from the LP Thembi, Impulse! Records, 1971I have no way of knowing for sure, but if pressed, I would bet the farm that Pharoah Sanders dropped acid with John Coltrane---let’s look at the facts: Trane started taking LSD in 1965, around the same time that he asked Sanders to join his crew fulltime (after the recording of Ascension), then along with Sun Ra, Lonnie Liston Smith and Trane’s widow Alice, Mr. Sanders went on to give birth to the cosmic jazz movement (see: out there shit), laying the foundation for what some call “acid jazz”, this song being a textbook example of that approach. The whole affair almost feels as if it was recorded underneath the sea, with currents of electric keys, basslines & random percussion swirling about, Pharoah’s tenor sax fluttering around all of it like sunlight dancing off of the waves; whether this was influenced by a lysergic dream or not, the windswept result is never short of trippy.
