US jazz saxophonist and composer Pharoah Sanders has died: His Luaka Bop record company announced that he died peacefully on Saturday with his family and friends at the age of 81 in Los Angeles. The cause of death was not disclosed. Sanders was born on October 13, 1940 in Little Rock, Arkansas, USA, and began his career in Oakland, California.
He came to prominence in the 1960s when he played with John Coltrane in New York, among others. After his death, he continued to work with his widow Alice Coltrane and then also appeared as a solo artist. Sanders has released dozens of albums over the next few decades, his most recent being titled Promises—a collaboration with the London Symphony Orchestra and DJ Floating Points—last year.
His passion was free jazz, a highlight being his work ‘Karma’, published in 1969, with his perhaps best known ‘The creator has a master plan’. His spiritual music often referred to African and Indian musical traditions. In 2016, he was named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States, the highest US honor for a jazz musician. “I’m always trying to somehow play something that might sound bad,” he told The New Yorker in 2020.
