Save Our Children
Pharoah Sanders
(Polygram Records)

Over the years, Pharoah Sanders has been one of the great roaming experimenters of jazz, spinning off styles as quickly as they began to adhere to him. Eclecticism has generally served him well, so it's disappointing to find that Save Our Children—like his previous album, a veritable smorgasbord of styles—never quite coheres into a full meal. Since both releases were produced by Bill Laswell, it's not hard to pin the blame here. We all know Sanders can cook, but Laswell seems determined to serve him up as Pharoah Lite.

The CD features tablas set against windy ambient backgrounds, repetitive piano comping, choral chanting, a dash of Arabic rap, empowering lyrics like "Now's the moment / For salvation, / All we need is / Inspiration," and a sort of sweetened, lyrical tenor playing more at home in contemporary jazz.

And that's just in the opening minutes of the title cut. It's a little like spinning the radio dial in a town full of college stations.

Curiously, it's mostly the melodic sense that goes astray here. Many songs start out with a promising rhythm underlay and then dissolve almost immediately into vague washes of synthesizer or tenor. Sanders has long carried on a love affair with cosmic sweetness, but there was always a redemptive growl to his sax which suggested that the Creator's master plan might not be all bliss. Here, it seems, the bliss has won out.

© Edward Batchelder
(from JAZZIZ)