Pharoah Sanders: Tauhid

Another master musician has left us with the death of the great saxophonist Pharoah Sanders last Saturday at age 81.  He was best known for his upper register screaming when he joined John Coltrane's band in 1965 and he definitely divided listeners who either hated the "shrill tones" or were enthralled by the sheer passion he generated.

Coltrane was obviously wanting a counterpoint to his own playing, which was becoming increasingly "avant garde" as he entered the last few years of his all-too-short life.  In some ways, Sanders provided much the same role that Eric Dolphy had in his short tenure in 1961, though the groundswell of intense negative criticism that the amazing Dolphy faced was more muted because, by 1965, change was clearly coming.

Championed by Coltrane, Sanders was given a contract with Impulse! and he recorded a string of always-interesting albums in the late 1960s and early 1970s, even as they went into the far reaches of jazz at a time when the genre lost a great many listeners.  Sanders' music changed, as to be expected, over subsequent years, but one of my all-time favorite albums was when uber-producer and bassist Bill Laswell brought in Sanders to play on the phenomenal Sonny Sharrock recording, Ask the Ages (1991), with the saxophonist playing with the searing passion not heard for a long time.

I had the opportunity to see Sanders play live in the Nineties at the original Catalina Bar and Grill in Hollywood and was really grateful that I had the chance to hear him.  The featured album for this post is his first Impulse! set, Tauhid, recorded in November 1966 and released early the following year, not long before Coltrane's death.

It is, as all of Sanders' recordings were then, heavily spiritual and full of diversity in conception and playing, with the stunning "Upper Egypt & Lower Egypt," the brief but beautiful "Japan," (inspired by the 1966 tour of that nation by the Coltrane ensemble) and the remarkable three-part suite, "Aum," "Venus," and "Capricorn Rising."  The musicians include Sharrock, in one of his first recordings before he left music and then was found by Laswell and his career resurrected in spectacular fashion; the sensitive and understated Dave Burrell on piano; the underappreciated Henry Grimes on bass; drummer Roger Blank; and percussionist Nat Bettis, whose colorations really help flesh out much of this recording.

We're seeing so many great musicians departing and, while this is always saddening, the consolation, of course, is that we can revisit the amazing work they produced and with the sublime Pharoah Sanders, there is so much to enjoy and appreciate.  May he rest in peace!

Aleksandr Borodin: Symphony No. 2/In the Steppes of Central Asia/Prince Igor (Excerpts)

Aleksandr Borodin (1833-1887) was, in one important respect, not unlike Charles Ives, though not necessarily in their approach to composing music.  That is, whereas Ives was an insurance company executive by profession and composed on his free time, Borodin also had a prime profession in that he was a scientist with a specialty in chemical research.

Born out of wedlock to a prince from the Russian province of Georgia and an army doctor's wife, Borodin lived an upper-class existence and studied at the Medico-Surgery Academy in St. Petersburg, earning his doctorate there and conducting post-graduate work in western Europe.  He became an adjunct professor at the Academy and, in 1864, a full professor and he continued his research and teaching for the next 23 years, while also composing music.

His second symphony was completed in 1869 and Borodin was known for using Russian folk motifs, but employing unusual harmonies, a strong sense of rhythm and a distinctive use of color in his orchestrations.  There are powerful, intense passages full of tension, but also quiet, pastoral sections of great beauty in this diverse work.  His tone poem, "In the Steppes of Central Asia," was finished in 1880 for the silver anniversary of the reign of Tsar Alexander II, who pushed Russian expansion into that vast region.  The composer's notes refer to the silence of the steppes, reflected in the hushed opening and than an Asian melodic strain and the arrival of caravan moving through the desert, with Russian and Asian melodies in harmony before the trail away as the caravan disappears into the distance.  

"Prince Igor" was the sole opera from Borodin, though it was nowhere near completed when he died suddenly at 53, so the great composers Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Aleksandr Glazunov finished it, adding much of their own ideas to the sketches their late friend left behind.  The story was of a 12th century Russian hero and the overture and march reflect the martial and nationalist Russian spirit with soaring passages, beautiful melodies and rich harmonies.  The Polovtsian Dances are frequently performed, with its famous theme and its sprightly as well as propulsive rhythms widely beloved.

In all, this RCA Victor recording from 1977 by the National Philharmonic Orchestra, led by Iranian-Armenian composer and conductor Loris Tjeknavorian, who is still living, is dynamic, powerful, beautiful and well-recorded and was a great introduction to Borodin.

Last Exit: Last Exit

The life of a non-commercial musician is nearly always one of struggle and any success, however well-deserved, can obviously be suddenly transitory.  Since 1990, Bill Laswell has been a great inspiration to this blogger because of his unerring commitment to presenting music in ways that challenge, provoke and move in ways outside (often far beyond) the mainstream.

An early discovery was the incredible and oft-chaotic four-piece Last Exit, which Laswell created by bringing together three forces of nature in guitarist Sonny Sharrock, saxophonist Peter Brötzmann and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson, while the producer and bassist was truly the glue that held the center during the raging cataclysms these masters brought to the ensemble.

The debut live recording from Paris in February 1986 literally involved the quartet arriving for the gig, without rehearsals, a set list or any pieces and just totally going for broke in a fully improvised and incendiary environment.  The results can be unsettling for a listener not knowing anything about the project, but it is also bracing, cathartic and amazing to hear Sharrock and Brötzmann play their instruments to what seems like their absolute limits, while Jackson provides almost illimitable rhythmic accompaniment and Laswell keeping everything (well, almost) grounded.

Last Exit is an astounding recording as Laswell has had an amazing, diverse career as a musician and producer.  Which leads to a request:  please consider contributing to a Go Fund Me fundraiser set up by friends of Laswell to help with expenses because his health issues, the loss of his longtime home, and the costs of maintaining his studio.  Given his absolute dedication to music and what he has given to it, he deserves as much support as he can get.

Habib Yammine: Thurayya Pleiades

Habib Yammine is a Lebanese percussionist, composer, ethnomusicologist and teacher whose doctoral dissertation was on the popular music of Yemen and this album, released on the French Le Chant du Monde label in 2008, is a masterful display of Arabic percussion.  Yammine plays the riqq, a small frame drum with cymbals held in the hands, the daff, a larger frame drum, and the darbouka, which has a goblet shape.  

Yammine is joined by his wife Aicha Redouane, who also plays the daff as well as chants, while Oussama Chraibi, a native of Morocco, plays the bongo, the double drum often associated with Cuban music, though Yammine noted in a very helpful interview in the liners that 1940s music in Egypt fused Cuban with native sounds.

Naturally, a listener of this album has to really like percussion, especially those of the Arabic world played by the hands, because there is well over an hour with the eleven pieces, but for those who do get a chance to hear this or other recordings of Middle Eastern percussion (including amazing Persian music, for example), the rewards are many.

The precision, varied rhythms based on several beat patterns, and the chants, along with the crystalline production is quite hypnotic and entrancing and it is not only great to read Yammine's interview with ethnomusicologist Gilles Delebarre, but Redouane's essay gives a poetic interpretation of her husband's art.  For example, she writes of the alchemy in his work that "is quite simply love, a love recounted . . . in flashes of light as he tells of the seasons and their passing, of succeeding generations of human beings, rolled out by his drums across the way of Time."

It is telling when Yammine, is replying to a question from Delebarre about the first piece having an unusual 19-beat rhythmic pattern, tells him that "you don't go to the sea to count the waves, you go to be lulled by it, to be carried aloft on the crest of the waves."  This is a reminder of the best advice this blogger has heard about how to listen to music:  try to follow the sounds, not the notes.  As adherents of the mystical Sufi form of Islam, the musicians compose and play in such a way, as Redouane noted, that it is "a nver-ending source of joy [that] fills the present moment with fruitfulness."

The Beatles: Abbey Road

Some thirty years ago, a Beatlemaniac friend asked why I didn't listen to the Fab Four and the reply was that, aside from having moved on to other musical interests (jazz, world and classical, mainly), which was really the main reason, there'd been plenty of exposure to that music in my youth, especially with a neighbor whose father played The Beatles all the time and frequently sat us down (when we were something like 8 and 9 years old) to show us the albums and explain the music in great detail.

Half-jokingly, I said to this friend that I'd probably wind up rediscovering The Beatles in my fifties and, sure enough, last spring is when that happened.  Picking an album to highlight here is definitely not a question of saying it's a favorite or the best, because Revolver is awesome, the eponymous album is the most interesting, and Sgt. Pepper's, with its studio innovations, is also stellar.

On balance, though, Abbey Road is incredible, especially after the Let It Be sessions proved to be a particular challenge (though Peter Jackson's new doc suggests the problems confronting the bad were not as bad as many have argued.)  Whatever the viewpoint on that, this recording wound up being a great finale for a phenomenal band.

There are obvious highlights, starting with the opener "Come Together," and while John Lennon said that he was becoming increasingly "submerged" once "I Am The Walrus" was rejected as a single, and his relationship with Yoko Ono, exploring experiemental music, and getting addicted to heroin, was definitely pulling him away from the band, it's a great, great tune.  He was purportedly embarrassed by such contributions as "Mean Mr. Mustard" and "Polythene Pam" and didn't much like the collage, but his other main offering, "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" is another classic.

It doesn't appear to have been an accident that both those "heavy" pieces were followed by two of George Harrison's greatest songs in "Something" and "Here Comes The Sun."  He was clearly increasingly frustrated by not having more of his tunes included on albums and was looking very much forward to striking out on his own, whether as part of The Beatles or not.  These two songs are still phenomenal by any standard.

To this listener, Paul McCartney's main contribution seems to have been shepherding the recording with George Martin, especially on the collage of songs on the second side of the LP that ends with great tracks like "Golden Slumbers" and "Carry That Weight," while "The End" is a rare example of where the three guitarists trade solos and Ringo even provided a solo, which he's always said he's resisted, and "Because" has that great three-part harmony.  As far as his songs are concerned, "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" often gets hammered for being yet another McCartney trifle and others may not be essential in the band's canon. It does seem, though, that his discipline, often needed after manager Brian Epstein's suicide, in getting The Beatles to put together a classic recording after the Let It Be fiasco was essential to the success of Abbey Road, which was a stellar way for the group to end its amazing run.