Promises
The jazz great Pharoah Sanders was sitting in a car in 2015 when by chance he heard Floating Points’ *Elaenia*, a bewitching set of flickering synthesizer etudes. Sanders, born in 1940, declared that he would like to meet the album’s creator, aka the British electronic musician Sam Shepherd, 46 years his junior. *Promises*, the fruit of their eventual collaboration, represents a quietly gripping meeting of the two minds. Composed by Shepherd and performed upon a dozen keyboard instruments, plus the strings of the London Symphony Orchestra, *Promises* is nevertheless primarily a showcase for Sanders’ horn. In the ’60s, Sanders could blow as fiercely as any of his avant-garde brethren, but *Promises* catches him in a tender, lyrical mode. The mood is wistful and elegiac; early on, there’s a fleeting nod to “People Make the World Go Round,” a doleful 1971 song by The Stylistics, and throughout, Sanders’ playing has more in keeping with the expressiveness of R&B than the mountain-scaling acrobatics of free jazz. His tone is transcendent; his quietest moments have a gently raspy quality that bristles with harmonics. Billed as “a continuous piece of music in nine movements,” *Promises* takes the form of one long extended fantasia. Toward the middle, it swells to an ecstatic climax that’s reminiscent of Alice Coltrane’s spiritual-jazz epics, but for the most part, it is minimalist in form and measured in tone; Shepherd restrains himself to a searching seven-note phrase that repeats as naturally as deep breathing for almost the full 46-minute expanse of the piece. For long stretches you could be forgiven for forgetting that this is a Floating Points project at all; there’s very little that’s overtly electronic about it, save for the occasional curlicue of analog synth. Ultimately, the music’s abiding stillness leads to a profound atmosphere of spiritual questing—one that makes the final coda, following more than a minute of silence at the end, feel all the more rewarding.
The all-star collaboration between a producer, a saxophonist, and a symphony is a celestial event. But it’s Pharoah Sanders’ playing that holds it all together, a clear late-career masterpiece.
Esteemed in their own right, Floating Points and Pharoah Sanders were destined to work together
'Promises' sounds like a leap of creative faith, a cosmic communion that reaches across generations, genres and musical…
The keyboardist and electronic music producer met with tenor sax demigod Pharoah Sanders in 2019, and completed the recording in 2020 with the violins, violas, cellos, and double basses of the London Symphony Orchestra.
As a backing musician during John Coltrane's cosmic phase, throughout sessions with Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra, and spanning his 57 years as...
After a run of releases that blur lines between electronic, minimalism, and psychedelic rock, it’s not surprising that Floating Points’ new venture is a 46-minute single piece of neo-classical-jazz minimalism.
“I’m on a ship. In the ocean. Bears around smoking cigars. The bears are singing, ‘we have the music. We have what you’re looking
Five years in the making, this breathtaking album transcends the genres each of its three collaborators bring to the table
Jazz legend Pharoah Sanders teams up with producer and arranger extraordinaire Floating Points for the transcendent Promises
Promises: Chapter I by Floating Points Pharoah Sanders & the London Symphony Orchestra Album Review by Adam Williams
Album Reviews: Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orchestra - Promises
Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The LSO - Promises review: A modern classic, probably.
46 minutes and 37 seconds of electronic, jazz and classical spiritual transcendence. Review by Asya Draganova