Allah supreme: how Pharoah Sanders found freedom and rebellion in Islam

The legendary jazz musician Pharoah Sanders left us in 2022, moving me to write this piece on the influence of Islam on jazz and hip hop.

The day the music died was 24 September 2022. On that Saturday, the legendary tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, a man who blew his horn “as if he was a dragon breathing fire”, passed on, at age 81. With his death came the end of a majestic era, a time of saxophone spirituality and musical mysticism that will probably never be surpassed or even replicated. Sanders, like so many of his generation, channeled spirit into song, drawing inspiration from a panoply of sacred sources.

For a while, younger hip-hop generations also found words and meaning in a similar kind of search, and the music –along with the quest – continued.

But jazz has changed and hip-hop has changed.

The assembly of American jazz musicians from the mid-20th century who spent their careers seeking spiritual transcendence reads like a pantheon of American genius: John Coltrane, Randy Weston, Yusef Lateef, Ahmad Jamal, Alice Coltrane, Sahib Shahab, Abbey Lincoln, Art Blakey, Sun Ra. These were players willing to take giant steps across scales and continents to find meaning in the sounds of others. They turned that sound into meaning for themselves, and they did it for decades. Central to this sometimes screeching, frequently psychedelic, and always expansive quest was the sonic travel this music took, an inspirational voyage into the mighty souls of African and Asian folks, regularly and intricately braided with, among other influences, the soundscape of Islam.

Never mind that only some of these artists adopted the faith itself. It was their notes and their tones that counted. Plaintive, modal, quarter-toned and chromatic, these aural landscapes of east and west and everything in between stretched the imaginations of both players and audiences. Inside the music, new alliances were forged between people and with all that was holy…

Read the rest here.