Rescued From The Fire: Jimi Tenor on Pharoah Sanders
An ongoing series in which we ask artists what record they’d risk life and limb to save from a burning inferno
For this edition, the Finnish musician and composer Jimi Tenor – known for his peculiar and subversive takes on everything from spiritual jazz to industrial to afrobeat – sits down to explain a bit about what he listens to when his wife is out of the house.
If my house was burning? I would go for Pharoah Sanders’ Karma. I used to listen to it a lot, and then my wife said after several years, “You can't listen to it anymore.” So, I haven't listened to it for many years. But yesterday, when she was out in the bar drinking, I took it out and listened to it.
These days, he doesn’t play that sound that he used to in the 1960s. I went backstage when he was playing in Helsinki once, and asked him to sign all these old 60s records, and he was really confused. He said, “Oh! Old stuff, old stuff.” But this is the great stuff, the tracks that people want to hear. He doesn’t even play “The Creator Has A Master Plan” anymore, so in a way, you can only hear it on the record. It’s quite complicated stuff, with percussion and violins and French horns. It’s a serious hippy work-out! His sax playing is great, his sound is amazing.
