Pharoah Sanders: Karma [AUDIO CLARITY]

Why you'll love it

This edition keeps the original two-side layout, with "The Creator Has a Master Plan" running across both sides before "Colors." It's the album that defined spiritual jazz, and Pitchfork ranked it No. 53 among the greatest albums of the 1960s.

This edition

• Original two-side running order
• Full 32-minute suite across both sides

About the album

Some albums take a whole side to say hello. Karma takes a side and a half to say one big, glorious thing. Pharoah Sanders had played in John Coltrane's last groups, and here, on his third album as leader for Impulse!, he took that searching spirit and turned it into something warm and very much his own.

"The Creator Has a Master Plan," co-written with vocalist Leon Thomas, opens with a rubato prelude that echoes A Love Supreme, then a bass figure kicks in and the whole thing blooms. Thomas yodels and soars, Lonnie Liston Smith rolls out shimmering piano, and the band includes Reggie Workman and Richard Davis on basses, James Spaulding on flute and Julius Watkins on French horn. Drummer Billy Hart and percussionist Nathaniel Bettis keep the pulse rolling underneath. The brief "Colors" closes the album like a deep breath out.

It became Sanders' most popular record and a cornerstone of spiritual jazz, sampled and studied ever since. Thirty-two minutes on one song sounds like a commitment, but in our experience nobody has ever got up to flip it early.

Also at Kops: more Pharoah Sanders on vinyl · browse Modern Jazz

Tracklist

Listen

On Audio Clarity (cat# ACL0087 LP), a reissue of the 1969 album.