When Pharoah Sanders picked up the tenor saxophone, he decided he wasn't going to play it the way everyone else did. In the 1960s, while he was working alongside John Coltrane, Sanders developed a sound that was genuinely unsettling — overblown, raw, capable of producing these extreme high notes that felt less like music and more like someone channeling something through the instrument. He didn't smooth it out or apologize for it. That distinctive tone, huge and sometimes abrasive, became his signature. You hear it and you know exactly who's playing.

The thing about Sanders is he wasn't interested in being fashionable or fitting neatly into what jazz was supposed to sound like. His 1969 album Karma (1969) demonstrates what he was after. The side-long track "The Creator Has a Master Plan" sits somewhere between free jazz experimentation and spiritual searching — it builds slowly, hypnotically, with Sanders' saxophone moving from whisper to wail. It's become one of the most recognizable pieces in spiritual jazz, and deservedly so. The piece feels like it's reaching for something, but Sanders never lets it become sentimental or easy.

What's interesting is how his music evolved over the decades. After establishing himself as this intense, sometimes difficult voice in jazz, Sanders gradually moved toward something more lyrical and contemplative. He didn't abandon his distinctive sound — he just learned to point it in different directions. By the time he was collaborating with Floating Points and the London Symphony Orchestra on that 2021 project, he'd incorporated elements of soul and gospel into his approach, which might have seemed like a natural mellowing-out, but it felt more like a musician simply following where his interests took him.

The reason Sanders still matters is straightforward: he sounds like nobody else, and he's never pretended to be anything other than exactly what he is. Whether you're hearing him in a spiritual jazz context or in something contemporary, there's an honesty there that you can't fake. He proved that a musician didn't need to compromise or soften their vision to keep growing and changing over a lifetime.