PHAROAH SANDERS — Karma (review)

PHAROAH SANDERS — Karma album cover Album · 1969 · Avant-Garde Jazz Buy this album from MMA partners
5/5 ·
Rexorcist
I've been on a spiritual kick for a few days now, as I'm trying to force onto myself a top 50 spiritual jazz albums list, and then move onto free jazz and diversify a top 100 avant-garde. As you can see, I'm proudly autistic. I just love making lists! But these lists have to be PERFECT. So I demand perfection. And lemme tell you, spiritual jazz is a challenge. While I absolutely adore atmosphere, I don't like it when songs are too long. I even have trouble with Frankie M. So I need something that switches and diversifies every few minutes, even from a spiritual jazz album. Thankfully, Pharoah Sanders often builds his albums on this concept, and the best example is Karma.

I recently compared Karma to his other big hit album led by Alice Coltrane: Journey in Satchidananda. Both are incredible, but I wanted to know which album I prefered since I hadn't heard either in a while. Now I know it's Karma. See, the reason Karma is the best example of Pharoah's love of switching things up (as shoved in our faces for proof on Thembi), Karma puts 80% of its runtime on 1 track. This track is the very essence of Pharoah Sanders' style. It has sparse but scattered vocal chanting of a very ritualistic and calming style accompanying an up-and-down rollercoaster that brings us into the spiritual world of heaven, drags us down to the free jazz chaos of our own world, and back up and back down and back up, ending with a culmination of both complexity and atmosphere for its second track., diversifying itself from the 32-minute epic. This journey is much great than Alice Coltrane's, who keeps us in the mysticism of Earth while Pharoah goes astral.

I should also mention that this is one of the very first avant-garde jazz albums I'd recommend to anyone to get them invested in jazz, telling them to just let the music take them away into another world and not worry about a beginning and an end. This album, despite its obvious avant-garde behavior, is actually pretty accessible in comparison to a lot of avant-garde jazz out there. This, Journey in Satchidananda and Tauhid are the three starting points I'd recommend for a beginner. Karma is currently in my top 20 albums of all-time, if not solely due to the fact that Pharoah mastered his style so early in his solo adventures.
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