I tried to interview Pharoah Sanders for The Wire in 2014. It didn’t go well. He didn’t like talking about his music — something Rob Mazurek warned me about, before giving me Sanders’ phone number — so when we connected, he was gentle and polite, but any direct question I asked was met with a blank wall of indifference. After about 10 minutes, I gave up on the idea of an interview. Instead, I wrote a Primer, a guide to his discography that extended from his recordings with John Coltrane in 1965 to the dual live albums with Mazurek and an ensemble combining the Chicago and São Paulo Undergrounds, billed as Pharoah & the Underground, that were his most recent work at the time.

I got to see Sanders live twice. The first time was in the mid ’90s, at Iridium when it was still uptown near Lincoln Center. William Henderson was on piano, Steve Neil was on bass, Cindy Blackman (not yet Cindy Blackman Santana) was on drums, and Ravi Coltrane guested. Sanders climaxed the set with a number on which he pounded his chest and sang a bellowing, wordless song. (I think now that it was “Highlife”, from Rejoice, an album discussed below.)

The second time was on December 28, 2019, also at Iridium but this time in their Times Square-adjacent location. His band that night included Benito Gonzalez on piano, Nate Reeves on bass, and Johnathan Blake on drums. Sanders played most of the set sitting down, and there wasn’t that much tyrannosaurus-style free jazz to be heard. He was mostly playing late ’50s style hard bop, which was a fascinating reminder that he was an absolute master of the horn, who could swing as hard as anyone you might care to name. Toward the end of the set, he was joined by his son Tomoki Sanders, also playing tenor, and the younger man took things farther out, as his father looked on with a gentle smile.

Many people have a limited idea of Pharoah Sanders. The majority of writers and listeners focus on his brilliant run of albums recorded mostly for Impulse! between 1969 and 1974. Even the weakest of those releases, Love In Us All, is at least worth hearing, and the best of them, Thembi and Live At The East and the Strata-East release Izipho Zam, are some of the best music made by anyone in those progressive, boundary-breaking years. After that, though, people’s attention drifts.

They may pick up the thread again with Sonny Sharrock’s 1991 album Ask The Ages, on which Sanders, bassist Charnett Moffett and drummer Elvin Jones helped the guitarist achieve orbit, or The Trance of Seven Colors, Sanders’ collaboration with Moroccan Gnawa musician Mâalem Mahmoud Gania and his band, from 1994. (Both were produced by Bill Laswell, with whom Sanders had quite a productive relationship in the 1990s and early 2000s.) Still others may have heard the collaborations with Rob Mazurek mentioned above, or Sanders’ final recording, Promises, made with producer Floating Points and the London Symphony Orchestra. But there’s almost two decades’ worth of music in between that is overlooked by nearly everyone.

Mosaic Records is attempting to draw attention to some of that music with its new 7CD box, The Complete Theresa Recordings. (Buy it directly from them.) It includes six Sanders albums (five studio, one live) released between 1980 and 1987, and selected tracks from albums by pianist Ed Kelly and drummer Idris Muhammad on which he guested. (Side note: I find Mosaic’s practice of only including tracks in their boxes on which an artist actually plays very annoying. Give us the whole Ed Kelly album, and the whole Idris Muhammad album, dammit!)

Revisiting these records for the first time since preparing the aforementioned Wire Primer in 2014, I hear things I didn’t notice — or didn’t remember — and have come away with an even greater respect for Sanders’ artistic breadth than I had before. That’s not to say that everything he did in the ’80s was gold, but he was absolutely doing what he wanted to do, never conforming to anyone’s image of him.

Journey To The One, released in 1980, is a sprawling double LP featuring a variety of ensembles and styles across 72 minutes of music. The core band on six of the album’s 10 tracks consists of pianist John Hicks, bassist Ray Drummond, and drummer Idris Muhammad, but guests show up on various pieces: guitarists Carl Lockett and Chris Hayes, flugelhornist Eddie Henderson, and a group of vocalists including Bobby McFerrin. A version of John Coltrane’s “After the Rain” is a duet with pianist Joe Bonner; “Kazuko (Peace Child)” features Yoko Ito Gates on koto and Paul Arslanian on harmonium and wind chimes; “Soledad” features Bedria Sanders on harmonium (and Pharoah adding tambura), James Pomerantz on sitar, and Phil Ford on tablas; and “Think About the One” swaps out the whole band: Bonner is on acoustic and electric piano, Mark Isham plays synthesizer, Lockett is on guitar, Joy Julks is on bass and Randy Merritt on drums, Babatunde Olatunji is on congas and shekere, Claudette Allen sings, and the aforementioned vocal ensemble returns.

The music is a natural progression from what Sanders had been doing during his most popular era. It’s frequently less dependent on rhythms from around the world than before — on the 12-minute “Doktor Pitt”, Hicks, Drummond and Muhammad are swinging so hard that Sanders’ extended solo sounds like he’s flying through the clouds. And the mix is very late ’70s; the bass sounds like a cross between a guimbri and a giant rubber band, and the cymbals sound like white noise. And “Think About the One” really sticks out, like a leftover track from an entirely different album that was shoehorned in here for mysterious reasons. But “You’ve Got to Have Freedom”, one of the tracks with vocals (and featuring Eddie Henderson), is a fantastic gospel-jazz rave-up close in spirit to Sanders’ mid ’70s work (and pointing directly to the music of Kamasi Washington), and his overblowing is so fierce at times, it feels like the horn will split in half. Journey To The One is a wide-ranging album that fits a lot of ideas under a big umbrella; it’s a major statement, and if it’s not 100% top-tier Sanders, it’s not far off. If you listen to just one of these albums, make it this one.

The following year, he released Rejoice, another double LP on which the personnel varied from track to track. About half the album features vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, and two legendary drummers, Elvin Jones and Billy Higgins, both show up. Much of the second half consists of tunes written by or identified with John Coltrane, including “Moment’s Notice”, “Central Park West”, and Benny Carter’s “When Lights are Low”, which he recorded with Miles Davis in the 1950s. (Danny Moore is on trumpet here, and Steve Turre on trombone; the rhythm section is Hutcherson, pianist John Hicks, bassist Art Davis, and Higgins.) The version of “Central Park West” also includes a five-member vocal ensemble, and has a graceful beauty. “Moment’s Notice”, on the other hand, has lyrics sung by George V. Johnson, Jr., and they’re terrible. Like Journey To The One, Rejoice is a mixed bag — its peaks aren’t as high, though, and its valleys dip pretty low. The one consistent factor is Sanders’ playing, which is superb and emotive whether he’s in a traditional mode or blowing freely.

Sanders’ next two releases were both live recordings. The first, simply titled Live, was taped at a series of 1981 shows at L.A.’s Maiden Voyage and released the following year. The second, Heart Is A Melody, documents a single 1982 gig at San Francisco’s Keystone Korner, and has an overdubbed vocal ensemble added to one track.

Live starts out with a 14-minute version of “You’ve Got to Have Freedom”, from Journey To The One. John Hicks is on piano, Walter Booker on bass, and Idris Muhammad on drums. The piece is an absolute burner, with Sanders playing the opening fanfare-like melody as a hoarse shriek (matching the gruff voice with which he delivers the titular lyric later on) before Hicks takes a powerhouse solo. Muhammad also dives in, absolutely demolishing the kit. Sanders’ final solo rises from fleet hard bop to rough screams before it all comes to an end. Up next is the tender ballad “It’s Easy to Remember”, with Hicks now on electric piano. The album also includes a version of “Pharomba”, from his 1977 Arista album Love Will Find A Way, and a nearly 22-minute version of “Doktor Pitt”, originally a CD-only bonus track. The only new piece is the self-explanatory “Blues for Santa Cruz”, a simple eight-minute jam that nevertheless features excellent solos from both Sanders and Hicks. But “Pharomba”, a Latin piece that reminds me of Duke Ellington’s “Caravan”, is a real highlight.

On Heart Is A Melody, Sanders is backed by pianist William Henderson and bassist John Heard, with Muhammad still on drums. The set opens with a 22-minute version of John Coltrane’s “Olé”, and three other pieces have a Coltrane connection: the older man recorded Tadd Dameron’s “On a Misty Night” and the 1930s pop tune “Rise ’N’ Shine”, and he of course wrote “Naima”. But Sanders puts his own spin on all of these tunes, and also includes two of his own compositions. “Heart is a Melody of Time (Hiroko’s Song)” is a simple, trancelike vamp very much in the spirit of his best-known piece, “The Creator Has a Master Plan”, and the overdubbed choir — eight singers in all, including Andy Bey — intones the title phrase, and repeats a solfége syllable over and over as Sanders solos. It works well enough that it makes me wonder at what point in the process of making the album the idea came up; it’s also notable that the track fades out, unusual for a live recording. The other original is a version of “Highlife”, here retitled “Goin’ to Africa” and featuring wild singing from Sanders and backing vocals from the band. Heart Is A Melody is a somewhat disjointed album. Sanders has clearly moved beyond the one-world spiritual jazz of his 1960s and 1970s material, but he’s done it at least in part by going backward to the 1950s. Fortunately, his mastery of the horn allows him to do pretty much anything he wants, and he’s playing at a very high level throughout.

Sanders’ last two albums for Theresa were a stylistic departure from what he’d done before. Shukuru, released in 1985, is billed on the cover as a reunion with vocalist Leon Thomas, who appeared on many of the saxophonist’s Impulse! albums. He’s only on two tracks, though — “Mas in Brooklyn” (which is another reworking of “Highlife”, this time transforming it into a kind of Caribbean parade song, with recordings of laughing children in the background) and “Sun Song”. Sanders himself sings on the title track, and there are wordless, somewhat alien-sounding synthesized choral vocals on versions of the standards “Body and Soul” and “Too Young to Go Steady”. William Henderson plays both piano and synths throughout the album, Ray Drummond is on bass, and Idris Muhammad is on drums (on “Shukuru” he sounds like he’s playing tympani). In some ways, this album and its successor remind me of what alto saxophonist Arthur Blythe was doing at the same time on Put Sunshine In It and Da-Da. And like those albums, Shukuru occasionally takes Sanders too far away from what he’s best known for, and best at. But it has its moments; the title track is low-key blissful, and the standards with the synth choir are just weird enough to be interesting.

A Prayer Before Dawn, on the other hand, is a step too far. As always with this era of Sanders’ work, it includes several tunes associated with John Coltrane: his compositions “After the Rain” and “Living Space”, and the standard “In Your Own Sweet Way”, which he recorded with the Miles Davis Quintet in 1956. But it also includes a version of the pop hit “The Greatest Love of All” that’s more than eight minutes long. (There’s a real howler in the booklet about this, too. Mark Stryker, a generally great writer, cites guitarist George Benson’s 1977 recording, which to be fair “reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot Soul chart.” Yeah, but in 1985, Whitney Houston had a #1 pop hit with it. Which version do we think Pharoah Sanders was thinking about in 1987?) That aside, the liner notes to this box are impeccably researched and deeply informative and insightful.

Most of the album consists of duets between Sanders and Henderson, who’s playing a variety of synths. But on “Midnight at Yoshi’s”, named for a well-known jazz club in Oakland, Alvin Queen plays drums and Lynn Taussig plays sarod and chandrasarang (two stringed instruments from the Indian classical tradition). Someone, possibly Sanders himself, is playing tabla, and some synthesized string patches are added here and there. The album ends with a version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”, here retitled “The Christmas Song”. If you need to fill seven minutes on a Christmas mix CD, there you go.

Sanders continued recording in the late ’80s and early ’90s, and made interesting guest appearances on albums by Randy Weston and Bheki Mseleku, but he didn’t seem to have much of an idea for several years beyond “let’s record songs by or identified with John Coltrane.” It wasn’t until he hooked up with Bill Laswell that he started doing interesting work again as a leader. But he continued to bring it live until virtually the end of his life. Anyway, this box set is a mixed bag. Four of the six albums, and the tracks from Ed Kelly’s and Idris Muhammad’s albums, are well worth hearing, the sound of a pioneer of free/out saxophone moving closer to the mainstream, albeit entirely on his own terms. The last two are somewhat misguided attempts to embrace synthesizers and New Age atmospheres, but there are still flashes of beauty to be heard.

Pharoah Sanders was an incredible musician. There will never be another like him. His tone was huge, seeming to crackle with excess energy; his phrases had built-in reverberation that sits in your chest cavity, massaging your heart. His vision of jazz, which borrowed sounds from Africa and India but only as parts of a holistic approach that was entirely his own, expanded the boundaries of what was possible. But he wasn’t just a brilliant leader, he was also a generous guest, always looking to serve the music and thus willing to be a fellow traveler on someone else’s journey, while still speaking in his own voice when called upon. He had a long and productive artistic life, and he leaves behind one of the deepest and most rewarding catalogs in jazz history. If you’ve never explored his music, I envy you — there’s a lot of it, and the best of it, some of which is contained in this box, will change you forever.

— Phil Freeman