Pharoah Sanders

North Little Rock

1940 – 2022

Before Pharoah Sanders became one of the most adventurous saxophonists in modern jazz, he was Ferrell Sanders, a young musician growing up in central Arkansas. Born in Little Rock, he first played clarinet while accompanying hymns in church. At Scipio Jones High School in North Little Rock, band director and saxophonist Jimmy Cannon introduced him to both the tenor saxophone and jazz. Sanders progressed so quickly that while still a student, he temporarily took over leadership of the school band after Cannon departed.

As a teenager, Sanders slipped into Black clubs in downtown Little Rock to sit in with traveling rhythm-and-blues and jazz musicians passing through the region. Arkansas gave him his musical beginnings, but segregation also imposed limits on where a young Black musician could perform. After graduating, Sanders left for California and later New York. In Oakland, musicians nicknamed him “Little Rock,” a reminder of the place he had come from. In New York, Sun Ra gave him the name that would follow him for the rest of his career: Pharoah.

Sanders became closely associated with John Coltrane during the final, most experimental period of Coltrane’s career. Together, they helped push jazz beyond established structures into music built around freedom, intensity, spirituality, and sound itself. Sanders continued that exploration on his own recordings, particularly the landmark 1969 album Karma and its centerpiece, “The Creator Has a Master Plan.”

His career eventually stretched across more than five decades, and he received a Grammy for his work on the Coltrane tribute Blues for Coltrane. Sanders carried jazz far beyond the conventions he encountered as a young musician in Arkansas, but Little Rock and North Little Rock were where he first learned to turn breath, melody, and improvisation into a musical language of his own.