Pharoah Sanders, Straight-Ahead and Avant-Garde

Abstract In this article I examine the career of Pharoah Sanders through two streams. I first trace the path of Sanders's career through recordings and performances in a variety of settings with various musical approaches. Specifically, I examine his evolution from John Coltrane's Meditations (1965), through Karma (1969) and Sanders's hit, “The Creator Has a Master Plan,” Thembi (1971), Love Will Find a Way (1977), and eventually to Live (1981). I posit that Live represents Sanders's mature style that successfully combines avant-garde techniques and a more mainstream approach. I then examine Sanders's reception through the critical literature to more fully contextualize his career. Several things become evident in this regard. First, this period (the early 1980s) is frequently overlooked in the literature on Sanders, and when it is discussed it is frequently misunderstood in terms of its relationship to his career as a whole. Along with this, critical reception tends to focus on Sanders's work of the 1960s. Second, I posit that Sanders has had a complicated and limited reception because he does not fit neatly into established categories such as straight-ahead, mainstream, and avant-garde or free jazz. Further, I posit that perpetuating these artificial boundaries is detrimental to the music and to musicians such as Sanders who do not fit into one neat category, as well as to the larger world of the arts, scholarship, and well beyond.