The cover of MOJO 348, featuring The Beatles

MOJO-348-cover-Beatles-bag-Featured-Image.jpg

MOJO 348 – November 2022: The Beatles

The cover of MOJO 347, featuring Kate Bush

MOJO-347-Kate-Bush-cover-featured-image.jpg

MOJO 347 – October 2022: Kate Bush

MOJO 346 cover, featuring Bruce Springsteen

MOJO-346-cover-Springsteen-Featured-Image.jpg

MOJO 346 – September 2022: Bruce Springsteen

MOJO 345 magazine cover, featuring Patti Smith

MOJO-345-cover-featured-image.jpg

MOJO 345 – August 2022: Patti Smith

The cover of MOJO 344, featuring David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust

MOJO-344-cover-Ziggy-featured-image.jpg

MOJO 344 – July 2022: David Bowie / Ziggy Stardust

MOJO-343-cover-Liam-Gallagher-hero.jpg

MOJO 343 – June 2022: Liam Gallagher / Grateful Dead

MOJO 342, with blue-haired Jack White on the cover

MOJO-342-cover-Jack-White-hero-image.jpg

MOJO 342 – May 2022: Jack White

MOJO 341 magazine cover, featuring The Beatles’ George Harrison

MOJO-341-cover-George-Harrison-hero-image.jpg

MOJO 341 – April 2022: George Harrison

MOJO 340 cover featuring The Monkees, Pink Floyd, Eddie Vedder

MOJO-340-cover-Monkees-Hero-Image.jpg

MOJO 340 – March 2022: The Monkees

MOJO 339 magazine cover, featuring Neil Young and Neil Young CD

MOJO-339-cover-Neil-Young-hero-image.jpg

MOJO 339 – February 2022: Neil Young

FloydDeluxecover.jpg

Introducing MOJO’s Brand New Pink Floyd Anthology Edition

MOJO 338 cover, featuring The Rolling Stones

MOJO-338-cover-Rolling-Stones-hero-for-web.jpg

MOJO 338 – January 2022: The Rolling Stones / The Best Of 2021

MOJO 337 cover – features Led Zeppelin, Bowie, Springsteen and more

MOJO-337-cover-Led-Zeppelin-hero-for-web.jpg

MOJO 337 – December 2021: Led Zeppelin

MOJO 336 cover, featuring The Beatles in January, 1969.

MOJO-336-cover-Beatles-hero-for-web.jpg

MOJO 336 – November 2021: The Beatles

MOJO-335-cover-PlantKrauss-hero.jpg

MOJO 335 – October 2021: Robert Plant & Alison Krauss

MOJO 334 magazine cover, featuring David Bowie

MOJO-334-cover-David-Bowie-hero.jpg

MOJO 334 – September 2021: David Bowie

LORETTA-LYNN-HERO.jpg

Country Music Icon Loretta Lynn Dies Aged 90

The-Cult-hero-image.jpg

Shine So Hard: The Cult Reviewed!

Bjork-hero.jpg

Earth Mutha: Björk Reviewed!

Pharoah-Sanders-crop-bw.jpg

“I Just Have To Make Sure I Mean Every Note…” Pharoah Sanders Remembered.

Joni Mitchell Half Moon Bay, Canada, 1972

JONI-MITCHELL-HERO-IMAGE.jpg

“She’s Ahead Of The Curve, The Pack, Whatever You’ve Got…” Joni Mitchell Reviewed

Fleet-Foxes-by-Burak-Cingi-MOJO-crop.jpg

Fleet Foxes, Snapped Ankles And More In MOJO’s Best Of The End Of The Road Festival

BEALTES-REVOLVER-HERO.jpg

The Beatles’ Revolver Reloaded!

BowieEssentialshero.jpg

MOJO’s New Bowie Special Is Out Now!

SmithsMojoCover-hero-image.jpg

MOJO’s New Smiths Special Is Out Now!

record-club-square.jpg

The MOJO Record Club Podcast Launches!

EDIT-Glastonbury-flags-and-sun-Andrew-Allcock.jpg

Glastonbury 2022: MOJO’s Report

herbie-hancock-edit-2.jpg

“Music Must Serve Humanity…” Herbie Hancock Interviewed

Pet Shop Boys, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe

PSB-CROP.jpg

“We Prefer Not To Be Fake…” Pet Shop Boys Interviewed

phoebe-bridgers-web-crop.jpg

“We’re Tearing Down Confederate Statues And Trolling Trump Rallies…” Phoebe Bridgers Interviewed

elbow-press-shot-web.jpg

“People Might Think, ‘What Is This, A Cult?’” Elbow Interviewed

St-Vincnet-webcrop-one.jpg

“I Could Be Anybody Today…” St Vincent Interviewed

Time Machine

1950s

1960s

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s

Magazine

Latest Issues

Back Issues

Articles

Stories

The Mojo List

New Music

MOJO's New Bowie Special Is Out Now!

**Loretta Lynn has died at home in Hurricane Hills, Tennessee, aged 90, a spokesperson for her family confirmed today, 4 October.**

ONE OF THE MOST CELEBRATED AND SUCCESSFUL COUNTRY MUSICIANS OF ALL TIME, **Loretta Lynn** broke down countless barriers facing female artists in Nashville in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

As a songwriter and performer, Lynn’s songs were characterised strength, defiance and humour in the face of heartbreak, poverty and men for whom lyin’, cheatin’ and drinkin’ were a reoccurring trait.

Lynn was born Loretta Webb in Butler Hollow, Kentucky in 1932, where her father Ted worked in the Van Lear coal mine. The second of eight children, she met and married Oliver ‘Doolittle’ Lynn when she was 16. ‘Doo’ gave up running moonshine when the couple moved to Washington and would later become Lynn’s manager, though his alcoholism and infidelity would become the subject of many of Lynn’s songs over the years.

In the late ‘50s Lynn began writing songs on the $17 Sears Roebuck guitar Doo bought her as an anniversary present and began performing in local bars. In 1960 she recorded I’m A Honky Tonk Girl, which became a number 14 country hit.

Lynn signed to Decca and in 1962 her song Success became the first of 16 top ten country hits that decade. 1967’s Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ On Your Mind) became Lynn’s first number one. The album of the same name became the first gold record awarded to an album by a female country music singer and that year she won the Country Music Association’s first ever Female Vocalist Of The Year award.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBnkAkmLtaw

In the ‘70s, Lynn began a successful recording partnership with Conway Twitty. Their first collaboration, 1971’s After The Fire Is Gone, went to number one and the pair’s following six releases topped the county charts, with their next seven also landing in the top ten. As a solo artist Lynn enjoyed 24 country hit singles in that decade, with all but two charting in the top ten.

Lynn wrote with unflinching honesty about the plight of working-class women, often drawing from her own tempestuous marriage. Despite the relatively conservative values of country music at the time, she was unafraid to tackle controversial subject matters. Released in 1966 Dear Uncle Sam was written from the perspective of a woman widowed by the Vietnam draft, 1972’s Rated X criticised the stigma facing divorced woman, while The Pill, which Lynn wrote in 1975, was a celebration of the contraceptive pill, leading it to be banned by radio stations across America.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DcdONaKSQM

1970’s number one hit Coal Miner’s Daughter detailed her struggles growing up in Kentucky during The Great Depression and in 1976 she borrowed the title for her own best-selling autobiography which was adapted into 1980’s Oscar-winning film, starring Sissy Spacek.

In 1988 Lynn was inducted into The Country Music Hall Of Fame, but shortly afterwards took an extended hiatus from music to look after Boo, who died in 1996. Lynn was open about the pair’s 48-year relationship and her husband’s drinking, infidelities and violence, telling CBS, that “he never hit me once that I didn’t hit him back.”

In 2004, Lynn enjoyed one of her biggest commercial successes to date with Van Lear Rose, co-written and produced by Jack White. In 2016 her 43rd solo studio album Full Circle, which featured Willie Nelson and Elvis Costello became her highest-ever charting album in The Billboard Top 100.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7LFeFRXfWY

President Barack Obama awarded Lynn the Presidential Medal Of Freedom in 2013 and she released her final album, Still Woman Enough in 2021.

Lynn is survived by four of her six children.

**Ian and Billy’s eleventh offers light in the darkness.**

IN 2009, THREE YEARS INTO HIS BAND'S LATEST RE-FORMATION, Ian Astbury predicted that The Cult wouldn’t make another album. Dropped by their record label after just one LP, Astbury didn’t fancy “spending a year and a half in the studio arguing over agendas” on a format he considered “dead”. But perspectives change. The third Cult album since the singer’s doomy prophecy opens with Astbury whispering “Forget what you know” and Billy Duffy unfurling a hallmark display of sensuous riff calligraphy. This is Mirror, a song where “nature runs low”, “shadows are long”, “nightbirds croon”, and Ian Astbury helpfully signposts his new record’s location in heartland Cult territory by howling “Love! Love! Love!”. Rock’s unquenchable melodramatists have the fire in their eyes still.

These are suitably apocalyptic times to welcome a new Cult album. Made in 2020-21 and released into a burning world, Under The Midnight Sun drips with portent and dense instrumentation, signifying a tonal re-alignment from the revitalising raw powerage of 2012’s Chris Goss-produced Choice Of Weapon and 2016’s Bob Rock-assisted Hidden City. Tom Dalgety is the latest producer tasked with harmonising Astbury and Duffy’s sometimes adversarial ‘agendas’, bringing award-winning ears and an aptitude for sympathetically upgrading ’80s totems (Killing Joke; Pixies). His co-writing credits on five of the eight songs suggest an interventionist hand, one which instead of immersing the listener in frontline action, à la Sonic Temple, places us at a discrete vantage point. Outer Heaven’s shifting perspectives are like watching a cosmic powerplay, moving from the first half’s epic Morricone orchestral skirls into a two-minute coda propelled by classic Duffy powerchordage and Astbury’s mantric, “As all life fades/We have to go.”

The overall finish is big, but always connected to the core: at points the brooding momentum even evokes 1984 debut Dreamtime (both albums were mostly recorded at Rockfield in Wales). Uncoiling from Duffy’s plaintive guitar drones, Impermanence could be a ghostly return to Horse Nation guided by Charlie Jones’s sentinel basslines, Astbury picking through “The bones of this life”. Vendetta grooves balefully on spiky argeggios. The closing title track, meanwhile, plays out like the aftermath of a volcanically bloody western, with Astbury’s haunted baritone, not for the first time, evoking Mark Lanegan – a fellow seeker amid the dark stuff. “Actions of the violent, the moral fabric decays,” he intones sorrowfully, within Duffy’s counter-melody matrix. “No empire, just a wasteland.”

The LP title comes from Astbury recalling the uncanny aura of Finland’s Provinssirock festival, where the Love-era Cult played in 1986. Under The Midnight Sun invests those primal energies with the wisdom of age, creating something fresh and powerful. It all peaks in Give Me Mercy, the most majestic alliance of Astbury and Duffy’s double-vision, its haunted plea for “a new language” couched in a noble reaffirmation of old glories. Which is surely what a great Cult album is all about.

[READ MOJO'S EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH THE CULT'S BILLY DUFFY ABOUT THE MAKING OF UNDER THE MIDNIGHT SUN.](https://members.mojo4music.com/read/i-channelled-the-heartbreakers?utm_source=dynamic&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=bau_moj&utm_content=content_moj)

_Under The Midnight Sun is out 7 October via Black Hill._

To read MOJO’s guide to all the month’s best music [BECOME A MOJO MEMBER](https://members.mojo4music.com/membership?utm_source=dynamic&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=bau_moj&utm_content=content_moj) today and receive every new issue of MOJO on your smart phone or tablet to listen to or read. Enjoy access to an archive of previous issues, exclusive MOJO Filter emails with the key tracks you need to hear each week, plus a host of member-only rewards and discounts.

**Avant-pop matriarch digs deep into the earth; examines her roots; hatches “biological techno” opus.**

Björk   
★★★★  
Fossora  
ONE LITTLE INDIAN. CD/DL/LP

In Robert Macfarlane’s 2019 book Underland, a study-cum-travelogue exploring the subterranean, he writes of the discovery of an “underground social network” in forests, involving the web-like strands or “hyphae” sent out by fungi that appear to provide a support system linking trees. If one tree is ailing, the others supply nourishment.

It’s a head-spinning idea but one that Björk appears to reference nine tracks into her tenth album, in Fungal City, as she sings, over a skipping electronic kick drum and flitting woodwind shapes, of “Trunks bursting through the moss from our love,” and wonders, “Should I soften the blow of life on him?” The fact that she uses “him”, blurring the distinction between trees and humans, is telling and underlines the main theme of Fossora (a feminine derivation of “fossor”, the Latin name for diggers or burrowing animals): plants and people are not so different, and thrive thanks to a delicate ecology. It’s a notion extended here into family trees growing through the decades.

Björk has, of course, been here or thereabouts before. On 2011’s Biophilia, she wrote about life on Earth in the context of the universe. Now, she has returned to terra firma, and gone sub terra, for a record of what she has termed “biological techno”. In her intervening albums, she has weathered emotional storms – describing the pain of her breakup with artist Matthew Barney in Vulnicura (2015); creating the brighter colours of a world filled with flutes and birdsong in Utopia (2017). In comparison, Fossora was created during an extended period at home in Iceland that she’s said made her feel “grounded”.

Still, it’s a record made during a time of transition for Björk: empty-nested after her 19-year-old daughter Ísadóra left home (making an appearance here as the co-singer/-writer of floaty, transcendent album closer Her Mother’s House); in mourning for the death of her mother, Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir. Two consecutive songs are dedicated to the latter. The first, Sorrowful Soil (described in the lyric book as “a eulogy”), seems to treat grief as life-giving organic material and ends with the touching message to her mum: “You did well.” The second, the elaborate seven-minute-long orchestration of Ancestress (“an epitaph”) – featuring her 36-year-old son Sindri on vocals – is equally thankful in tone but reveals the rebellious spirit of Hauksdóttir. “The doctors she despised put a pacemaker inside her,” she sings, before her voice turns hushed when detailing   
the actual moment of her mother’s death.

It’s heavy stuff, but reliably gorgeous musically. If each new Björk album brings with it a different sonic palette, on Fossora it’s woodwind mixed with the chest-battering beats of Netherlands-originated ’90s techno sub-genre gabber. Here, it’s a version remoulded in Indonesia by the hands of contemporary Balinese duo Gabber Modus Operandi, who have fittingly recorded gamelan drums half-buried in the ground for their stark beats, further edited by the singer, to provide the thumpingly demented moments in the album where it feels as if the listener has been transported to Glastonbury sometime in the mid ’90s, only to wander into some far-flung Techno Nutter Field.

Hammering electro rhythms have been a central feature of Björk’s solo albums since 1993’s Debut, but elsewhere her music has gradually morphed into a post-rave neoclassicism with song structures so contorted that they’re unrecognisable as normal verse-chorus-bridge forms. The general, and fair, criticism of this development is that she has forfeited melody along the way – there’s no earwormy Hyperballad or Bachelorette here. A demanding listen initially, only really with repeated plays of Fossora does it really begin, as its title suggests, to burrow its way under your skin.

> “Fossora may involve a strange ecosystem, but it’s one filled with hope and joy and life, in all its forms, moving forward.”

It’s worth remembering that Björk is inherently drawn to the outré – the Associates’ Sulk and Joni Mitchell’s Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter being among her favourite LPs. And so Fossora is not for the faint of heart, and in some ways bears comparisons to the aural challenges of latter-day Scott Walker. The other guests on the LP similarly tend towards the left-field: Norwegian jazz electronicist Emilie Nicolas on Allow, Brooklyn’s dream popper Josiah Wise AKA serpentwithfeet on Fungal City.

Bit by bit, though, these songs increasingly reveal their beauty. Over its five-and-a-half minutes, Allow revisits the flute arrangements of Utopia, and in its insistently hypnotic chorus, as Björk and Nicolas’s voices entwine with the words “allow, allow, allow, allow you to grow”, the effect is like watching a plant expanding in a sped-up time-lapse film. At the other end of the spectrum there is Victimhood, a dark place filled with unsettling bass clarinets, like creeping shadows, and the singer finding herself in a crater in the ground and trying to imagine herself from a high vantage point. “Only a bird’s eye view,” she frets, “can help me transgress out of this hole.”

While they’re unlikely to send the listener off whistling their tunes, two songs feature slightly more traditional melodic structures. The push-and-pull delivery of the lines in the trombone-and-timpani-driven Ovule makes little sense at first, but slowly pulls into focus before the melody wends its ways to the none-more-Björk reminiscence: “When I was a girl/I fell in love with a building/I marched towards.” Then there is the lovely Freefall, a song of oblique romance written for string quintet and voice, that sounds like Rezro Seress’s 1933 “Hungarian suicide song” Gloomy Sunday re-imagined for a film score in 1940s Hollywood. As Björk’s overlapping vocals gracefully and timelessly climb up an octave and into the chorus, reminding us that likely she would have been a world-famous singer in any age, the effect is soul-stirring.

By digging in the dirt and placing herself in a world of ovules and mycelia, moles and slugs, Björk has literally earthed herself. In Allow, she has “hair fossilised with salt and crust”. In the title track, past hurt is something that can be clawed to pieces and “dug down to rot”. Fossora may involve a strange ecosystem, but it’s one filled with hope and joy and life, in all its forms, moving forwards.

_Fossora it out now via One Little Indian._

To read MOJO’s guide to all the month’s best music pick up the latest issue of MOJO, in shops and available to order online [HERE](https://www.greatmagazines.co.uk/mojo-november-2022). [BECOME A MOJO MEMBER](https://members.mojo4music.com/membership?utm_source=dynamic&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=bau_moj&utm_content=content_moj) today and receive every new issue of MOJO on your smart phone or tablet to listen to or read. Enjoy access to an archive of previous issues, exclusive MOJO Filter emails with the key tracks you need to hear each week, plus a host of member-only rewards and discounts.

**Carrier of Coltrane’s torch, architect of “spiritual jazz”, life for Pharoah Sanders was as hardscrabble as his voice** **was transcendent. But as Dave Di Martino discovered in 2021, at 80, as it was at 20, the aim was still the same.**

Pharoah Sanders does not consent to a great many interviews. In fact MOJO has lost count of the number of times it has asked for an audience with the legendary saxophonist and been turned down. Sitting in Los Angeles’ otherwise deserted Zebulon club in unseasonable 100-degree heat, wearing a straw hat and with his silver beard gathered in a tuft, he explains his elusiveness in soft tones. “Talking, that’s very hard to do,” he says. “I don’t know how to talk about the music. Just let it play.”

Sanders has earned the right to approach the media any way he likes. Days away from turning 80, he is still performing with the same passion and spirituality that has marked his career. Just a few days earlier, with a band including fellow saxophonist Azar Lawrence, he filmed a 90-minute live performance in this very venue – to be livestreamed on his October 13 birthday. The actual day of filming, September 23, would have been John Coltrane’s 94th. For Sanders, it is a lifelong connection.

After the shoot, Sanders’ band and management had gathered around the saxophonist’s table and presented him with a birthday cake celebrating “Another Trip Around The Sun”. It was a show of warmth and respect for a celebrated jazzman whose dignity off-stage suggests a sternness that doesn’t quite materialise, one-on-one.   
In later conversation, Pharoah Sanders is reserved but surprisingly wry, a contrast with the squealing, exclamatory blasts that punctuate the heartfelt excursions of his horn.

Born Ferrell Sanders, he grew up in a religious household in Little Rock, Arkansas, musically inspired but seeking more. In 1959, he moved to Oakland, California, where he would play blues and R&B, and significantly, just across the bay in San Francisco, he would meet John Coltrane. Later, in New York, he’d join the latter for a string of historic recordings including 1965’s bold Ascension, before a series of groundbreaking albums as bandleader on the Impulse! label. Sanders’ 1969 album Karma, specifically the 32-minute track The Creator Has A Master Plan, is revered among today’s crop of young guns – including UK combos Maisha and SEED Ensemble (who gathered for a celebration of Sanders’ music at London’s Barbican Centre earlier this month) – and is often said to have laid the foundation for what is called, for better or for worse, “spiritual jazz”.

Post-Impulse!, Sanders made albums fascinating for their cultural diversity, embracing African music, R&B (1977’s quiet stormish Love Will Find A Way with Phyllis Hyman), and three Bill Laswell-produced collaborations: two for Verve and one in Morocco (see panel). He won a Grammy in 1988 for his work on a Coltrane tribute album, went to Africa in the 1990s as part of a US cultural exchange program, and won an NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship in 2016.   
He keeps on, but, as we’ll learn, a living has been hard to maintain.

And so MOJO is brought to a corner table at the Zebulon, air conditioner now thankfully up and running, to settle down with Sanders and Azar Lawrence – the latter to prompt Pharoah stories as needed. The seated Sanders, a cane in his lap, chooses his words carefully. “I don’t have nothing I can say too much about what’s going on right now,” he declares. That he is speaking through a face-covering – as we all are today – makes this encounter even more surreal than expected.

**What drew you to music as a child?**  
Well, really, at that time, it was in church. I tried to go along with singing in church. My mother, she would sing around the house all the time while she was working. I always was really into painting. Music came later on.

**What kind of stuff did you paint?**  
Anything. If someone asked me to do it. I haven’t painted in many, many years, in fact.

**So, did you start out playing clarinet?**  
I started playing drums. But I wanted to play an instrument, like a reed, like a saxophone or a clarinet. I wanted to try them all out, somehow. At school, I would mess around with all of them. Trombone, trumpet, all of them. But it was easier for me to play the clarinet. I used to play the drums and sit around in class beating on the desk all the time. They were about to put me out.

**What sort of jazz were you hearing when you were a child?**  
I wasn’t hearing _nothing_ like that when I was a child, a small child. I wasn’t hearing anything. In Arkansas, we didn’t have too many jazz stations, we didn’t buy records. We didn’t have the _money_ to buy records.

**You moved out to Oakland when you were a bit older. Why?**  
To get out of Arkansas. It was too racist back there for me. I decided to make a move and come to California.

**You started playing professionally in Oakland. What sort of music did you play? R&B, jazz, blues?**  
Blues. I had to learn to play the blues in all the keys. Sometimes you’d be playing with a guitar player, and a lot of times _they_ don’t know what key they’re in. They’d play a note, and I’d ask them what key or what scale, and they’d tell me, “This one right here.” And I’d say, “OK, what is ‘this one right here?’” I knew how to play blues scales and stuff like that, the elements of music. So I started playing, I started practising in every key, and I’d play the blues. Sometimes, if you didn’t know, you’d be lost and you wouldn’t know where to start.

**Did those lessons you learned back then stay with you? Do they come into the way you play now?**  
Yeah, it does a whole lot. I just have to make sure that whatever I play, I mean every note.

**I think the first time I ever heard your playing was on the _Live At The Village Vanguard Again_ album \[1966\] with John Coltrane, and I remember your sound being so incredibly fierce and energetic. Was that raw emotionalism always present in your playing from the beginning? How did that develop?**  
I don’t know – I’m _still_ going through mouthpieces; they all have a different sound, the mouthpiece and reed combined. I started playing all kinds of mouthpieces, until I felt better. It wasn’t easy, because you had to get a good reed to play – and that wasn’t easy, especially when I was much younger, because I didn’t have the money to buy a reed, so I sometimes had to play the same reed all the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1tNiXNhTrU

**You left the West Coast in 1961 and moved to New York. Why did you do that?**  
Because people were telling me that I should leave and go to New York. They said my sound was “not like” California. “You should go play in New York, learn all the standard songs, get your tuxedo and learn how to work – learn how to live this kind of life.”

**I understand it was rough financially for you when you first hit New York. How did you make ends meet?**  
Well, I did all kinds of things. I was homeless for about two-and-a-half years. I used to give blood. I found out you could give blood and make a little change, five dollars or 10 dollars. In New York, you’d try to buy something like a Snickers or a Baby Ruth, a candy bar, and in New York City it wasn’t just a nickel – you had to add another penny. Six cents. So like I said, I started going to places where I could give blood, and make some little change money.

**I know you got some early work in New York from Sun Ra. Did he suggest you change your name from Ferrell to Pharoah?**  
No, he never did. He never even mentioned it. I read some interviews, somebody said Sun Ra gave me my name (_chuckles a little_), or something like that. He didn’t give me my name. I used that name before we ever even met, before I’d ever even known about who Sun Ra was. My grandmother, she named me from the Bible. At first, she named me “Pharoah”, then she decided that might be a little hard, getting along with the system, I guess, so she decided to name me Ferrell. So when I moved to New York, later on, I had to join the musicians’ union, and they give you documents to fill out. And one thing I read is that you could have an artist’s name, so I decided to put “Pharoah”, and that’s how that got started. A lot of people used to call me “Rock” or “Little Rock”, until I started recording. They found out what my real name was, but they didn’t spell it right either – they called me “Pharaoh”. They never _did_ know my real name, my real first name.

> I listen to everything. Car horns, the squeaking of a door… I listen to sounds, lightning and thunder.
> 
> Pharoah Sanders

**Tell me a bit about what music you liked when you started out, who you liked, who inspired you, who maybe you wouldn’t mind emulating.**  
I was listening to Sonny Rollins a lot – I always liked the way he popped the notes out of his horns. He had a good punch. I would go home and study just that. How to use my tongue, how to use my lips, breath control.

**You have a very intense, emotional sound. What goes on inside when you’re playing? Are you angry, are you happy, neither? What’s your internal mood?**  
I don’t know. I listen to everything. (_At that moment, a car outside Zebulon honks its horn_) Car horns, the squeaking of a door, I listen to everything. I listen to sounds, lightning and thunder.

**Back in the early ’60s you were playing with Sun Ra and Don Cherry, people doing avant-garde stuff as opposed to the** **post-bop coming up at the same time. What sort of feedback did you get from audiences and other musicians?**  
I was trying to play _everything_ at that time. I hadn’t had no choice – sometimes you have to do things just to make a little money to put in your pocket to buy some potato chips or some nuts. But I always kept a jar of whole wheatgerm in my suitcase.

**When you were starting out, did you pay any attention to what critics were writing about your music? Did you care?**  
It didn’t bother me at all. I’d look at it, and read, and went on from there. I kept on playing and I kept on practising. I wasn’t into somebody talking about the way I play or what I do. I knew what I needed to learn, so I kept to doing that.

_**Pharoah**_ **\[1965\], your very first record for ESP Records, was once very rare. Now it can be heard by almost anyone who streams music. I understand you weren’t exactly thrilled with the album at the time. What are your thoughts about it now?**  
Well, at that time, you’re using your talent, and \[the label\] felt like they liked it, so that’s all it meant to me. If they liked it, they liked it. They never paid me no money, but they liked it. So I was still trying to find some jobs around town. One time I played piano at a club and nobody showed up, but I had to play in order to make 10 dollars.

**How did you come to join forces with John Coltrane?**  
I don’t know. I don’t think I was ready to be playing with John Coltrane. I always loved his music and I loved his style of playing. I never felt like I should play more than he played when he hired me – I’d always stand back and let him play more than me. I always wanted to get my _own_ band together, but it was hard to do; it was hard to keep a band together. I did many other things. I worked for Macy’s for a while, for Macy’s warehouse.

**After Coltrane died, you made some fascinating records with his widow, Alice. What was that like, what was she like?**   
Alice? She wanted to keep the music going, you know, and her husband left a whole lot for her to do – it was for her, for whatever she wanted to do. They had three kids, I think, and she had to take care of them, so I’d never talk to her that much. I didn’t know her like I knew John. She had called me sometimes for a record date, once in a while ask me would I do something with her.

**You released a very impressive and diverse string of albums on Impulse! on your own, starting with _Tauhid_. What was the strategy there, what was the intent?**   
I was trying to let people know what I can do. I never did get credit on that particular record \[_Tauhid_\] – because I played alto _and_ tenor \[it’s credited on the CD release\]. I guess it sounded like I was playing tenor – they didn’t know the difference in pitch or whatever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWVa9eVd0Lo

**How did you select the musicians that appeared on your albums? Were they a working band, or   
did they come in specifically for the session?**  
They’d heard me and always had said, “I’d like to play with you sometime, if you need a drummer, a bassist, a piano player, a conga player, I’d love to play.” I didn’t have no jobs for anybody. But I think they heard me play, and they might’ve liked something I was doing.

**Tell me a bit about working with Leon Thomas \[vocalist on The Creator Has A Master Plan\].**  
When I first heard Leon Thomas, there was a place in Manhattan, downtown, called St. Mark’s, I think – a jazz club, classical, whatever they’d play. I met \[Coltrane drummer\] Elvin Jones, he was just sitting there, and Leon Thomas was there, singing, And I asked \[Thomas\], “Would you mind playing with me on a job?” I was looking to get a job at a club on the East Side called Slugs’. He reminded me so much like an instrument, with his voice, and I wanted to use him. And it seemed like everything went well; he decided to work with me for a while.

> I was homeless for about two-and-a-half years.
> 
> Pharoah Sanders

**Artistically, how appreciated did you feel? Were people listening?**  
For me myself, I always felt like I wasn’t really good enough with what I was doing. So I kept trying to find out information – what I needed to learn. Do I still feel that way? Yeah. Gotta learn. Every time I listen to somebody, they do things that I wish I could do. Everybody’s got something different to say. So it kind of messed me around – I started feeling, maybe I should’ve started playing piano first, instead of sax.

**Do you hear your influence in other players? I’m sure Azar here can.**  
I like the way Azar sounds, I love that kind of sound. I used to ask him why he’s around here in LA – I didn’t think it was too good to be playing and working here in LA. Because sometimes you have to find your personality, at some point, what you’re going to do. When I was in Oakland there were many players, good players – like Smiley Winters, he used to play with Charlie Parker – they told me, “You should go to New York.” I didn’t know what they meant by “go to New York”, I was still trying to study and play music.

**You spent some time overseas. Was your international appeal different than it was in the States?**  
It seemed like people in other countries were far advanced, listening to what they wanted to hear – young, old and all ages. It surprised me, you know? And I’d come back over here and it was very different. Plus, it really helped me because they _paid_ me, and that really helped in my everyday. So I kept wanting to go back over. People like Archie Shepp, a lot of freelance people, they’d go there and were working many, many years before I went over there. I didn’t start going over there until maybe in the ’70s, late ’70s, I don’t know. I just didn’t know who to hook up with as far as the agencies. I didn’t know _anything_ about the agencies. Ornette Coleman, I learned a lot from being around him. He’d be telling me, “You can go and they pay you a little bit more money.” I didn’t understand. I said, “Really, I’m ready if they want to send for me.” I didn’t have a passport or nothing – so I finally got a passport and I seen what they were talking about. And you know, they paid me pretty well, but at the time I had met Ornette Coleman, he told me, “You should be able to get a whole lot more than this,” and so I learned from him. That he wouldn’t never go over there unless he got what he wanted to get. So I had to learn to make them respect you, and the price that you say will get you over.

**You reappeared on Verve Records in the 1990s in the States, at least briefly. How was that for you?**  
I didn’t actually sign with them. You know, a lot of things I kind of did _wrong_. I started out sort of late. Verve kept calling me, wanting to do something. They mentioned Bill Laswell – he could produce me or whatever that was. But he didn’t do it right. They had given him the money that was needed, but he waited a long time, I guess. Apparently they were a little bit angry with him.

**You are considered one of the giants of what is now called “spiritual jazz”. What would you say “spiritual jazz” actually _is_**  
Well, I always look at music as a kind of very spiritual thing anyway. So I never have to go _to_ it. It is all around me.

**Has anyone new caught your ear recently? Anybody you’re especially impressed with?**  
Well, you know, a lot of people are doing a lot of things new. I love Azar, the way he plays. A lot of players around me, they play very different – Azar, he likes to express, and he seems to be a very inventive kind of person, and I listen to it and I say, “Yeah, that’s great.”

**Are there any musical areas you haven’t explored yet that you’d like to?**  
Well, it comes and goes, you know. Me, I would like to go to India and study the music over there. Maybe, if possible, play with them. Learn the scales and whatever else I have to learn in order to play. I always like to do more of a cultural exchange, playing with some bands in other countries. I like to listen to them, but I never played with them. I played with \[Indian percussionist-composer\] Zakir Hussain, I love his playing. I never played with too many sitar players – I’d like to play with them. I always feel like I should get my soprano saxophone out and start playing. My soprano’s been in storage about 10 or 12 years. I remember when I couldn’t take my soprano on the airplane, they gave me problems and problems. I thought, Well, I’ll just leave it at home, and I’ll try to make my tenor sound like a soprano.

**With the Covid-19 situation, how has life changed for jazz players?**   
I think we’ve all been at home, maybe writing more music, maybe practising more, staying healthy. But you can be trying to play some beautiful music, and you still have to go out and make a little money energy or something to help out. Because there don’t be too many places you can get food free.

**I see you’re walking with a cane – how are you holding up physically?**  
I’m doing OK. In March, I was coming out to work with Joey DeFrancesco, and I fell on my right side and I broke my hip bone. I got up and I thought I was OK, but I tried to walk a few steps and I had to crawl back into the house.   
I couldn’t make it. So ever since, I’ve gotten a whole lot better, and started healing, and then I got this cane stick, because you might fall again. I can’t be doing that.

**What do you think is your greatest accomplishment as a musician? What are you proudest of?**  
I was brought up in a very, very religious way by my mother – I was the first one at church every Sunday – so I’ve stayed into the church, I’m that kind of person. And I’ve always loved the music, and I just went in that direction.   
And when I heard jazz, I loved that, too. It was like another kind of a classical music, a very intelligent way to play music. In some ways you can play music that’s maybe _not_ so intelligent – and keep digging, keep digging, and then feel something \[deeper\] that’s going to come through. So I decided to _stick_ with what’s called jazz music – black classical music.

**Think you’ll ever call it a day playing music?**  
That’s what we got now, unless they’re going to pay me enough money to come out of the house. I feel like I _have_ retired… (_his raised eyebrows suggest a grin beneath his mask_) …from getting low pay!

**This article originally appeared in MOJO 326.** [BECOME A MOJO MEMBER](https://members.mojo4music.com/membership?utm_source=dynamic&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=bau_moj&utm_content=content_moj) **today and receive every new issue of MOJO on your smart phone or tablet to listen to or read. Enjoy access to an archive of previous issues, exclusive MOJO Filter emails with the key tracks you need to hear each week, plus a host of member-only rewards and discounts.** **The latest issue of MOJO is in shops and available to order online** [HERE](https://www.greatmagazines.co.uk/mojo-november-2022).

**After the bittersweet success of the intensely personal Blue, Joni Mitchell headed somewhere only she could go.**

**The Joni Mitchell Archive** series arrives at the second box of remastered studio albums, The Asylum Albums (1972-1975) (Rhino, 5-LP/4-CD), ★★★★★ with a booklet essay by Neil Young. On 1971’s Blue, she had declared, during River, that she was “gonna make a lot of money and quit this crazy scene”. When her relationship with fellow star, and a muse for Blue, James Taylor crumbled, Mitchell retreated to Canada to consider her future in a cooler climate, and returned with the material and the cover images for her fifth album, For The Roses, her first for David Geffen’s Asylum label.

While it may seem, on the surface, like a disillusioned record, it’s really Mitchell edging away from the limelight and steeling herself to work in a new way. Enthusiastically received at the time, it has since become undervalued in her catalogue. In places it’s ‘Blue II’; Lesson In Survival sounds very close to The Last Time I Saw Richard. Elsewhere, with Tom Scott providing shimmering woodwind parts, Mitchell’s dumping folky introspection and gazing longingly towards the mutable landscape of jazz. Which might be what she’s doing in Joel Bernstein’s naked portrait of her, standing on the shoreline of the Sunshine Coast in British Columbia, inside the album sleeve’s elaborate gatefold-within-a-gatefold packaging.

Lyrically, these aren’t diary entries, she’s singing about characters or concepts, employing extended metaphors. Taylor’s heroin addiction is addressed in Cold Blue Steel And Sweet Fire, set in all the places junkies score: “Concrete concentration camp, bashing your veins for peace/Cotton, steel and sweet fire, falling for lady release.” For The Roses is full of good things – the title song, in particular – but Mitchell at arm’s length wasn’t exactly what her fans wanted at the time.

January 1974’s Court And Spark was her second masterpiece. Her joy in playing with a band – Scott’s crack crew of session players, LA Express – is evident, and off-stage she’s hanging with upmarket buddies like Geffen, subject of the buzzy Free Man In Paris. She’s moving through swanky parties and swish hotels, and the music envelops her like fine-cut clothes, the multi-tracking of her voice offering up new textures. She uses it to cover her beloved Lambert, Hendricks & Ross on delightful closing vignette Twisted. The extraordinary Car On A Hill, possibly about an unhappy fling with Jackson Browne, more or less foretells how Steely Dan will sound circa Aja. She’s ahead of the curve, the pack, whatever you’ve got, here. It’s the album where Mitchell comes out as complex.

Miles Of Aisles (November 1974), documented her first tour with a full band (LA Express minus Joe Semple and Larry Carlton, who were busy with The Crusaders), for an energised distillation of her work to this point. A prowling version of Cold Blue Steel is well received by the crowd: “Joni, you have more class than Mick Jagger, Richard Nixon and Gomer Pyle combined,” an audience member heckles. Mitchell laughs delightedly.

Lastly, the groundbreaking The Hissing Of Summer Lawns. Too oblique to be universally admired, it’s nonetheless a major work of art. Her inspired use of the Burundi drummers on The Jungle Line prefigures sampling or, indeed, Graceland. Combining them with a synthesizer echoes the ancient and modern collision of Mitchell’s brilliant cover art – native tribesmen carrying a python towards a metropolis – a metaphor for the drug trade. Poetic, strange and hip-deep in ideas, Summer Lawns saw Mitchell forever leaving behind mere entertainment. “Joni’s music is so deep and transporting. She \[was\] creating a unique kind of sound that I loved to listen to over and over,” writes Neil Young.

She had effectively quit that crazy scene, as promised, and arrived at an elevated place, the arcane jewelled city of Joniville, Population 1.

_Joni Mitchell’s The Asylum Albums (1972-1975) is released 23 September via Rhino Records._

**To read MOJO’s guide to all the month’s best music pick up the latest issue of MOJO, in shops and available to order online** [HERE](https://www.greatmagazines.co.uk/mojo-november-2022). [BECOME A MOJO MEMBER](https://members.mojo4music.com/membership?utm_source=dynamic&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=bau_moj&utm_content=content_moj) **today and receive every new issue of MOJO on your smart phone or tablet to listen to or read. Enjoy access to an archive of previous issues, exclusive MOJO Filter emails with the key tracks you need to hear each week, plus a host of member-only rewards and discounts.**

REVOLVER – THE BEATLES ALBUM that turned rock and pop on its head – returns, remixed and revitalised with revelatory outtakes and studio chatter. With exclusive access, MOJO tells the full crazy story – acid and sitars, jam jars, tin baths and all – in a bagged package that includes CD and Beatles art print, wherever you are in the world. Also in this issue: Nick Cave – from despair to... where? Joe Strummer’s final fling. Blur’s Graham Coxon searches his soul. Plus: Blue Öyster Cult, Björk, Dry Cleaning, Jellyfish, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Lamont Dozier, John Cale, Grateful Dead, Mickey Jupp, Joni Mitchell, Don Cherry and ‘compostable’ vinyl?!

THIS MONTH’S COVERMOUNT CD is The Meaning Of Within, 13 tracks of the music in the minds of the Beatles in 1966: Delia Derbyshire, Ornette Coleman, Ravi Shankar, Nat King Cole and more!

You can now **receive every new issue of MOJO on your smart phone or tablet to listen to or read. Enjoy access to an archive of previous issues, exclusive MOJO Filter emails with the key tracks you need to hear each week, plus a host of member-only rewards and discounts.**

## **[SIGN UP FOR A MOJO MEMBERSHIP](https://members.mojo4music.com/membership?utm_source=dynamic&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=bau_moj&utm_content=content_moj2)** {#h-sign-up-for-a-mojo-membership}

**COVER STORY: THE BEATLES** The album that invented modern pop and rock gets a stereo makeover, augmented by revelatory outtakes. MOJO delves into the secrets of its creation and consults the musicians whose lives it changed.

**NICK CAVE** Heartfelt, wise and fearlessly frank, Cave reflects on the transformations in his life and work since 2015 in this extract from a stunning new book.

**JOE STRUMMER** Exploring the music and the mayhem of the Clash man’s final fling. “Joe would stay up all night, bringing the joints in, he was the puppet master.”

**BLUE ÖYSTER CULT** 50 years on, its stars recall how killer riffs, literary fantasies and gay clobber fuelled the ’70s most unique band. Until it went all Spinal Tap.

**GRAHAM COXON** Blur’s troubled guitarist on the agony and the agony of Britpop, plus the recent realisation that it might not be The End Of The F\*\*\*ing World, after all.

**DRY CLEANING** Florence Shaw’s existential shopping lists were the unlikely hit of lockdown. Luckily, there’s more where those came from, discovers Laura Snapes.

**THE EQUALS** Black and white unite in the heyday of UK R&B and hit Number 1 with Baby Come Back. Then: a car crash, a political awakening and a symbolic wig-burning.

J**ELLYFISH** Set to be the Beatles of the ’90s, before the whims of their singing drummer cast his colleagues to the winds, to seed the sound of Beck, St Vincent and more.

**REVIEWED** Björk / The Cult / Beyoncé / Pink Floyd / Bill Callahan / Yeah Yeah Yeahs / Creedence Clearwater Revival / Alela Diane / The Cure / Lightning Seeds / Bitchin Bajas / Joni Mitchell / Sorry / The Libertines / The Comet Is Coming / Courtney Marie Andrews / Brian Eno / Robyn Hitchcock / The Bad Plus / Dungen / Can / The Everly Brothers

MOJO 348 – November 2022: The Beatles

MOJO's New Bowie Special Is Out Now!

MOJO 347 – October 2022: Kate Bush

Latest on Mojo

Country Music Icon Loretta Lynn Dies Aged 90

Shine So Hard: The Cult Reviewed!

Earth Mutha: Björk Reviewed!

“I Just Have To Make Sure I Mean Every Note…” Pharoah Sanders Remembered.

“She’s Ahead Of The Curve, The Pack, Whatever You’ve Got…” Joni Mitchell Reviewed

Fleet Foxes, Snapped Ankles And More In MOJO’s Best Of The End Of The Road Festival

The Beatles’ Revolver Reloaded!

MOJO’s New Smiths Special Is Out Now!

Latest Magazine

MOJO 346 – September 2022: Bruce Springsteen

MOJO 345 – August 2022: Patti Smith

MOJO 344 – July 2022: David Bowie / Ziggy Stardust

MOJO 343 – June 2022: Liam Gallagher / Grateful Dead

MOJO 342 – May 2022: Jack White

Latest Articles

MOJO’s New Smiths Special Is Out Now!

The MOJO Record Club Podcast Launches!

Glastonbury 2022: MOJO’s Report

“Music Must Serve Humanity…” Herbie Hancock Interviewed

“We Prefer Not To Be Fake…” Pet Shop Boys Interviewed

“We’re Tearing Down Confederate Statues And Trolling Trump Rallies…” Phoebe Bridgers Interviewed

“People Might Think, ‘What Is This, A Cult?’” Elbow Interviewed

“I Could Be Anybody Today…” St Vincent Interviewed