Canard
Senior Member
- Joined
- Sep 30, 2020
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I was a young person in a small rural town, a pothole at the end of the road to nowhere. There were few record stores, and all were serviced by rack jobbers. I had a great curiosity about music, and I had a modest amount of money burning a hole in my pockets. I walked into to one of the few shops, and there was Pharoah Sanders’ Jewels of Thought album. It was most unusual. I bought it and took it home.
Side one was strange but somewhat accessible.
Side two sounded as if Ken Kesey and his merry friends had doctored the water cooler at a psychiatric hospital's New Years party, handed out little paper party favour horns and kazoos, and then led an improv music therapy workshop.
I put the record away in horror. Three years or so later, I took it out again, played it, and was perplexed by the fact that it made sense. In those three years, I had listened to Blood Sweat and Tears, Cannonball Adderley, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Archie Shepp and more.
I went on to buy quite a number of Sander’s other albums.
It is my understanding that he was initially an intuitive, natural player, someone with a great ear. He confessed later in life that he did not have a good technical understanding of what he was doing at first. From a solely academic point of view, he was faking it. He later studied.
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