On this show a focus on John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders plus new post/avant lo-fi jazz from Gridfailure & Megalophobe
Show Intro 00:00
Pharoah Sanders “The Creator Has A Master Plan” from Karma (Impulse!) 00:38
John Coltrane “Chasin’ The Trane” from ‘Live’ At The Village Vanguard (Impulse!) 34:05
John Coltrane Quartet “Nature Boy” from The John Coltrane Quartet Plays (Impulse!) 51:06
McCoy Tyner “Naima” from Echoes of a Friend 1:00:00
Gridfailure & Megalophobe “Harbinger Winds” from Harbinger Winds 1:06:33
John Coltrane “My Favourite Things” from Live at the Village Vanguard Again! (Impulse!) 1:20:55
Pharoah Sanders “To John” from Love In Us All 1:41:09
NOTES
Pharoah Sanders
Pharoah Sanders’ third album as a leader is the one that defines him as a musician to the present day. After the death of Coltrane, while there were many seeking to make a spiritual music that encompassed his ideas and yearnings while moving forward, no one came up with the goods until Sanders on this 1969 date.
There are only two tracks on “Karma”, the 32-plus minute “The Creator Has a Master Plan” and the five-and-a-half-minute “Colours.” The band is one of Sanders’ finest, and features vocalist Leon Thomas, drummer Billy Hart, Julius Watkins, James Spaulding, a pre-funk Lonnie Liston Smith, Richard Davis, Reggie Workman on bass, and Nathaniel Bettis on percussion.
“Creator” begins with a quote from “A Love Supreme,” with a nod to Coltrane’s continuing influence on Sanders. But something else emerges here as well: Sanders’ own deep commitment to lyricism and his now inherent knowledge of Eastern breathing and modal techniques. His ability to use the ostinato became not a way of holding a tune in place while people soloed, but a manner of pushing it irrepressibly forward. Keeping his range limited (for the first eight minutes anyway), Sanders explores all the colors around the key figures, gradually building the dynamics as the band comps the two-chord theme behind with varying degrees of timbral invention. When Thomas enters at nine minutes, the track begins to open. His yodel frees up the theme and the rhythm section to invent around him. At 18 minutes it explodes, rushing into a silence that is profound as it is noisy in its approach. Sanders is playing microphonics and blowing to the heavens and Thomas is screaming.
Love in us All is a 1974 release on Impulse!
Pharoah Sanders – tenor saxophone, flute
Joe Bonner – piano
James Branch – flute
Cecil McBee – bass
Norman Connors – drums
Lawrence Killian, James Mtume, Badal Roy – percussion
John Coltrane
Live at the Village Vanguard released in February 1962 on Impulse Records. The first album to feature the members of the classic quartet of Coltrane with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones, plus the added bonus of Eric Dolphy. This was also the first Coltrane live album to be issued. In contrast to his previous album for Impulse!, this one generated much turmoil among both critics and audience alike with its challenging music. On the featured track there is just the trio of Trane, Jimmy and Elvin.
The John Coltrane Quartet Plays (full title The John Coltrane Quartet Plays Chim Chim Cheree, Song of Praise, Nature Boy, Brazilia) is an album by jazz musician John Coltrane, recorded in February and May 1965, shortly after the release of A Love Supreme. The tracks recorded on February 17 and 18 featured two bass players (Jimmy Garrison and Art Davis), and may be seen as a continuation of experiments begun by Coltrane in 1961 involving multiple basses, often with one playing arco and the other playing pizzicato.
Live At The Village Vanguard Again! was recorded in May 1966 during a live performance at the Village Vanguard jazz club in New York City, the album features Coltrane playing in the free jazz style that characterized his final years. The lineup features a quintet, with Coltrane on tenor and soprano saxophones, bass clarinet, and flute, Pharoah Sanders on tenor saxophone and flute, Alice Coltrane on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Rashied Ali on drums, supplemented by Emanuel Rahim on percussion. It was the quintet’s only official recording released during Coltrane’s lifetime.
McCoy Tyner
1972 album released on the JVC label, and later on the Milestone label. It was recorded in Tokyo, Japan, on November 11, 1972, and features Tyner in a solo piano tribute to John Coltrane.
Gridfailure and Megalophobe
New York based solo/collaborator projects GRIDFAILURE and MEGALOPHOBE unveil their third collaborative album together, the jazz-influenced Harbinger Winds.
Culminating nearly five years of unpredictable progression, regression, erosion, and transformation, Harbinger Winds was finally completed in February of 2022, a wide array of guest contributors helping shape this album’s post/avant lo-fi jazz direction. Engineered, recorded, and mixed by GRIDFAILURE’s David Brenner at The Compound in Rockland County and MEGALOPHOBE’s Benjamin Levitt at Forked Audio in Brooklyn, the two contribute a wide array of vocals, guitars and basses, keys and synth, drums and percussion, accordion, theremin, cello, harmonica, and more, electronics/effects, tape manipulation, nature recordings, and more.
Joining Brenner and Levitt on the album are platinum session musician/performer Mac Gollehon (Duran Duran, Chaka Khan, Buddy Rich, David Bowie, Blondie, Onyx, more), Leila Abdul-Rauf (Vastum, Ionophore), Sally Gates (Titan To Tachyons, ex-Orbweaver), Christian Molenaar (Those Darn Gnomes), Morgan Evans (Walking Bombs), Matt Bacon, Rosa Henriquez, Rob Levitt, and Denise Fillion. The cover art, photography, and videos for Harbinger Winds were created by Brenner, with additional photos and video by Levitt, the album then mastered by Dan Emery at Black Matter Mastering (Kool Keith, Lost Dog Street Band, Thetan).
Different Noises 