PHAROAH SANDERS — Thembi (review)

PHAROAH SANDERS — Thembi album cover Album · 1971 · Avant-Garde Jazz Buy this album from MMA partners
3.5/5 ·
Sean Trane
Recorded around the end of 1970, Thembi (a diminutive of an African Xhosa) is an amazing Pharaoh album in his classic era with a much-better-known line-up, comprising of regulars like Haynes, McBee, Liston-Smith and Jordan. A bit surprisingly, it’s not the usual Thiele-Van Gelder team on production, Szymczyk (bless you ;o))), but it doesn’t change the sound quality.

Opening on the slow but superb Atral Travelling (also the name of Liston-Smith’s first solo awesome album) the Thembi album is off to spiritual start, but just after its gentle conclusion; you’re attacked by the dissonant Red part of Red Black & Green, where Pharoah unleashes his anger through his sax, but the rest of the track is much gentler and in the Trane realm, despite the argumentative sax’s presence. The title track is a lovely mid-tempo piece where Sanders draws sax rings and curves around his band’s gentle rhythms.

Past the no-less enchanting Love Trane-inspired track, the flipside is definitely a bit more slanted on the ethnic side, and features a slightly different line-up, notably on percussions. The apex of the album is reached with the 9-mins+ Morning Prayer, where (after a contrabass and gentle sax solos) the superb congas and African percussions are underlining SLS’s awesome spine-chilling piano and Sanders’ wild flute and steaming sax and veers into a percussion passage, which evolves into the closing transient Bailophone Dance. Wild stuff, man!!

Definitely one of my fave Sanders albums, much more so than the coming JoT and Karma albums, Thembi is indeed spiritual, but isn’t encumbered by fallacious religious chants and prayers, and that’s indeed a huge plus. Actually if you’re a bit afraid of Sanders’ saxophone antics, but still want a gateway to his musical world, Thembi might just be the album to start with.

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