Pharoah Sanders's Karma is a spiritual jazz summit that peaks with "The Creator Has a Master Plan," a thirty-two-minute argument for transcendence where Leon Thomas's yodel cuts through cosmic saxophone like a blade. It's late-night listening for people who believe sound can open doors. Essential.
There’s a moment about eighteen minutes into “The Creator Has a Master Plan” where the rhythm section locks into something so deliberate, so patient, that you stop waiting for resolution and surrender to the idea that this is the resolution. Pharoah Sanders doesn’t push—he breathes into his tenor, extending notes until they feel less like notes than like atmosphere, while Leon Thomas’s voice, that impossible yodel of his, rises and falls like a call being answered across a canyon you can’t see.
This is Karma, recorded in the spring of 1969 at A&M Studios in Los Angeles, and it’s the sound of a musician who has learned to stop performing and start witnessing. Sanders had been part of John Coltrane’s final groups, had absorbed the spiritual intensity of A Love Supreme and Ascension, and by the time he walked into the studio with producer Bob Thiele, he knew exactly what he wanted: not a jazz album, but a prayer in real time.
The band around him was right for the work. Lonnie Liston Smith on piano—young, open-eared, capable of both delicate impressionism and thunderous declaration. Jimmy Garrison on bass, who had played with Coltrane and understood the language of spiritual searching. Marty Grebb on organ, Ed Blackwell on drums, and Thomas, whose voice had never been categorized before and wouldn’t be after. He wasn’t a jazz singer or a soul singer. He was something else entirely.
The Argument
“The Creator Has a Master Plan” doesn’t build. It arrives, settles, and then begins its real work: the slow dissolution of the boundary between listener and music. The piece opens with Thomas’s voice over a sparse, patient groove, and for the first five minutes you’re still in a room, still aware of the speakers. But something happens around minute seven when Sanders enters, and the saxophone starts to breathe in sync with the drums, and suddenly you’re not listening to the band anymore—you’re inside it, walking where they’re walking.
There’s no bridge, no chorus, no moment where the music pivots toward commercial interest. It just deepens. At twenty minutes, Lonnie Liston Smith’s piano sounds like it’s coming from underwater. At twenty-five, you’ve forgotten what the beginning sounded like. At thirty-two, when Thomas’s voice returns for the fade, it feels like the only possible ending to a conversation you never knew you were having.
The rest of Karma works because it has earned the silence around it. “Let Us Go Into the House of the Lord” is barely more than a hymn, Sanders’s horn gentle enough to not wake a sleeping child. “Harvest Time” moves with the patience of actual growth. By the time you reach the brisk, almost perky “Thembi,” the listener has been so thoroughly rewired that even a straightforward groove feels like a spiritual revelation.
Bob Thiele’s production is nearly invisible—which is to say it’s perfect. He left space. He let silence be an instrument.
This album would spend decades in the jazz section of record stores, which is one of the great miscarriages of filing. It’s not jazz in any competitive sense. It’s not about chops or harmonic sophistication, though both are present. It’s about the moment when a musician decides to stop proving something and start believing something, and invites you to believe it too.
Leon Thomas died in 1986. Pharoah Sanders is still alive, still making music at eighty-six, still traveling the spiritual path he mapped out here. Lonnie Liston Smith is gone now too. But this record—this specific moment when five people sat in a Los Angeles studio and decided to reach for something just beyond the edge of language—remains exactly where they left it, waiting for someone to need what it offers.
🎵 Key Takeaways
- Eighteen minutes in, rhythm section locks into deliberate patience as resolution itself.
- Sanders extends tenor notes into atmosphere rather than discrete musical phrases.
- Leon Thomas's yodel rises and falls like calls across invisible canyons.
- Recorded spring 1969, this is prayer in real time, not jazz.
- Listener dissolves into music around minute seven when Sanders enters with saxophone.
- Band includes Coltrane alumni who understood spiritual searching through musical language.
Is the whole album as long as 'The Creator Has a Master Plan'?
No—that title track is thirty-two minutes, but the album is sixty-five minutes total. The other pieces are much shorter: 'Let Us Go Into the House of the Lord' is a gentle hymn, 'Harvest Time' is introspective, and 'Thembi' is a brisk groove by comparison. After the main statement, the rest feels like a benediction.
Why does Leon Thomas's voice sound so unusual?
That's his natural yodel—a technique he developed over years, somewhere between African call-and-response and falsetto. It's not an effect or affectation; it's his voice. On this album, it functions almost like another horn section, cutting through the cosmic density with a human quality that nothing else could achieve.
How does this relate to Coltrane's spiritual jazz?
Sanders played on Coltrane's final groups and absorbed that vocabulary of spiritual seeking, but Karma is its own statement. Where Coltrane built complexity through density, Sanders builds transcendence through patience and space. It's the student honoring the teacher by following his own path, not his footsteps.