One night a DJ changed my life… It was Pete Drummond, who would go on to reach the dizzy heights of presenting Rock Goes To College for BBC2. I was listening to his late-night show on my dad’s transistor radio, probably with the little white ear piece attached to my shell-like to keep the parents far hence. Turn that thing off; it’s high time you were asleep!
I must have been 15 or 16 at the time and fortunately I hadn't drifted off to sleep, because I caught the whole mesmerising 18 minutes of a piece of music that was like nothing I'd ever heard before. Fortunately, too, Pete Drummond was a sensible DJ, who gave out the full information. The sound-scape of mystical music replete with melody and exotic percussion that seemed to rise and fall and then rise and fall again like waves lapping within my head was Pharoah Sanders, with 'Let us go into the House of the Lord', a traditional negro spiritual adapted by the band's pianist, Lonnie Liston Smith.
It was jazz, Jim, apparently – but not as I knew it. I used to watch the Ronnie Scott programme on BBC2 with my dad, partly out of curiosity, partly to keep him company and partly for the thrill of being able to stay up later than normal. Jazz at that point in my life seemed to mean the Johnny Dankworth Orchestra with Cleo Laine and the Buddy Rich Big Band, who were all right, I suppose, even though Buddy Rich himself seemed as flash and as showy as his drumming... and a weird pianist called Thelonious Monk, whose music was intriguing but a little difficult.
There was nothing difficult, though, about what I heard on my dad's red Japanese transistor – apart from the business of getting hold of the album. The title, Summun, Bukmun, Umyun, was taken from a chapter of the Koran and translated as Deaf Dumb Blind. 'Deaf – To the pleas of fellow creatures to harken, Dumb – To spiritual enlightenment and Blind – To the essence of beauty and truth', as Jameelah Ali's sleeve notes explain. And certainly, to someone searching at the time for the meaning of life in the portentous music of Van Der Graaf Generator, this saxophonist who went by the glorious name of Pharoah Sanders seemed to have created something that contained 'the essence of beauty and truth'.
I couldn't find it in Belfast and I was a little reluctant to use the new Virgin mail order service, because it meant that my mother could more easily keep tabs on the amount of pocket money I was spending on LPs. However, I tracked it down in what I believe was the first Virgin Records store, in London, after a few weeks in the summer holidays of picking strawberries in the Fens – to earn some money to buy more LPs. It was an inauspicious little shop on the first floor of a building at the Tottenham Court Road end of Oxford Street. And there it was! On the pink Probe label, A great name from ABC/Dunhill Records, USA.
Finally I could listen to it in living, breathing stereo. Which is the only way to appreciate how first Sanders himself on the soprano sax, then Lonnie Liston Smith's tinkling, trebly piano and then Cecil McBee's extraordinary bowed bass carry the beautiful melody through a swirling periphery of bells, shakers, maracas and all kinds of African percussion that creates an impression of a steaming night on a veranda, sipping a cold drink and staring into the heart of a jungle darkness. The music was all-embracing and all-encompassing. You had no choice but to sit and listen. Well, not at that age anyway.
And it wasn't just me. A few years later, I was lying on my bed in a house I shared as a student in Exeter, listening to the same piece of music spinning on my BSR MacDonald deck. I was waiting for my man, my disreputable friend Simon, who was late as usual. He was due back from London on his old, impossibly noisy Ariel motorbike. Suddenly he was there standing transfixed at the door that led from my bedroom into the conservatory and thence into the back garden. Looking a little like an elongated Richard III, with his thin lank body and his long limp hair – but covered in oil after another misadventure with his bike – he was riveted by the music.
He had never heard anything like it, either. This was someone who listened predominantly to rock music by the likes of Led Zeppelin and The Who. Someone who once set light to his waste paper basket across the corridor in our Hall of Residence, just for a bit of atmosphere while he played some Pete Townshend air guitar during 'Won't Get Fooled Again'. Black smoke billowed out of his window and the communal fire extinguisher had to be employed. This was someone who would not have had any truck with jazz.
If I remember correctly, he didn't have enough patience for the 22-minute title track. I, too, found it a bit protracted and certainly not up to Side 2. Significantly, it was edited to half the length on the double-CD Pharoah Sanders anthology of 2005. Later, I would come to appreciate that it's effectively an extended Afro-Latin jazz workout for three horns (Sanders, Woody Shaw on trumpet and Gary Bartz on alto sax) and piano powered by congas, assorted percussion and Cecil McBee's fat (I suppose I should spell that 'phat' these days) resonant double bass.
Some 20 years or so later, I would finally catch the Pharoah in concert at the Leadmill, Sheffield: a smallish, quite intimate venue that offered a good view of the four- or five-piece band and the great man himself. In fact, John Coltrane's pupil, sporting what would become his trademark bushy white beard, was not the physical titan I had envisaged. He played more tenor than soprano that night and no one I've ever heard roars on the big sax quite like the Pharoah does, but he was significantly shorter than his tone suggested.
The album still smoulders and captivates today as it did 45 years ago when it came out. Pharoah Sanders led me musically to Africa and the joy of riddim. Deaf Dumb Blind helped teach me to listen and hear, to be around and be aware, and to look and see.
