He cut an unlikely candidate as the jovial song and dance man he eventually, if briefly, became.
Much of Pharoah Sanders's saxophone playing time was spent balefully gesticulating to the onstage sound engineer, asking for more piano in the mix – and from where I was sitting, he had a point. When it fell to Sanders's long-time pianist, William Henderson to solo, the piano's middle register was awol.
Continuity, thus, was in short supply for this opening Glasgow Jazz Festival mainstage concert. This was a great pity because in flashes, Sanders, at 71 and moving a mite stiffly now, showed himself still capable of creating jewels of thought, to quote one of his album titles. His big muscular tenor tone is still intact and in a programme that paid no little homage to his former bandleader and saxophone duellist-duettist John Coltrane, moving from pacey modal playing through haunting ballad form to African-influenced grooves, Sanders produced some magical phrases, enthrallingly bullish harmonics and beautifully tender lyrical touches.
If the music as a whole never really caught fire, this was no reflection on Sanders's drummer, the London-based New Yorker Gene Calderazzo who, working alongside fellow Londoner, double bassist Oli Hayhurst, contributed the evening's one constant with his springy, swinging time-keeping. It was Calderazzo, too, who provided the pulse for Sanders to get down into a game, if slightly arthritic shuffle, take up the microphone and intone his totemic anthem The Creator Has a Master Plan, leading his enthusiastic audience in a chanted call and response that if not entirely wholehearted, ended the night with a feeling of good- natured positivity.
HHH
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