Search - Pharoah Sanders :: The Creator Has a Master Plan

Wonderful Cd but what's with the price?

R. J. Marsella | California | 05/24/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I recently purchaed this at Tower Records in NYC and paid less than half of the price listed here ! It is a wonderful CD and Sanders playing is soulful and heartfelt throughout. However I would shop around before dropping 44 bucks for this."

It's good, but it's missing something.

Michael Stack | North Chelmsford, MA USA | 08/08/2005

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Pharoah Sanders' catalog has been an odd source of brilliance and frustration for fans of his early work, and perhaps this release, "The Creator Has a Masterplan", best illustrates the rationale for that. Sanders, best known for his fiery work with John Coltrane's last bands and his free jazz workouts in the late '60s and early '70s (most notably the title track to this release) cooled off significantly as the '70s wore on. His style became more conventional, his choice of material seemed to drift largely into pieces Coltrane had abandoned before Sanders joined. And while he maintains his shockingly powerful and expressive tone, it seems the old fire only comes out infrequently.



"The Creator Has a Masterplan" is largely a reflection of the sort of sets that Sanders has been doing live-- a mixture of ballads, blues, and spiritual pieces, be they originals, standards, or drawn from the Coltrane catalog. Sanders is heard only on tenor sax on this record, supported by William Henderson (piano), Ira Coleman (bass) and Joe Farnsworth (drums).



The best material are largely the ones where Sanders catches fire-- either through the sort of screaming pyrotechnics he cut his teeth with, or through his fantastic tone-- wide, powerful, forceful, and imbued with more emotion in one note than many musicians can get out in a lifetime. case in point: pop cover "The Greatest Love of All"-- this piece tends to catch a lot of flack, being a Whitney Houston piece (mind you, no one complains when a '30s pop song is covered....) and having very little in the way of improv. But Sanders plays beautifully, capturing a real spiritual resonance that really communicates the meaning of the piece.



Sanders also digs way deep on "I Want To Talk About You", his original "Tokyo Blues" (although he sounds primed to explode and his band mangles it by not pushing him further along) and the legendary title cut. Sanders seems to draw inspiration from the piece's power, I've seen it live a couple times and on now on this record, and all those times, it's been nothing short of breathtaking.



Still, for all the good on here, it's just missing something. It could be that his take on Hoarace Silver's "Moon Rays" seems uninspired, it could be that the closing ballad pair feel like a letdown after "The Creator Has a Masterplan" and Coltrane's "Welcome", or it could just be that you wish Sanders would explode and cut loose and remind us why what he used to play was called "fire music". It's a good record, and quite frankly, it finds its way into my rotation a lot more than many of his albums I consider better records, but it's just missing something."