Greetings to Idris

Most listeners who know Pharoah Sanders know him from the Coltrane collaborations and from Karma — the 1969 album that contained “The Creator Has a Master Plan,” his most celebrated composition. Sanders at his most ecstatic, his most spiritually overwhelming, his most sonically extreme. That Sanders is extraordinary. This is a different Sanders, and equally worth knowing.

“Greetings to Idris” — a tribute to the master drummer Idris Muhammad — comes from Sanders’s 1980 album Journey to the One, a period when his music had matured from the searching intensity of the late 1960s into something more patient and more inward. The saxophone tone is still warm and penetrating, the spiritual content still present and real, but the approach has shifted from immersion to invitation.

The song opens with the saxophone delivering a melody that functions as exactly what the title says: a greeting, an acknowledgment, an act of recognition between musicians who understand each other. The rhythm section beneath Sanders — Jerome Hunter on bass, Steve Peck and Idris Muhammad himself on drums — provides a foundation that is simultaneously supportive and responsive, the musicians listening as much as playing.

Sanders builds not through volume but through presence — the horn more insistent, more searching, more willing to reach for the notes that express what the melody alone cannot contain.

The climax, when Sanders reaches his signature tone — the overblown, barely-controlled shriek that his critics found difficult and his devotees found transcendent — arrives here not as fury but as joy. This is the specific quality that distinguishes the 1980 Sanders from the 1969 version: the same intensity, directed outward rather than inward, offering rather than demanding.

The deep cut for those who think they know Pharoah Sanders. They don’t. Not until they’ve heard this.