Album review: Floating Points (Sam Shepherd), Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orcestra - Promises

Floating Points (keyboards, electronics); Pharoah Sanders (sax) + The London Symphony Orchestra

Before this album came out I hadn’t had cause to wonder if I was unique in all the world by being a fan of both Floating Points and Pharoah Sanders. FP’s 2015 album, Elaenia, was a gem and a thing of beauty. Since that release it turns out that Sam Shepherd, who is Floating Points, had a masterplan to record with Pharoah Sanders and here is the fruition of that ambition.

Promises is a work consisting of nine movements built around a single repeated motif that dominates or retreats as the piece progresses; similarly, at different moments, times, the tenor or the electronics or the strings play the leading parts, or they merge to bring the whole right to the front of the stage.

Promises has been described as an ambient, jazz, electronica, classical crossover, a sort of 21^st Century third-stream, what Gill Scott-Heron would have called ‘miscellaneous’. It is more than ambient though; its sparsity, at times, demands attention and it bears repeated listening, offering more on each occasion; whatever you give it, it gives back. I suspect it might explode into the mainstream and become one of those essential middle-class dinner party albums, like Gorecki’s Third, Tubular Bells or Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble’s Officium. Maybe it will sell millions and Pharoah Sanders will win the International Breakthrough Artist award at next year’s Brits.

The title, Promises, seems less apt than its cousin, Hope; in part 6, after a crescendo of strings falls away, the motif is repeated in a way suggestive of hope after a crisis. Other sounds seem to come from nature, such as the whale-like call of the cellos in part 7 that combine with pulsing electronics and wailing sax. Belief in Promises and hope lasts until the last part, an epilogue for strings, when (spoiler alert) darker chords suggests that hopes fade and promises are broken. Sanders’ tenor is a bold part of the whole, not an afterthought. There are passages of bold lead playing, the sax to the fore or combining with the other actors, or short sputtering phrases and, at one point, muttered wordless vocals from the man himself.

Impossible to categorise, not as good as The Creator Has a Masterplan (but few things are), an excursion that doesn’t even acknowledge boundaries.

Dave Sayer

Available on Luaka Bop on CD/Digital/Vinyl from all the usual outlets inc. Bandcamp.