The Trance of Seven Colors

In June of 1994, Bill Laswell brought some mobile digital recording equipment, and saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, to Essaouira, Morocco, to make this breathtaking album, a collaboration with Gnawa traditional musician Maleem Mahmoud Ghania. Gnawa music centers around the guembri, a massive lutelike instrument with heavy gut strings and played percussively, like a massive bass guitar; the rest of the group claps the time, engages in call-and-response vocals, and rattles steel castanets at extraordinary volume. Sanders might be the only jazz saxophonist who could have found a place for himself in this music; he unleashes the expected tyrannosaurus-like cries, but also clicks his horn’s valves in time during quieter, more meditative passages.