Deaf Dumb Blind (Summun Bukmun Umyun)

*Deaf Dumb Blind* is more horn-centric than some of Pharoah Sanders’ classic Impulse! titles, with trumpeter Woody Shaw and alto saxophonist Gary Bartz joining in the front line. (Sanders made a notable appearance on Bartz’s 1968 classic, *Another Earth*.) Yet it is also the first album to feature Sanders playing no tenor saxophone at all. The title track begins with layered percussion and bass in a heavily Afro Latin feel. Lonnie Liston Smith’s piano shifts the tonality unexpectedly, opening the door to Sanders on cow horn and, ultimately, soprano sax, his main instrument on the session. The mood is ecstatic and trancelike as the three horns go for broke over grooves laid down by bassist Cecil McBee, drummer Clifford Jarvis, and African percussionists Nat Bettis and Anthony Wiles. Smith’s soaring arrangement of the spiritual “Let Us Go Into the House of the Lord” is likely what inspired the one heard three years later on Carlos Santana and John McLaughlin’s *Love Devotion Surrender*.

Three invaluable reissues showcase a young bandleader and his top-tier players as they create a powerfully cohesive group sound: elegant, adventurous, warm, and ferocious all at once.