Pharoah Sanders in Antwerp, Belgium, on this day, August 19, 1977

Pharoah Sanders performing at Jazz Middelheim in Antwerp, August 19, 1977.

This was the second stop on a short European tour that he took the summer after he released his seminal album Pharoah. 

The festival that brought him and his group to Belgium was Jazz Middelheim, which had started in the late sixties and was put together by Belgian public radio, with all performances broadcast live in high quality. They had paired him in a program alongside various free jazz Belgian groups and playing before a young David Murray. For an audience who hadn’t seen him much as the leader of his own band, he was known to most in Europe as the proverbial son of Coltrane, possibly the heir to Coltrane’s  throne. But, as much as he loved him, Pharoah was not trying to carry Coltrane’s mantle. Many weren’t prepared for how much his music had evolved in the years since he had been in Coltrane’s septet. 

The program for Jazz Middelheim 1977.

He wasn’t continuing in the pure, free jazz ‘fire music’ of the 1960’s, instead he was playing  in a more spiritual direction, as he told us, continuing on from Love Supreme more than Ascension or Sun Ship. 

And now, with Pharoah, he had added an ambient dimension to his sound—at times, he could have been playing electric modal rock—an even greater departure from what European audiences might have expected from an avant-garde group from the states. 

But the avant-garde keeps pushing forward, and so did Pharoah. For him, this short European tour was yet another opportunity to experiment. He was joined onstage by a host of otherworldly players—Clifford Jarvis and Hayes Burnett had started out in Sun Ra’s band, and the pianist Khalid Moss was in the process of converting to Islam, much like Pharoah had before him. 

Together, they played the music of Pharoah—and at Middelheim, they played “Harvest Time,” although they didn’t approach it the way it had been on the record. Of course not. 

This photograph was taken by Guy Stevens. Guy wasn’t one of the photographers hired by the festival—he was an amateur, who happened to make it on stage during the soundcheck, and continued to document the whole performance and afterwards, as well. If you look closely at the frame, you can tell that Pharoah’s in a tent, trying to watch the very tall Hayes Burnett to his left, off frame.

Special thanks to Landers Lanaerts for the research of this story.

Pharoah is out September 15.