We are a bit late this month in getting up our Crew's Choice award.  Summers tend to slow up around here and we are in the process of moving to our new and larger offices, but the music is still flowing.  And so it is with this month's selection, Spirits.

From Adam Rudolph's small but excellent quality label, Meta Records, Spirits was an eagerly awaited listen.  It has been a few years since Pharoah Sanders has recorded anything that harkens back to the diversity of his Theresa Records days, and we were wondering if any label would ever give him the chance again to stretch and explore the other worlds that have become Pharoah's unique sound stage.  We are quite pleased to announce that Meta Records has done just that with this recording.

Grounded by the driving rhythm section of long time friends and collaborators, Adam Rudolph and Hamid Drake, this project provides the perfect vehicle for Sanders to explore a sound stage that listeners first heard when he and Coltrane polarized the jazz world on its head with recordings like Ascension, Meditations, Live At the Village Vanguard Again, Om, and Cosmic Music.  On Spirits, we are treated to an hour long set of music, written collectively by the group, that stylistically spans Pharoah's 40 years of performance and growth...from his early 1963 group with Billy Higgins, Wilbur Ware, and John Hicks right up through the time he began to explore the musical forms of the Third World stream.

While many critics would have Sanders just continue rehashing his 'Trane days to preserve the purity of the "jazz" lineage, he was moving on, spiritually and artistically...beyond the comfortable catch-all label of "jazz."   And, actually to our ears, moving to places that were first heard during Ascension and to sonic spaces that we feel 'Trane was also going had he lived longer to find them.   In fact, spaces first explored by Sanders in 1967 while still working with 'Trane in his Tauhid recording on Impulse.

So, we welcomed this recording as an affirmation of the validity of his last 30+ years of exploration without regard to the critics.  Yes, this recording features all of the fiery energy that when first heard in the 1960s caused critics to label Sanders the "shrieking charlatan," but the recording also delivers a compassionate fervency and lyricism that we last heard from Sanders on his 1992 tribute to Coltrane, Crescent With Love.