Adding Another Saxophonist

John Coltrane brought Pharoah Sanders into his band in 1965, during the period when Coltrane was pushing furthest into free jazz and spiritual exploration. What made it unusual is that Sanders wasn’t really a sideman in the conventional sense. Coltrane treated him more as a counterpart, someone whose harsher, more abrasive tenor sound (the overblowing, the screams, the multiphonics) gave Coltrane a foil and a goad. Records like Ascension, Meditations, and the Village Vanguard Again sessions show two saxophonists pushing each other toward noise and ecstasy rather than one leading and one following.

The relationship was also explicitly spiritual, not just musical. Both men were deep into Eastern religion and mysticism by then, and Coltrane seemed to see Sanders as someone further along a path he himself was trying to reach. There’s a quote, often attributed to Coltrane, calling Sanders “the father” in spirit even though Coltrane was the older man and the leader. That inversion, the bandleader treating his sideman as a kind of spiritual elder or torchbearer, is the genuinely unusual part.

After Coltrane died in 1967, Sanders didn’t just move on. He spent the next several years making records that were direct continuations or tributes, Tauhid, Karma, the track “The Creator Has a Master Plan”, carrying Coltrane’s late-period aesthetic forward almost as a custodian. So the relationship outlived Coltrane’s life in a way most bandleader-sideman relationships don’t.

Here, Coltrane biographer Lewis Porter discusses how Trane added Pharoah to his group, in 1965. But first, a performance excerpt of Pharoah with Alice Coltrane from Tony Brown’s Journal, 1970, (A Love Supreme) documentary about Alice. And the video closes with John Hicks and Pharoah playing Trane’s “After the Rain.”