Floating Points and Sanders/LSO

[jazzy_dave]

There is a new project from Floating Points with Pharoah Sanders no less and its damn good-

Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orchestra - Movement 1

Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orchestra - Movement 6

Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orchestra - Movement 7

Wire mag gave this album a very good review.

The piece begins with a repeated keyboard figure, almost like a harpsichord shadowed by an electric piano. Soft creaks can be heard, as though someone is shifting in their chair. After a minute or so, Sanders enters, soft and rough, his tone harsh but gentle, like a chiding parent. He’s singing, not roaring; his total mastery of the horn makes his phrases emerge like someone narrating a lucid dream at sunrise. Shepherd’s contributions are repetitive, but not static; the third movement features a squiggly synth solo straight from Pink Floyd circa Wish You Were Here. The fourth movement consists of Sanders murmuring and humming; he picks up his horn again for the fifth section. In the sixth, the orchestra (recorded at a socially distanced summer 2020 session) finally comes in at full strength, swelling around Sanders and the still repeating central keyboard figure. The strings have a sort of spiritual romanticism that recalls Alice Coltrane’s early 70s albums – World Galaxy and Universal Consciousness in particular.
Toward the midpoint of the seventh movement, the keyboards burble into life in a way that brings to mind, of all things, The Orb’s “Towers Of Dub” – one half expects to hear a prankster phoning the BBC to leave a message for Haile Selassie. At the end of the eighth movement, there’s nearly a full minute of silence, then the strings fade slowly back in. It starts like an end credits reprise, but when they get more active than they’ve been at any other point on the record, the track almost feels misplaced. It would have worked better as an overture, before the album proper began.
Promises doesn’t always come across like a true meeting of equals. Laswell used the saxophonist as a plug-in element in the late 90s, Michael Mantler’s Jazz Composer’s Orchestra did the same on 1968’s Communications, and there’s a bit of that feel here. A player with as unique and instantly recognisable a voice as Sanders always risks becoming a gimmick, but his performance here is stunningly beautiful, and the album would be unimaginable without him.

Promises
℗ 2021 Luaka Bop
Released on: 2021-03-26

Composer: Sam Shepherd
Lyricist: Sam Shepherd


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