Über das neue Pharoah Sanders-Album (und Shepp/Moran):
“Promises,” his first major album in nearly two decades. It is a collaboration with the London Symphony Orchestra and is led by Sam Shepherd, a d.j. who produces electronic music under the name Floating Points. Shepherd, an Englishman in his mid-thirties, emerged in the late two-thousands, making boogie-influenced dance tracks. His music soon became more ambient and expansive, as though he were uncoiling his club-oriented songs and exploring where the synth squiggles and hazy textures might go if they were allowed to meander. In 2015, he released “Elaenia,” which flitted between squelchy dance music and fusion-inspired experiments in mood. That year, Sanders was in a car with a representative from Shepherd’s label who began playing “Elaenia.” Sanders became transfixed, and the pair sat there until the record finished. Afterward, he remarked that he hoped to meet the person who had made it.
In the following years, Sanders and Shepherd often discussed a potential collaboration. They hung out in Shepherd’s London studio and visited the British Museum together to see the ancient Egyptian sculptures of Sekhmet. Eventually, they began recording in Los Angeles. “Promises,” the result of their work, is a single, forty-six-minute composition that showcases both of their strengths—a rarity for an intergenerational conversation between a jazz great and a much younger fan. In contrast with the uproarious, conjuring tunes of Sanders’s youth, or Shepherd’s floor-packing dance music, it is a remarkably intimate experience.
The composition, written by Shepherd, begins with orchestral refrains that evoke a sense of space, an open field. Sanders explores the expanse, testing out riffs and runs. You are carried along not by a rhythm track but by the flickers of Sanders’s horn, the distant sound of a synthesizer, string crescendos suggesting a light just past the horizon. There are long, quiet stretches when you can hear Sanders’s reed vibrating as he blows, the sound of sheet music being shuffled. Over time, the orchestra takes charge, and, about halfway through, a swell of strings washes over everything, calling to mind Alice Coltrane’s swirling, devotional music. When the instrumentals settle, Sanders returns quietly, fingering the keys, then blowing again, softly. His playing is twisty and teasing. A synthesizer seesaws in the distance, almost imperceptible, as Shepherd slowly begins to accompany him.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/29/pharoah-sanders-takes-on-electronic-music
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