The US jazz saxophonist and composer Pharoah Sanders is dead. His record company Luaka Bop 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 started his career in Oakland, California.
He became known 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 soloist. Sanders released dozens of albums in the decades that followed, his most recent being entitled Promises – a collaboration with the London Symphony Orchestra and DJ Floating Points – last year.
His passion was free jazz, a highlight is 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 always try to make something that might sound bad sound nice in some way,” he told the New Yorker in 2020.