Floating Points & Pharoah Sanders (with The London Symphony Orchestra)
Promises
Luaka Bop
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Pharoah Sanders, the octogenarian jazz legend, has divided listeners with regularity throughout his career. For some, the stretches he made—alongside others like Albert Ayler and John Coltrane—at various points in his career were simply too much to bear. His free jazz, for all its boundary breaking, blew too dissonantly for many folks. But at the heart of it all was an unwavering spirituality—a divinity explored through the power of his tenor sax.
Floating Points (a.k.a. the Manchester-bred soundsmith Sam Shepherd) also has a great many strings to his bow: an innovative electronic musician, a talented producer, a festival floor-filling DJ, not to mention a PhD in Neuroscience—not forgetting co-founder of Eglo Records.
On paper, the two may not seem ideal bedfellows. But together with the London Symphony Orchestra, they have created an album of incredible emotional charge and incandescent, ruminative beauty that takes all of their respective strong suits and somehow manages to meld them together to create something greater than the sum of its incredible parts.
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t describe circumstances of my listening but here, in the case of Promises, it seems incredibly pertinent to how I received it and the overwhelming impact it had on me. With rare time away from my wife and daughter, I decided to get out for a walk in the local countryside. After a recommendation from a friend, I grabbed my best headphones—the noise cancelling ones—and set off to sample Promises.
I waited until I reached a quiet, more deserted stretch of the mud-ridden pathway before pressing play and I was rewarded for my patience. The solitude, the beauty of the bucolic surroundings and the chance to listen uninterrupted all paid dividends. In fact, so much so that I was hesitant to listen again in more “normal” circumstances lest they have made my early judgments about the album overinflated.
When I pressed play for the second time, a palpable wave of relief flooded me. While those conditions had certainly helped, the impact of the music was the same the second time around —namely that it moved me as much as any piece of music ever has, maybe more. Ostensibly a single piece of music lasting 46 minutes, it is split into nine “movements” that differ subtly, but decisively in character.
The building blocks of the piece are (on the surface at least!) simple—a shimmering set of keys, the lamentations and boldness of Sanders’ saxophone and intermittent bursts of orchestral beauty. The themes that the keys play with sound like a line that could have come from Miles Davis’ jazz-fusion period and Sanders eschews his more atonal faculties to bring such pathos and contemplation so as to stir emotions easily and freely.
Although each movement has its own peaks and flow, in general terms, the piece builds with a gradual ascent towards the highly emotional denouement in “Movement 6.” Along the way though, the pace is steady, meaning there are spaces left for the listener to reflect and interpret as he/she goes. Those spaces allow for greater immersion in and engagement with the beauty of the composition.
The slow build towards “Movement 6” increases the tension and emotion almost exponentially before the concentration of strings reaches feverish heights and the listener is left with an enormous “come down” to negotiate. This is reflected in the subdued “Movement 7,” before it explodes once again with Sanders’ frenetic saxophone energy—an astral messenger to guide mere mortals.
Though I’ve heard outstanding records in the last few years and awarded 5 stars for some, nothing has come close to the visceral emotion I felt upon first hearing this masterful concoction. It’s pacing and spacing are incredible, with every single note placed to perfection to elicit depth of emotion, but with enough emptiness to allow thought and interaction with its beauty. It is jaw-droppingly astonishing in its scope and ability to wring emotion from the listener, and it merits every single bit of your time and attention.
Listen in solitude if you can and its beauty will illuminate your life in ways that didn’t seem possible.
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