Scream of the Week

The best screams don't always have to come from the human voice. One of my favorite screamers of all time is Pharoah Sandars.



I chose this live performance of the Coltrane Quintet from 1966 mostly because Sanders takes the first solo, but you can hear his astonishing screaming throughout his career, and especially when he played with Coltrane. Here, the most obvious examples of what I'm talking about happen at 2:20, 4:40, 6:00, and 8:00 of the clip.

To my ears, the piercing squeal that Sanders achieves, almost always built up with rising glissandi, and similarly trailing off into Ayler-like smears down in pitch, have that same kind of existential rawness that I talked about Roky Erickson having a couple weeks ago. The context makes it maybe a little less jarring than Erickson's screams, since this is some pretty up-tempo, chaotic, screamy music to begin with. But it's also probably a little more direct because of the same context.

There's also a sense in which each of Sanders' screamy moments in this solo serve as a microcosm of the solo itself. Each of those moments is a little louder, higher, and more human than the one before it, and like the ahh-ahhh-ACHOO effect of each moment, he builds over four minutes, and then trails away. Sanders isn't working much with pitch motives or melody in his solo (that's Coltrane's job in this group, and by the way, Sanders really never avoids melody or harmony as a player, with the exception of his work with Coltrane - I suspect it's an overlooked clue about the degree of control and arrangement that Coltrane had in his freer, noisier performances that he could convince Sanders to focus almost entirely on non-tonal, gestural, and screamy playing with the group, even if Sanders' own interests lay elsewhere), but he builds a long-term structure on repeated ideas in a way that reminds me a lot of Lester Young (no joke!).