Pharoah Sanders: Sinking the Spirit

With few lapses, a performance by Pharoah Sanders has always been a sure bet. A live show, and certainly a listen to Tauhid, Jewels of Thought, or Karma (his late-'60s classics on Impulse!), means the fix is in and high-flown, free-thinking, ecstatic playing results. When he played a week-long stand at New York City's Knitting Factory last year, one set found him in the thick of a 50-minute rundown of John Coltrane's "Olé." Like a snake handler reciting a psalm in tongues, he squawked, squealed, and thundered through innumerable variations on the theme. After one extended barrage that sounded as if his sax bell would crack from the tension, when there were no more sounds he could make, he pulled the instrument from his mouth and grabbed the mike and let loose a yell that came from beyond any source of earthbound inspiration. I've not heard its like before or since, and that performance was the closest thing to any sort of spiritual experience I've ever felt.

So now come two vexing albums -- Welcome to Love, on Evidence, and the Bill Laswell-produced Message from Home, on Verve -- that run so gratingly against the grain of what I've just described that they come close to nullifying it. Both records are finely wrought, soaked in melody and good technique, hands-on production, and clear intent. But the otherworldly quality you can get pure and uncut from Sanders at his peak disappeared while he was going through the fakebook choosing Welcome's material, and it got diluted in the first wave of overdubs and synth colorings on Message. It hovers here and there, darting out of the ether like an ignored specter.

Welcome to Love is an eight-song set of standards -- some of them Coltrane-associated, like "My One and Only Love," "I Want To Talk About You," "Nancy (With the Laughing Face)." But they're done up in slick Tin Pan Alley fashion. There's little in the way of extended harmonies or techniques. Sanders sticks as close to the melody as Ben Webster, but without Webster's embodiment of the song in breathy exclamations, quicksilver dynamic shifts, and creamy-rich whole notes. His tone is light as helium, and there's about as much tension in the way he constructs his solos as there is in a game of solitaire. His bluesy attack recalls Coltrane, but there is none of Coltrane's dazzling ornamentation. And though he spins compact phrases, they're merely lulling. The weight of making the album sonically interesting falls on the shoulders of the band -- bassist Stafford James, drummer Eccleston W. Wainwright Jr., and (especially) pianist William Henderson.

How you feel about Message from Home depends on how appropriate you think synthesizers and drum machines are in this context, and what you think of producer Laswell's tendency to spit-shine his projects. This CD ponies up more of Sanders's goods, but not with the regularity or ferocity of his earlier works.

Opener "Our Roots" is an acid-jazz vamp made thick by drummer Hamid Drake (who did a snapper of an album with Peter Brötzmann last year, Dried Rat Dog, on Okra Disc) and a drum machine, with two synths bubbling underneath what would otherwise be perfect playing on Sanders's part. Throughout the rest of the album, moments of real beauty -- Sanders's yearning melodicism (and the vocals) on "Tomoki," William Henderson's piano on "Ocean Song," the flutes and African instruments of "Kumba" -- are stained with keyboards and electronics and by sanitizing. On the last tune, "Country Mile," Sanders screams and honks and rolls through chorus after chorus. You wonder whether he isn't trying to subdue the music that verges on doing the same to him.

-- Jonathan Dixon