clearly winds the crowd into a frenzy, again Mayfield’s charm allows him to joke with the audience on sensitive subjects, comparing women using the contraceptive pill to “ease the pains” with heroin addicts, despite keeping his tongue firmly in cheek, is a risky business, but after the “whoo” from the crowd he wins them over again.

So there it is.  By no means perfect.  Not perfectly recorded, received by the audience or even performed, but an idiosyncratic masterpiece.  There is so much to love, so much to reward the listener who perseveres with repeated listens.  Mayfield’s introduction of the band members alone is great, as is every other “talky bit” or shout from the crowd, the musicians are marvellous and Curtis’ choice of material I find intriguing.  There is little from his first solo LP (what, no “Move On Up?”), and his reworks of Impressions songs have become to me the definitive versions.

Get it.

Play it.

All the way through!

King Canute, January 2011.

Published tracklisting (from discogs, differently tracked versions of the same recording exist):

A1 Mighty Mighty (Spade And Whitey) 6:46

A2 Rap 0:2

A3 I Plan To Stay A Believer 3:00

A4 We're A Winner 4:35

B1 Rap 0:42

B2 We've Only Just Begun 3:43

B3 People Get Ready 3:35

B4 Rap 0:35

B5 Stare And Stare 6:19

C1 Check Out Your Mind 3:50

C2 Gypsy Woman 3:48

C3 The Makings Of You 3:03

C4 Rap 2:00

C5 We The People Who Are Darker Than Blue 6:38

D1 (Don't Worry) If There's A Hell Below, We're All Gonna Go 9:08

D2 Stone Junkie 7:48