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 21st
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.
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