15. “Thembi,” Pharoah Sanders, from Thembi (1971)

After John Coltrane’s death, Albert Ayler described a lost holy trinity of jazz: "Trane was the father. Pharoah [Sanders] was the son. I was the holy ghost."
 
“The son” first arrived in New York in 1962. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Sanders had spent a few years on the West Coast after high school, studying art at Oakland Junior College and gigging on tenor sax around the Bay area—but he kept hearing that New York was the place to be. “In Oakland, there’s a good time, but all they wanted to do was drink and smoke,” he explains. “Smiley Winters, a left-handed drummer, had to work tarring parking lots. He told me, ‘Yeah, man, with your sound, you don’t need to be here, you need to go to New York City.’ And I listened to him.”
 
Sanders hitchhiked cross-country, and arrived with no money; he slept on park benches, sold his blood to eat, and struggled to find his voice on his instrument. Though he looked rough, others immediately saw his potential, and he started putting together bands. After being invited by Sun Ra to play with his Arkestra—a 1964 gig at Judson Hall was recorded, but the resulting album, Sun Ra Featuring Pharoah Sanders and Black Harold, would not be released until 1976—Sanders caught the attention of “the father” himself.
 
When Sanders first joined John Coltrane, the older bandleader was tight-lipped about his intentions. “Being around him was almost, like, ‘Well, what do you want me to do? I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,’” Sanders says. “He always told me, ‘Play.’ That’s what I did.”
 
Sanders initially made his reputation unfurling sheets of wild noise—with multi-phonic growling, reed-biting, and other extended techniques. Once Coltrane was gone, though, Sanders seemed drawn to different sounds, and became a pioneer of what critics now call “spiritual jazz,” a style that favored droning, elliptical compositions and featured instruments and textures borrowed from African, Indian, and Arabic musical traditions.
 
“Thembi” closes out side one of Sanders’s 1971 album of the same name. Driven by a smooth-running bass ostinato by Cecil McBee, and featuring drummer Clifford Jarvis contending with a cloud of irregular hand percussion—claves, maracas, various types of shakers or bells—the track showcases Sanders on alto sax, playing with unforced melodic lightness, but still tossing in the occasional overblown squeal.
 
At just over seven minutes, it’s an uncharacteristically brief, focused utterance from Sanders: “Pharoah would play forever,” producer Ed Michel once said. “We worked out a technique where about 17 or 18 minutes in, I would dim the lights up and down in the studio to let him know that he was getting to the point where he should start winding down. The only problem was that at that point when Pharoah would get playing, he would close his eyes.”