Celebrating Pharoah Sanders’ 71st birthday today, we played the classic The Creator has a Master Plan. There will be lots more Pharoah next week, including tracks from the newly reissued albums Village of the Pharoahs and Wisdom Through Music.
There was also new music from Flying Lotus acolyte Thundercat (aka Stephen Bruner) and tracks from another great reissue – Bennie Maupin’s late 1970s albums Moonscapes and Slow Traffic to the Right. This is the Herbie Hancock Mwandishi band (without Herbie) on fine form. The album is out on the UK-based Vocalion label.
The studio also welcomed Cordelia Charles from Grenada and we featured music from the Caribbean – Jon Lucien (British Virgin Islands), Joe Harriot, Marjorie Whyte and Monty Alexander (Jamaica) and Soft (Guadeloupe).
- Jon Lucien – A Time for Me to Fly
- Bennie Maupin – Water Torture
- Sonny Rollins – St. Thomas
- Thundercat – Fleer Ultra
- Joe Harriot Quintet – Compound
- Marion Brown – Sweet Earth Flying (part 4: Prince Willie)
- Marjorie Whyte – Drum Song
- Pharaoh Sanders – The Creator has a Master Plan
- Monty Alexander – Evening Time
- Dub Colossus – Satta Massagana
- Soft – Krim Kont la Gwadloup
- Miles Davis – Tout de Suite
- Michael Garrick Quintet – Calypso Sketches
- Weather Report – Black Market (live)
Video this week had to come from Pharoah: here he is with bass player and shaman Bill Laswell. Great to have footage of Toshinoro Kondo on trumpet too. The uncredited kora player is Foday Musa Suso – check out parts 2 and 3 of this on YouTube. Atmospheric – and DEEP.