On 24 September 2022, Sam Shepherd arrived at a hospital in Los Angeles a few moments after the saxophonist Pharoah Sanders died, surrounded by members of his family. Shepherd had left a DJ gig in New York halfway through when he heard that the titan of spiritual jazz had suffered a stroke. When he finally reached Sanders’ bedside after a flight to the west coast, he felt comforted. “I was pleased that we could see him with his spirit leaving him slowly, because he just seemed so peaceful,” he says. “It felt like he was truly there with us, just in his usual meditative state. We were playing music in the room for hours, just listening to music that Pharoah liked.”
The previous year, Shepherd (under the name Floating Points) had released one of the decade’s most acclaimed albums, Promises, in collaboration with Sandersand the London Symphony Orchestra. The contemplative, 46-minute, nine-movement suite ended up being the spiritual jazz titan’s final recorded exhalation. Mostly instrumental, Promises ebbs and flows, propelled by Shepherd’s patient, luxurious arrangements. There are oceans of strings washing within waveforms and countermelodies whose ingredients include rickety upright piano, harpsichord, celeste and vintage synthesiser – and Sanders’ breathy, expansive tenor sax and brief, glorious vocalisations.
Promises won almost universal praise and a nomination for the Mercury prize, but neither Shepherd or Sanders did any interviews, preferring to let the record speak for itself. There was another reason, too, says Shepherd. “It was just bigger and better than I could handle. So when it came out, I was too scared to talk about it, I think. And I never think that about stuff I’m involved in. It’s never good enough. I’m always thinking: ‘What can I do to make it better?’”
Four years after Shepherd and Sanders convened at a converted two-storey house in LA to begin work on Promises, Shepherd has decided to talk about it for the first time, as he prepares a single live performance of the album at the Hollywood Bowl. “Hearing Pharoah merely breathe through his saxophone feels like a portal into his soul,” Shepherd says, calling the instrument “this weird black hole that you can teleport through, into the lungs of the player”.
Promises was the culmination of a remarkable career for Sanders. With a humming saxophone vibrato that seemed to originate in the Earth’s core, he got his start in the early 1960s as a member of Afrofuturist jazz visionary Sun Ra’s Arkestra before joining John Coltrane’s band in 1965. Sanders’ work with Coltrane and his widow Alice was dynamic and meditative, a reflection of a spirituality that fuelled his music. He would become best known for his string of late-1960s and 1970s solo jazz albums, including Karma, Thembi and Tauhid. His 1977 album Pharoah, one of the jewels in his discography, is being reissued as a box set and explores what the sleevenotes describe as “a sense of openness that would have been deemed indulgent during the bebop and free jazz eras”. In the past decade Sanders’ ideas have inspired new generations of musicians, particularly on London’s booming jazz scene.
Sanders and Shepherd met through a mutual friend in 2015. They sealed their friendship when Shepherd showed him around London a few years later. “Even quite late into life,” Shepherd says, “he was still talking about an okra curry we had: ‘Is that place still there?’”
By 2019, Shepherd was an established electronic producer, DJ and musician with a background in jazz, but he was still caught off-guard when Sanders suggested they collaborate. “He’s like: ‘So what do you want to do?’ I was like, well, I’ve never produced an album before.” He asked Sanders to offer ideas. “Oh, I don’t know,” Sanders replied. “What have you got?”
Sanders hadn’t always gelled with collaborators in the studio. The tense 1976 session for Pharoah ended with Sanders at loggerheads with label boss Bob Cummins, and so frustrated that he virtually disavowed the album. Rather than risk a rocky start, Shepherd began alone, “rushing around LA finding instruments and synthesisers, and I spent a couple of days writing”. He came upon the magical chords that power Promises late one night and repeated the phrase for so long that the session engineer started dozing off.
“I could hear it all in my head, and I got this overwhelming sense that something pretty cool is getting made right now,” Shepherd says, adding that he built the melodic theme with harpsichord, piano and celeste (the one in the studio had been used on the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds). Then slowing the recording down by 25% produced “this much sexier, richer sound. When I heard the playback, it was like fireworks going off in my head. I was like: ‘I know exactly what I’m going to do now.’”
Sanders returned to the studio and they began demoing Shepherd’s ideas, including those chords. Shepherd closely monitored the saxophonist’s reactions. Listening to possible starting points, “he’d shuffle around in his little frame and look a little disinterested. But with [these chords], he looked at the speakers, looked at me like – ‘uh huh’ – gave me this nod of approval, which I hadn’t had before.”
As Shepherd reflects on the experience, his voice springs to life, as if finally able to let out a profoundly gratifying experience that he has internalised for so long. He swoons over details like the distinctive character of the studio’s harpsichord and the tones generated by the Buchla synth; he frets over the sound of the saxophone on many classic jazz pieces – “I sometimes find it doesn’t sound as lifelike as it does in a live setting” – and recalls worrying about Sanders’ fragile physical state during the recording and the “pressure, that what we’re doing here has to be with intent”.
As a Sanders devotee, Shepherd confesses to being overwhelmed by the responsibility, thinking: “This could be his last record. So that last phrase he played, I was like: ‘This could be his last recorded phrase.’ All those things are going through my head. Maybe they shouldn’t have been, but I was there every day with him. I knew the reality of what was going on here. And it was beautiful, but also within me was a little sadness.”
Shepherd was keen to focus on what he called the recording’s “in-between sounds” such as “the creaking wooden switches of the Leslie [speaker] cabinet going on and the machinations of instruments. Hearing the thumb pad and hearing the breathing. All those sounds that are extraneous to the musical content are actually super important to being inside the world of this piece.” He says that Sanders’ spontaneous burst of vocalising during the fourth movementhas “something quite ornithological about it. It’s like birdsong.”
Shepherd pauses when mentioning Sanders’ voice on Promises. “I don’t know how we’re going to do that at the Hollywood Bowl, actually. I would really like to leave it out. I want it to be a reminder about the absence of Pharoah.”
The Bowl concert was originally envisioned with Sanders centre stage. The artist, who late in life used a wheelchair, was to perform his Promises parts, and tenor player Shabaka Hutchings of the Comet is Coming and Sons of Kemet would join him. “Pharoah was always asking after him,” Shepherd says. “Every time I visited him in LA he was always like, ‘How’s your friend Shabaka?’ and describing him as something like, ‘big and strong, like a lion’.”
Some months after Sanders’ death, the Hollywood Bowl and the Sanders/Shepherd team revisited the idea of the Promises concert. All agreed that it wouldn’t be a tribute event. Joining Floating Points and Hutchings will be Kieran Hebden (AKA Four Tet), Dan Snaith (AKA Caribou) and the Los Angeles Studio Orchestra, among others.
Though it will be a one-off performance, Sanders fans will have a chance to hear Harvest Time, the centrepiece of the Pharoah box set and a 5m-stream hit on YouTube, on stage this autumn and into 2024. The Harvest Time Project is billed as “an ever-evolving concert”, premiering on 12 November at the Le Guess Who? festival in Utrecht, and featuring the album’s original guitarist Tisziji Muñoz. It’s among the first events the Sanders estate has sanctioned since his death, one envisioned to keep the artist’s spirit lingering in the ether.
“I imagine that’s where he is,” Shepherd says, “floating around the cosmos, hearing music in all of the sounds that he hears. He’ll be sitting in the garden listening to the crickets and he’ll pull out music from that. He listens deep.”
• Promises is performed at Hollywood Bowl, 20 September. The box set of Pharoah is released 15 September by Luaka Bop. The world premiere of The Harvest Time Project: A Tribute to Pharoah Sanders is at Le Guess Who? festival, Utrecht, 12 November; it reaches the UK on 16 November at London’s Barbican, as part of London jazz festival
