“That’s what Harvest Time sounds like, too: an ethereal masterpiece, created when its maker was ready, spontaneously, and intuitively.”
PERHAPS YOU KNOW the feeling. There’s a record you really need, but the original pressings are scarce, to say the least, and normally sell for a few hundred pounds. One day, you learn that a reissue has finally surfaced, albeit on a label you’ve never heard of before. You buy it, the pressing’s OK, and you add it to your collection. But then, a while later, you discover you’ve bought a nicely presented bootleg: an official version remains frustratingly out of reach; the collection incomplete.
The last time this writer got caught out was with a copy of Pharoah Sanders’ 1977 album, Pharoah. Over the past few years, the market for Sanders’ music has become more intense, thanks to the vogue for spiritual jazz – aquesting imperative and loosely Eastern musical augmentation, playing that vacillates between the meditative and epiphanic – and his feted 2021 album with Floating Points, Promises.
Originally published by Mojo.Read it on Mojo