In my nascent explorations of avant-garde and free jazz I've heard Pharoah Sanders' name numerous times (he first achieved notoriety playing tenor in John Coltrane's combos and influenced Coltrane's move to free jazz), and I've seen Karma, his 1969 breakthrough solo album, near or at the top of quite a few lists of the best free jazz albums. Unfortunately, though, personal tastes don't always jive with popularity, and this album stands as my first big free jazz disappointment.
There are so many flaws and annoyances that easily come to my mind, from the obvious (atrocious lyrics--hell, the fact that it even has vocals at all) to the less obvious (the fact that there's almost no harmonic development over the course of a half hour, and the fact that Sanders' saxophone, which sounded so blistering on John Coltrane's Ascension, occasionally comes dangerously close to sounding like SNL opening credits/softcore porn soundtrack) that I couldn't even imagine calling this one of the best albums of the free jazz movements. The first time I listened to "The Creator Has A Master Plan" and Leon Thomas started going "Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah..." I was thinking, "Oh no, is that what this is about?" The lyrics, few though they are, are among the worst of the era for their painfully broad, facile peace n' love message, and they get even worse on "Colors," where the hoped-against happens again--"yellow....purple...." Is he really going to sing-list all of the colors as an illustration of how great god is? Yes, he is. And then there's the wordless vocal soloing--while I don't really mind Thomas' yodel phrasing, his improvisation here is a perfect example of why I have yet to be satisfied by a vocalist in a group improvisational setting--the lines he sings are the kind of generic, simplistic soul runs that any average music listener would likely attempt if told to sing a solo over this music. If this album is supposed to be some sort of pinnacle of free jazz--a genre supposedly anchored on unbridled freedom of expression, especially during soloing, then this sort of repetitive, rudimentary technique just comes across as middling. Let me put it this way--if a saxophone (even with Pharoah's tone) played the notes that Thomas sings, it'd probably be lambasted as one of the most boring solos ever laid to tape.
Ok, so the vocals are a major detractor. Take them away, and what do we have? Well, for the most part, we've got two chords for over a half hour's worth of music. That's dangerous territory--with a harmonic compositional structure that lazy, you've got to provide some variation in other ways. Miles Davis would do it the same year on In a Silent Way by adding and subtracting instruments, adding and removing subtle repeating riffs and themes, and allowing the energy to gently ebb and flow, then in 1972 he'd perfect the technique with On The Corner's merry-go-round of instruments, textures and rhythmic shadings. Here Sanders offers a mildly dynamic development with the percussion, which is one of the biggest draws of the album--it's definitely a thick sound, and when things ramp up around the 18-19 minute mark, it gets exciting. However, the piano and bass are both pretty rigid, and other than Pharoah's saxophone we have nothing to keep things fresh for around 20 minutes of the album. Other than the borderline cheesy sax sound (Sanders can't really be blamed too much for how much his sound influenced much worse soft jazz artists to come in the past 40 years), the minor-key opening flourish offers a change in texture and mood, and again around 11 minutes. So, for structure and development, we have to be satisfied with a lot of repetition and a general energy buildup that reaches a series of intermediary peaks before really topping out around the 20 minute mark--and make no mistake, this album exudes structure, which is disappointing considering its prized place representing a jazz movement that moved continually away from structure; I can't help feeling that there simply isn't enough compositional substance there for track's length and that an opportunity to make a much more interesting backbone for Sanders' soloing was missed in a big way. To be fair, the noisy, atonal section that happens from about 20-25 minutes is pretty great--all kinds of cacophony and the Sanders soloing I had assumed would be the centerpiece of much more of the album. The crescendo paces itself (what else could it do in a 32 minute song), and for that reason it's pretty effective.
Really, Sanders shines throughout with his thick timbre, trilling and melodicism, but it's a far cry from the crazy religious expression some descriptions would have you believe. Instead of something other, we get something mostly familiar and only occasionally rapturous--for the most part telling us how great god is rather than showing us. Though the resulting music's mainstream approachability won Sanders some much-deserved popularity and success, I think it falls far short of what the free jazz movement has to offer in terms of spirit, theoretical development, and actual other-worldliness. Can't win 'em all.
Decide for yourself and get it here
on CD or MP3.
No comments:
Post a Comment