When you have worked with some of the most significant names over the past 50 years of jazz history and thus become a player of some significance yourself, you might be entitled to look back at your achievements with some satisfaction.

For Pharoah Sanders, however, while he acknowledges that he may have a certain status, the past is just that: the past. What really matters is the next gig.

Sanders, whose next gig happens to be the headline concert on the opening night of Glasgow Jazz Festival, is by no means alone among jazz players in his desire to move on. His fellow saxophonist Benny Waters appeared to actually run to his gigs (he moved at a loping pace at the best of times) well into his 80s and kept playing right up to his death in 1998, aged 96. Closer to home, another saxophonist Bobby Wellins, who won the Parliamentary Jazz Awards' Musician of the Year title this year aged 76, is still perpetually on a journey in search of the elusive perfection.

"I just like to play," says Sanders down the phone line from his home in California. "For me there's no mystery, no secret to what we do and to keep doing it, we have to stay alive, live right, treat people right and hope that they treat us right."

The passionate, committed style of his playing that drew Sanders to the attention of bandleaders Sun Ra, Don Cherry and John Coltrane may come partly from his teenage experiences of playing the blues with Junior Parker and Bobby 'Blue' Bland in his home town, Little Rock, Arkansas. Indeed, there's something of Bland's rasp and the more aggressive side of his singing in Sanders' saxophone sound.

"I've never really thought of my playing as having a vocal quality but there could be an element of Bobby Bland or the blues in what I do," he says. "It's all just music to me really but the blues was and is important and those gigs were good experience. I'd started playing clarinet at school and played in the marching band but I liked the saxophone better. There was just something about the sound and the way it felt in my hands, and having played in the school band I could read music. That's why the blues guys hired me. I was still at high school and getting 10 or 15 dollars to spend the night playing in a club was quite appealing."

The music Sanders was listening to at this point was largely saxophone-based. His early favourites included Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, James Moody and John Coltrane and when he moved to Oakland, California to study art and music in the late 1950s, he fell in with saxophonists Dewey Redman and Sonny Simmons and pianist Ed Kelly, all of whom would go on to make an impression during the next decade and beyond.

Moving on to New York in 1961, Sanders found things tough at first. At one point he had to pawn his saxophone and sleep rough but slowly he began to find kindred spirits. Sun Ra took him into his Arkestra and changed Sanders' given name, Ferrell, to Pharoah, in keeping with Ra's fascination for Egyptian mythology combined with space travel, and Don Cherry and drummer Billy Higgins introduced Sanders to the wider free jazz scene. Within two years, Sanders had formed his own band, with pianist and long-time collaborator-to-be John Hicks, and towards the end of 1964 John Coltrane, who had heard Sanders' quartet at the Village Gate in New York, and invited Sanders to join his band.

Coltrane's recordings with Sanders' fiery saxophone complementing, some might say competing with, his own are among the landmarks of 1960s jazz. They led to Sanders getting a recording deal with Coltrane's label, the ultra-stylish and prestigious Impulse!, and to Sanders continuing to work with Coltrane's widow, Alice, after the saxophone giant's untimely death in 1967.

"People always ask me about working with Coltrane," says Sanders, "and it's difficult to know what to say. There was nothing weird about it and there's no dirt to dig or anything like that. I still feel good about it because he was one of the best and I really enjoyed the energy of what was happening at the time."

As well as continuing to range between spiritual peace and often quite violent outbursts on recordings such as Karma, with his iconic free jazz 'hit' The Creator Has a Master Plan featuring future Santana singer Leon Thomas, Sanders went on to draw on the energy of Africa in general and Senegal in particular after his first visit there during the 1980s. Further trips to his ancestral home fuelled possibly the best received of his more recent albums, Message from Home, recorded with the inspirational producer Bill Laswell in 1996.

African music remains an inspiration, as do Indian ragas and sounds from all over the world.

"I listen to all sorts of music at home and I'm always fascinated to hear how people interpret their own traditional music," he says. "Whether that in turn feeds into my own music, I'm not sure. I don't think I'm consciously influenced by anything specifically when I'm playing. I really just start to play and let the music go wherever it goes. But at the same time, I always feel in control and I hope that the people listening will feel happiness, peace and love."

The Pharoah Sanders Quartet opens Glasgow Jazz Festival at the Old Fruitmarket tomorrow evening