The saxophonist was among an assembly of American jazz musicians who reached across continents to find meaning in sound
he 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”,. 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.
The association between Black rage and a saxophone blasting free has always been too simple to make. By 1969, the Black arts movement poet Sonia Sanchez was mocking white anxieties over Black anger through poetry inspired by. In ways that prefigure some of Dave Chapelle’s most cutting humor, she writes in a poem titled on seeing pharoah sanders blowing: “i’m coming / for u / now with / my / blood / filled / sax. / calling / all / bloods. / beep. / beep. / mary / had / a / little / lamb.
One concert flyer from 1963 shows an event featuring Weston, the percussionist Majid Shabazz, the pianist Sadik Hakim, and “many others projecting new innovations in music”, at Club Sea Breeze in Harlem. The night was themed “African Bag”. Admission was $1.50, and the poster promised “free Egyptian perfume for the ladies”.Weston eventually relocated to Morocco for about five years and traveled throughout the African continent before returning to the USA in 1972.
Scholars have written on the important influence of Five Percenters on early hip-hop. But there are also other, more mainline Muslim influences on the American scene. Five Percenter doctrine was foundational in hip-hop, but it operated as an esoteric language among the educated and enlightened. The way the language and numerology operated was to signify kinship and belonging, which was particularly important in the early hip-hop years.
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