Our JazzTimes Sweeps Week concludes on the last Thursday of the month, with one historical release/reissue pick from each of our reviewers.
Pharoah Sanders, Love Is Here: The Complete Paris 1975 ORTF Recordings (Transcendence Sounds/Elemental Music)
This double-disc trifold package contains surreal, expansive performances from a Pharoah Sanders–led quartet with Danny Mixon on piano (and pipe organ on the first track), Calvin Hill on bass and Greg Bandy, who died in June of this year, on drums. The playing is superb, especially Mixon’s, which is energized, incredibly versatile and deeply in the tradition.
Love Is Here comes around the same time as a Mosaic Records box (with Mark Stryker’s notes) collecting Sanders’s ’80s recordings for the Theresa label. In the wake of the influential tenorist’s death in 2022, there’s consistently more to remember him by.
The booklet for Love Is Here, with Kevin Whitehead’s essay and much else, lays out the context: This was the close of Sanders’s association with Impulse! Records and the start of a new chapter. “His performance in Paris reflects a shift from the fiery energy of his early free jazz years to a more spiritual, cosmic voice,” states a promo blurb, although to my mind, Impulse! titles such as Thembi, Black Unity and Village of the Pharoahs were plenty spiritual and cosmic.
Granted, “cosmic” probably refers to things like the nine-minute Danny Mixon improvisation on pipe organ that leads off this set, or the return of the organ against fiery tenor sax pronouncements halfway through “The Creator Has a Master Plan,” or Sanders’s beyond-gruff blues shout vocal on “Pharoah’s Blues,” or his oddly high-pitched vocal improvisation on “Ferrell’s Tune” (Sanders’s given name). Even for free jazz, these moments are uniquely out there, to quote the Eric Dolphy album title. — David R. Adler
John Coltrane, A Love Supreme: Mono Edition (Impulse!)
In hot anticipation of the 2026 John Coltrane Centennial, the saxophonist’s first devotional album, along with his experimental live-recorded Village Vanguard residency, get released this autumn in versions with notable differences. And isn’t that truly the reason that God created reissues and box sets in the first place? Give me that Amen.
Let’s talk about the “mono” process for a second: In the last five years, the earliest full-album Beatles and Rolling Stones recordings have been given the monaural sound treatment, with differing results. Monophonic sound in the 2020s flattened some of the tunefulness of Lennon and McCartney’s chirping “yeah-yeah-yeahs” yet gave Jagger and Richards’ cocky vintage blues some sorely needed punch that stereo mixes often dissipated.
Songcraft versus swagger? Maybe. But Coltrane’s initial, expansive leap into the epistemological and the metaphysical? How would such mountainous spirituality and quietly epic invention play funnelled into mono, as it was previously in 1973? Boldly, if you must know. Even Coltrane’s roundly repetitious voicing of its title sounds more hymnal here in mono than it does in stereo — more private and somnolently soul-filled.
Now, if you want to figure out how Coltrane and the quartet could hone A Love Supreme’s eloquent immensity into roughly 33 minutes on one night’s recording in December 1964, perhaps The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings, newly reissued for the first time in its full, four-hour-plus performance iteration across seven vinyl records, can better explain things, or at least bat-signal toward the divine. — A.D. Amorosi
The People’s People, The People’s People Present The Spirit Of David (Frederiksberg)
The ’70s were a strange time for the jazz record business, independent stalwarts folding or on hiatus and majors mostly oblivious to anything not soul-jazz or funk/fusion. As such, the decade was replete with private press LPs by obscure bands who likely never saved any copies in anticipation of bloodthirsty eBay auctions.
The bookend to that phenomenon is that new millennium private-press-type labels are the ones now reissuing said albums. One of those is Brooklyn’s Frederiksberg, whose catalogue ranges from Scandinavian weirdos to American soul/spirit jazz. Firmly in the latter category is the sole release by Oakland-based saxophonist Jeff Jones’s group The People’s People, The People’s People Present The Spirit Of David (1976).
According to the notes, Jones demanded from his musicians a three-year commitment, to the point where they could take no outside gigs even as he paid them nothing. Combine this exaggerated Sun Ra–esque approach with Impulse!-era Pharoah Sanders, Stan Getz in his Captain Marvel phase, and the elongated space jams of neighbors The Grateful Dead, and the heady mix becomes representative of the era.
For a sextet, The People’s People sounds larger, and apart from Leonard Franklin’s inconsistency as a guitarist — comping fine, soloing not so much — the band is on par with similar groups found in various American urban centers. The two shorter tunes are pretty and prefatory, bookending the two 14-minute-plus middle jams, of which “Fritz” is the highlight. — Andrey Henkin ◊