Pharoah still reigns supreme

Serene in shades and a snappy green velvet smoking-jacket, 61-year-old Farrell Sanders (his Christian name felicitously misheard and mispelt by an early telephone booker) looked fit and sounded very good last night.

Opening with a Spiritual-like piece from the Love Supreme days, he chose an ideal moment to enter over Bill Henderson's sombre piano chords, Jeff Littleton's sturdy bass octaves and John Betsch's distant-thundery mallet rolls.

The rubato theme pulsated with powerful unstated rhythms as the great man generated his huge, keening tenor-sax tone through a standard house mic enhanced only by a touch of reverb. His stately phrases oozed gravitas, the harmonic-overtones splitting into the hoarse cries Coltrane envied so much that he invited Sanders into his group.

My Favourite Things, taken at a brisk 6/8 tempo, found Sanders soloing over a single chord for 20 fascinating minutes, delving inside and "outside" the harmony and varying his phrasing from staccato soundbites into smooth, graceful lines and husky, impassioned shrieks. Tremendous.

Betsch, a fine drummer who holds the sticks correctly, wrists loose, left hand in penholder grip, scored well here with a bass-drum and hi-hat pattern lifted from a classic Max Roach recording, Speak, Brother, Speak. But Sanders upstaged it with a complex "percussion" coda of his own, tapping the saxophone pads as if to illustrate LeRoi Jones's famous dictum that in black hands every instrument is a drum.

Over and Over Again, a gem from Coltrane's Ballads album, was just beautiful. No question, Sanders is a phenomenon. Through him Trane lives on, both in sound and in spirit.

Pharoah Sanders, Led Bib