Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra - Promises

Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orchestra — Promises

180-gram gatefold LP

Promises is the new album by Floating Points and Pharoah Sanders, featuring the London Symphony Orchestra. The jazz great Pharoah Sanders was sitting in a car in 2015 when by chance he heard Floating Points' Elaenia, a bewitching set of flickering synthesizer etudes. Sanders, born in 1940, declared he would like to meet the album's creator, a.k.a. the British electronic musician Sam Shepherd, 46 years his junior. 

Promises, the fruit of their eventual collaboration, represents a quietly gripping meeting of the two minds. Composed by Shepherd and performed upon a dozen keyboard instruments, plus the strings of the London Symphony Orchestra, Promises is nevertheless primarily a showcase for Sanders' horn.

In the '60s, Sanders could blow as fiercely as any of his avant-garde brethren, but Promises catches him in a tender, lyrical mode. Billed as a "continuous piece of music in nine movements," Promises takes the form of one long extended fantasia. Toward the middle, it swells to an ecstatic climax that's reminiscent of Alice Coltrane's spirtual-jazz epics, but for the most part, it is minimalist in form and measured in tone; Shepherd restrains himself to a searching seven-note phrase that repeats as naturally as deep breathing for almost the full 46-minute expanse of the piece. For long stretches you could be forgiven for forgetting that this is a Floating Points project at all; there's very little that's overtly electronic about it, save for the occasional curlicue of analog synth. 

Ultimately, the music's abiding stillness leads to a profound atmosphere of spiritual questing — one that makes the final coda, following more than a minute of silence at the end, feel all the more rewarding.

1. Movement 1

2. Movement 2

3. Movement 3

4. Movement 4

5. Movement 5

6. Movement 6

7. Movement 7

8. Movement 8

9. Movement 9

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