Pharoah Sanders – Karma

Verve and Universal Music Enterprises are continuing their analogue-only reissue series this year. The 2022 calendar for Acoustic Sounds includes refreshed releases from a lineup of jazz greats. This year’s forthcoming releases include: Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong’s Ella & Louis, Duke Ellington & Coleman Hawkins’ Duke Ellington Meets Coleman Hawkins, and Pharoah Sanders’ Karma.

The Acoustic Sounds series was introduced in 2020 and releases LPs stereo remastered from original analog tape recordings and pressed on 180-gram vinyl at Quality Record Pressings.

Released in May of 1969, Karma was the famed tenor saxophonist’s third Impulse! Records album and is now
seen as a milestone of the Spiritual Jazz movement. A natural progression in the sonic exploration that
Sanders, along with John Coltrane and Alice Coltrane, had spearheaded throughout the previous five years, the
album features two tracks, the 32-minute-long “The Creator Has A Master Plan,” and “Colors.” Filling the entire A-Side of the LP, “Creator,” co-composed by Sanders with vocalist Leon Thomas, is as close as Spiritual Jazz comes to having its own anthem. Meanwhile, the lone B-side track, “Colors,” is no less transfixing.

This reissue honors the late jazz legend who passed away in September at the age of 81 and concludes the series for 2022. The nearly two dozen releases from the series to date feature many of the timeless, classic albums from the Verve Label Group’s stable of labels including Decca, EmArcy, Impulse! Records, Philips Records and Verve.