OPINION

PHILIP MARTIN: Observing Pharoah Sanders

The old man dances.

He sways, gingerly, as though it hurts, or might. And it does and it will, for no trajectory in this physical world goes undeflected. Everything meets resistance, nothing is without cost, no matter how smoothly it seems accomplished, no matter how slick the magic or splendid the engine. Every step is an overcoming. Lungs fill only at an ever-increasing expense. Every day breath is dearer. Sometimes the old man might feel the need to find the shadows and sit.

Yet now he dances, his old-man shuffle and nod. He rakes at the tenor saxophone hanging low--at his knees as he limbos--in parody of one of those rock 'n' roll guitar boys. The drums rattle and quake, mice on a pie tin, while the bass struts and the piano tinks and vectors. And the room is charged with joy and yearning as the people in their nice clothes bob along with the old man dancing.

They didn't come to watch him dance, but no one finds it ridiculous. Or maybe someone does, maybe someone takes the noise for nonsense, the old man as one of those legends far past his prime who people turn out for so they can check the "seen 'em" box. One thing you learn quick is that anyone telling you they don't get it may be telling you the truth; taste is not something you can argue. There is no common reservoir of agreed-upon merits or demerits. Each of us is free to dismiss what we will as irrelevant or annoying or, to use the word in the imprecise yet fashionable sense, pretentious.

Yet the old man answers with the horn to his lips. He makes it peal and shudder, a tone unearthly yet warm as blood. Gold and silver blooming on the inside of your eyelids. That melting prayerfulness, that hell-shook squall. What Coltrane nicked. Easy enough to say this ain't the real truth baby when you're standing there all cocky and above it all. Maybe hard to make yourself believe it when something you can't even name seizes your heart.

But you had to be there, of course you did. Some people say that writing about music is futile because music is a language beyond words. Sometimes they get clever and repeat something they've heard about it being like "dancing about architecture" and maybe they think that makes them look smart. But in reality it only makes them look smug, and it betrays their fundamental misunderstanding of what art is supposed to be about.

Because only propagandists and racketeers make assertions. What artists do is interrogate the infinite complexity of what it means to be alive. And sure, you can do this in square English, in purple hull peas and okra, or in 4/4 time with major chords moving from the tonic to the fourth to the fifth, with maybe a minor second or sixth tossed in for spice. But if your mind is right and your technique sound you can also do it on an avant-garde astral plane, way out beyond the straitjackets of tonality and strict time.

What you mean to do is connect, to say that what cannot be said with words even if words are all you have. The old man has something other than words. He has a deep lyricism to go with his growl and honk, his trills and his dynamics. This old man was in the room with Trane and Don Cherry and Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra and McCoy Tyner and Miles Davis--all those cats. This old man is a monument, sure, but monuments are often impressive.

It isn't surprising the young man originally named Ferrell Sanders first aspired to be a painter; you get the abstract impressionism in his sound as well as an organic Grant Wood quality. Maybe it's less the medium that calls than the desire to express the ineffable--Coleman, Davis, Muhal Richard Abrams, Bill Dixon and Roscoe Mitchell also painted; Archie Shepp and Cecil Taylor wrote modernist poetry.

But music was primary. It's often been reported the old man's parents were music teachers, but the man himself has debunked that--his mother cooked in schools, his father worked for the city of Little Rock. It was his grandfather, his mother's mother, who taught math and music in the public schools. He was also head of a church choir and all that stuff.

"I was around music all my life," the old man told a writer for Jazz Times a decade ago. "I lived near a church that went on almost every night. Some people called it a sanctified church; they wore white dresses, white stockings, white pants, all that stuff. They'd be loud and go until about one, two o'clock in the morning. It was the only church like that; most churches were Baptist . . .

"Jimmy Cannon was my band teacher--he's the one that got me started. I owe everything to him. He was a very serious-minded person and a great trumpet player . . . I used to listen to him so much and I didn't want to go to any other class.

"I found a way to cut a lot of my classes so I could come up to the band room and listen to him. I would miss English class and it got to be where the teacher asked me, 'Mr. Sanders, are you going to come to class this week? You know the test is gonna be Friday.' But she understood. Everybody in the school knew where I was. Mr. Cannon started putting some music in front of me to read, so we got started reading different overtures and whatever. He loved me 'cause I was very serious about the music and I was serious about the high school band. I felt like that was home for me."

And now the old man dances. And sings. (A surprise because Leon Thomas is so associated with "The Creator Has a Master Plan," but Thomas has been dead for nearly 20 years.) And brings that great gleaming horn to his lips. And blows. Long and lovingly.

The old man dances.

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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.

Editorial on 02/27/2018

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