Pharoah Sanders

Pharoah Sanders — born Farrell Sanders — American jazz tenor saxophonist whose spiritual free-jazz language stretched from ferocious overblowing to hymn-like calm, died in Los Angeles on September 24, 2022. He was eighty-one. Born October 13, 1940, in Little Rock, Arkansas, he learned local R&B circuits, moved to Oakland and then New York, and found a crucible beside John Coltrane in the mid-1960s before leading sessions that treated improvisation as prayer as much as performance. Albums such as Karma — with the long meditation "The Creator Has a Master Plan" — and later collaborations kept him in conversation with younger listeners who discovered his tone through samples and reissues. Colleagues described a soft-spoken man offstage whose horn could scream or float without vanity. He never abandoned the Arkansas church feeling beneath the avant-garde vocabulary. Los Angeles became a late home after decades of New York lofts and global festival stages. He died after a period of declining health, still regarded as a bridge between Coltrane's last fire and the next century's spiritual jazz revival. He died in Los Angeles on September 24, 2022. Late-night playlists still open with that warm, searching saxophone cry. Sanders's gift was sacred intensity — making free improvisation feel like congregation. Notice Nearby keeps the death date so September 24 remembers the Little Rock saxophonist who turned overtones into a kind of American liturgy.