Search - Pharoah Sanders :: Welcome to Love

A Beautiful Set

Stephen | Virginia Beach, VA USA | 11/02/2000

(5 out of 5 stars)

"While cynics will cry that Pharoah is cashing in on his Coltrane connection, just listen and you will hear what a fantastically sensitive player Sanders is. Those who have listened to Sanders throughout the years already know this. I like this CD for the same reasons Ballads is one of my favorite Trane CDs - Its is just so nice to listen to."

Music of Incredible Beauty and Sensitivity

John F. Temmerman | Skokie, Il United States | 01/01/2003

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This CD has many similarities with the John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman CD and titled it Music of Incredible Beauty and Sensitivity. Each CD shares a moving version of the jazz ballad, My One and Only Love. There are more parallels. Coltrane himself recorded several of these tunes. Coltrane and Sanders collaborated in furious free-jazz explorations at the end of Trane's life. Sanders became famous within the jazz community for those recordings. However, he has explored music and the saxophone from then until now. This CD, recorded in 1990, issued in 1996, explores the gentler side of Pharoah Sanders, a jazz giant, communicating subtly and serenely. Here, the musicians are a quartet. Sanders is on tenor and soprano sax, William Henderson on piano, Stafford James on bass and Eccleston W. Wainright, Jr. on drums. The included songs are standards and ballads, songs of love, tempos of reflection and deliberation, compositions clearly within the mainstream jazz tradition. Sanders' performances are stunning. On tenor, his tone is lyrical and sure in his upper register, big, yet mellow in his lower one. His incredible technique is displayed not in furious runs but in exquisite note choices, the mark of the outstanding communicator as demonstrated in the art of the ballad. Sanders plays six of the eight cuts on tenor. On soprano, IMHO the most difficult of the saxophones to play with excellent tone and intonation, Sanders communicates with a warmth and tonal center that is unusual among present players and compares favorably to many soprano sax greats. Mr. Sanders lays claim to these tunes as his own - through subtle lines constructed inside the changes but unique in their beauty, romance and evocativeness. It's incredible to realize that a free-jazz explorer of fire and fury could choose to come around full circle and be equally inventive in a setting of deliberation and subtlety. Even the few free jazz effects, subtle warbling to end a couple of the cuts, are deployed gracefully. The opening cut, My One And Only Love is exceptionally beautiful in it's restatement of the melody and introspective solo and is my favorite, although the entire CD is uniformly great."

Gentle side of Pharoah

R. Bader | San Francisco | 11/09/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This CD could have been titled "the gentle side of Pharoah Sanders". Here is a beautiful collection of ballads, most of which were favorites of John Coltrane. If you like Pharoah's outside playing this might not be the best choice; there's none of that here. I like all of it, in and out, and he gets sounds out of his tenor that no else can, but on this date he treats the songs with reverent lyricism on both tenor and soprano. Great trio support also."