Pharaoh Sanders at Atlanta Jazz Festival, May 24, 2015

We got to Piedmont Park around 8:30 pm, having taken a well-timed MARTA rode from Lindbergh Station to Midtown, and the short walk from there to the park.  It was just getting dark, but there was a sizable crowd already present from the day-long (weekend-long, really) Atlanta Jazz Festival.   

Pharaoh took the stage a few minutes after 9:00, played about 8 bars of fiery saxophone, and then walked off the stage letting the band carry the piece while he talked to a stagehand.  He seemed concerned about something - I think the mic in his sax wasn't working, and he had to use the external mic instead, which may have limited some of the effects he had wanted to create.

In any event, he and the band played about 45 minutes of modern, post-bop jazz, with extended solos by his pianist, bassist and drummer, and relatively little Pharaoh.  Pleasing enough, but not really what one goes to a Pharaoh Sanders set to hear.

That changed at around the 45-minute mark, when he played a solo, soulful number, I believe a John Coltrane cover (Alabama?), and then went into his own The Creator Has A Master Plan, with Pharaoh singing the lyrics covered by the inimitable Leon Thomas on the recorded version.

The set was more upbeat and more typical of Pharaoh after that, and he finally got the audience up out of their lawn chairs, standing, dancing, and clapping along to the music.   Some call-and-response singing followed that, some of Pharaoh's sax feedback tricks, and a long farewell to end the set.

It turned out to finally be a good set, but without the fire of Pharaoh in his prime.

Still and all, even on an off night, a set by Pharaoh is better than a lot of other things, and the evening could not have been more beautiful.

Most of my pictures sucked, but I did find this one good image from last night on line. 

Ptah, the el Daoud

Pharoah

You'll either get this or you won't, you'll either love it (or already love it) or hate it, but in either case, words would be unnecessary.  From 1966.

Dave Brubeck

Innovative jazzman Dave Brubeck passed today at the age of 91, just one day short of what would have been his 92nd birthday.

During a period of the 1970s, between, say, the demise of "progressive rock" and the advent of punk, when  disco, mellow California pop, and Stevie Nicks ruled the airwaves, I very nearly stopped listening to rock music altogether and retreated into a world of jazz.  I was amazed at the richness and variety of this American art form that was largely ignored by the American public.  Coltrane, Miles, Mingus, and Monk became my new John, George, Paul, and Ringo, and as I went further down the rabbit hole of the avant garde, Shepp, Pharoah, Braxton, and Sun Ra became my new Coltrane, Miles, Mingus, and Monk. Speaking of Monk, though, there's a link to a great, nearly half-hour performance by Monk in all of his eccentric genius at the end of the Brubeck clip above.

Somewhere in the background of all this great music, though, there was always the Dave Brubeck Quartet.  They weren't my favorites, and I don't think I ever owned an album of theirs, although I had managed to accumulate a fairly prodigious collection of vinyl.  They were cool and cerebral, and my interests in jazz leaned more toward the visceral and the emotive.  No disrespect toward the departed today or the living back then, but it simply wasn't my thing.

I always did have an appreciation, though, for the playing of Brubeck's alto saxophonist, Paul Desmond.  In 1977, at the height of my jazz enthusiasm, Desmond died of lung cancer, the result of chronic chain smoking.  He was 52 when he passed, and I remember thinking that he was an old man then, even though I'm older than that now.

In any event, at some point around the rise of late 70s punk and the emergence of New Wave, rock music got interesting again.  At the same time, the number of musicians playing music that could legitimately be called jazz had already started to diminish due to sickness, old age, and death, as well as to the economics of the music industry.  I still appreciate jazz and my musical tastes today are informed and influenced by the freedom and creativity I encountered in jazz, but rather than listen and re-listen to the same old recordings over and over, I continue to explore the new and the different, just like Brubeck had during his lifetime.