https://floatingpoints.bandcamp.com/album/promises
Genre: Spiritual Jazz
Rating: World Treasure (transcends numerical rating)
My friend, who’s a successful writer, suggested I lengthen my reviews. While sometimes less is more and music simply needs to be listened to, on the other hand he’s right. Do I have anything to say? And if not, why the fuck am I writing a music blog? It’s time to put up or shut up.
I know this has already received good reviews. Only a fool would challenge what’s been given to us here. I haven’t read any other reviews. I just want to say what I have to say, untainted.
One, I’m a fan, not a critic. I’m here because I love music and I’m here to praise. Am I too liberal with my praise? Nope. I’m not. I’m that kind of lover. Giving.
Two, let me express my profound gratitude to Pharoah Sanders for giving us so much. The man is eighty. Jazz is so physical but jazz musicians often give more later in life than any other artists. It astonishes me how they continue on. Perhaps after growing up black in Arkansas in the 1940’s even the ravishes of time are relatively unimpressive. Still, I don’t give a fuck who you are: Life is fuckingfcc
haistingexhausting.
That was a weird glitch but I’m just going to leave it in. It feels right to me. So yeah. I’m thankful to Pharoah Sanders for giving us more and giving it now when it means so much and when we need it so badly.
OK this is where my write up gets tricky. I’m going to try to connect a lineage of records that I believe make up an important ancestry that leads us to this.
Dvořák’s New World Symphony from 1893 is the first one. Dvořák organized indigenous and black American musical influences in the symphonic format.
…
“I remember coming home from school and [stutters] guess how young I must have been, and my mother asked me if my teacher was colored or white. And I said she was a little bit colored, a little bit white because she was about your color. And as a matter of fact, I was right. That’s part of the dilemma of being an American Negro. That one is, a little bit colored and a little bit white… How precise are you going to reconcile [pause] yourself to your situation here? And how you’re going to communicate to the vast, heedless, unthinking [silence] cruel white majority that you are here…It’s the history of Europe, simply. It’s one of the reasons we’re in this terrible place. It’s one of the reasons we have five cops standing on a black woman’s neck in Birmingham…And this means that they have become in themselves moral monsters.”
– James Baldwin
Dvořák’s work belongs to all of us and to diminish it is to steal our own heritage from all of us. Perhaps slightly ironically it was defined by this Czech composer. Obviously, Baldwin wasn’t talking about Dvořák nor am I trying to redirect his words toward Dvořák. It’s there’s a very complicated history where so many artistic monuments died in the dual American holocausts and yet fortunately but still unfairly the Dvořák lives.
It’s 2021 in America. These are awkward eggshell words. Bear with me, please.
Then came the original king of Americana. Aaron Copland really defined the sound of America as if it comes out of a junior high history text. The same complexities arise but let me point the reader to the Short Symphony or Symphony Number 2. If you’re brand new to Copland I would still direct you to Appalachian Spring but if you know his music peripherally and haven’t heard the Short Symphony it really truly is essential and hopefully you can see how this composition from 1933 was important when it came to paving this path.
Finally and thankfully I’m going to get to a couple jazz records. The endlessly lush and beautiful Charlie Parker with Strings. This record is on such a high level. It’s everything right when it comes to the orchestration, production, and every beautiful perfect note Parker plays. Then a shamefully underrated Ornette Coleman masterpiece, which like this was recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra. Skies of America has been one of my favorites for decades. It was recorded in the early seventies but took on new meaning after 9/11. For me at least, it’s a crucial look at human nature and showcases Coleman’s compositional style in a fantastic format.
Promises adds a new chapter to this tradition. Sanders is so great I don’t even have words for it. It’s a wonderful thing that this will always be a part of his later life discography. A fantastic achievement by an extremely powerful artistic genius.
Warmth Highest 