Recorded at Orange Music in West Orange, New Jersey in 2003 and produced by Bill Laswell, With a Heartbeat finds Pharoah Sanders entering one of the strangest and most luminous settings of his later career. The project takes as its starting point actual heartbeat sounds, recorded by cardiologist Dr. Jean‑Louis Zink, which Laswell uses as the subterranean grid for four extended pieces. Against this living pulse, Sanders, cornetist Graham Haynes, guitarist and electric sitar player Nicky Skopelitis, keyboardist Jeff Bova and tabla master Trilok Gurtu weave a music that sits somewhere between jazz, ambient dub and devotional raga.
The album unfolds across four tracks - “Across Time,” “Morning Tala,” “Alankara (Beats of the Heart)” and “Gamaka” - with a total duration just shy of fifty minutes. Each piece is anchored by the insistent thud and flutter of the sampled heart, alternately foregrounded and submerged in the mix. Gurtu’s tabla and vocalisations interlock with that inner metronome, creating cycles that feel as much bodily as rhythmic, while Laswell’s bass and keyboards lay down broad, hovering fields of tone. Over this, Sanders moves between tenor saxophone and flute, his sound by now burnished, grainy and deeply vocal, less about the fire‑music eruptions of the 1960s than about long, beseeching cries and melismatic sighs.
Laswell, who also adds flute and additional keyboards, shapes the record with his characteristic sense of space: low‑end drones, dub‑inflected echoes, and subtle electronic textures that expand the acoustic playing rather than smother it. Graham Haynes’ cornet and electronics act as a foil to Sanders, often shadowing or answering his lines with smeared, harmoniser‑thickened phrases, while Skopelitis’ guitar and electric sitar thread in glints of South Asian and Middle Eastern colour. The overall mood is unhurried and immersive, like a single, continuous meditation viewed from four slightly different angles.
