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Music
Pharoah Sanders

When

May 13, 2008 – May 17, 2008

Daily (8:30 & 11pm)

Where
Birdland (315 W 44th St, 212.581.3080)
Price
$35 - 45
Details
http://www.birdlandjazz.com/
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Pharoah Sanders is not the Kangol-clad, cable-knit-sweater-wearing, electric-clarinet kind of jazz musician. A link between Coltrane's free-form experiments and the fusion of the '70s and '80s, he's done more to popularize and legitimate rule-bending dissonance than practically any other living artist (save, perhaps, Ornette Coleman). Sure, in recent years he's veered slightly toward martini-bar fodder, but beneath this slick facade lurks the same dense, unhinged spectacle that once re-articulated the possibilities of the tenor sax. Don't worry too much about things getting dull; even numbers that start as tappity-tap tend to end with a kaboom.

Nick Earhart