In the early 1960s, a young tenor saxophonist from Little Rock, Arkansas, was living on the streets of New York. He slept on the subway, sold his blood for a few dollars at a time, and pawned his horn when the money ran out. By his own count, he was homeless for about two and a half years.
His name was Ferrell Sanders. Within a few years he would be playing alongside John Coltrane, billed as Pharoah Sanders.
How he got that name has become one of jazz’s favourite stories. In it, Sun Ra, the bandleader who claimed to come from Saturn, took the struggling saxophonist in and gave him a new name to match his sound. It’s a good story. Sanders told a different one.
From Little Rock to the subway
Sanders was born in Little Rock on 13 October 1940, the only child of a school cafeteria cook and a city worker. He started out in church, on drums and then clarinet, and moved to tenor saxophone at high school, when he was also playing R&B gigs, sometimes from behind a curtain at segregated venues.
In 1959 he moved to Oakland, California, studied briefly at Oakland’s junior college and played blues and R&B around the Bay Area, where musicians called him “Little Rock”. There he jammed with Dewey Redman and met John Coltrane for the first time.
He arrived in New York around 1962, having hitchhiked across the country without a plan. Steady work didn’t come. He took a job in a restaurant kitchen and played wherever he could.
Pharoah Sanders and the Sun Ra story
Sun Ra was leading his Arkestra in New York by then, a big band that mixed swing, free improvisation, costumes and a philosophy built around ancient Egypt and outer space. In John Szwed’s biography of Ra, Space Is the Place, Ra gave the homeless Sanders somewhere to live and clothes to wear, and encouraged him to use the name Pharoah.
The story spread. The New York Times repeated it in its obituary of Sanders in 2022, and so did many others.
Sanders himself, interviewed by MOJO in 2021, the year before his death, rejected it. Asked whether Sun Ra had suggested the name, he answered: “No, he never did. He never even mentioned it.”
His version was plainer. He said his grandmother had first wanted to name him Pharoah, after the Bible, before settling on Ferrell. When he joined the musicians’ union in New York and had to fill in its forms, he wrote Pharoah, and he said he was already using the name before he met Sun Ra. The Guardian and the New Statesman both followed his account in their obituaries.
What isn’t in dispute is that Sanders spent time with Sun Ra. In late 1964 he filled in on tenor with the Arkestra while its regular saxophonist, John Gilmore, was away. Sun Ra’s concerts at Judson Hall in New York that December, part of which came out on Ra’s own El Saturn label as Featuring Pharoah Sanders and Black Harold, are the only recordings of the two together.
If you want to hear Ra explain himself in his own words, we have a rare Sun Ra interview on the site.
The Coltrane years
By then Sanders was finding his feet. He played with Don Cherry in 1963, formed his first group with Billy Higgins on drums, and in September 1964 recorded his debut album for the ESP-Disk label. It came out the following year with his name misspelled on the cover as “Pharaoh”.
He had kept in touch with John Coltrane, who invited him to sit in with his band. On 28 June 1965 Sanders was one of three tenor players on Ascension, Coltrane’s most radical record to that point, and in September he joined the band. Within days they were recording at the Penthouse in Seattle, and you can hear that line-up on A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle.
His sound shocked many listeners. Where Coltrane built long, searching lines, Sanders pushed the tenor into screams, overtones and roars. McCoy Tyner left the group that December, saying all he could hear was noise. Coltrane saw it differently, praising the strength and conviction in Sanders’s playing. Sanders stayed until Coltrane’s death in July 1967.
Karma
In February 1969 Sanders recorded Karma for Impulse!. Most of it is one piece, “The Creator Has a Master Plan”, which runs for around 32 minutes over two sides of the LP.
It opens with a calm, free-floating prelude before a bass figure and a chant take hold, then builds into a storm of saxophone before settling again. Leon Thomas sings the words and adds his own yodelling cries. The record reached listeners outside jazz, with airplay on FM radio well beyond the jazz stations, and writers since have placed it among the defining records of spiritual jazz.
The late chapter
Sanders kept recording for decades, though more sparingly in his later years, and we’ve picked out the highlights in our guide to Pharoah Sanders albums. His last major release was Promises, made with the electronic producer Floating Points and the London Symphony Orchestra. It came out in March 2021 as a single 46-minute piece in nine movements, with Sanders playing quietly and sparely over shimmering keyboards and strings.
It was the last album released in his lifetime. Pharoah Sanders died in Los Angeles on 24 September 2022, aged 81.
For the label that released his greatest records, see our pick of essential Impulse! Records albums.
