Pharoah Sanders in Billboard, 1969–1974

Pierre Crépon

Introduction

Nonstandard music does not sell: this is a fact of life, except when, once in a while, it does. Pharoah Sanders (1940–2022), one of the key players of the 1960s jazz avant-garde, had a noticeable presence on the one readily available measurement for this aspect of an artist’s career: the charts. The following article gathers chart data on Sanders’s albums found in Billboard, the music industry’s leading trade weekly. Sanders’s albums appeared primarily, but not exclusively, on its “Best Selling Jazz LP’s” listings.

At its core, chart information is both meaningful and meaningless: it cannot be converted into more palpable units of measurement such as sales numbers. Chart presence has always, at the very least, however, carried some degree of symbolic significance, even when rankings were not derived from actual numbers, as was the case during the period under consideration here.

During that period, Billboard mailed forms to selected middlemen and retailers in the largest markets. Those forms contained preestablished lists of recordings that respondents were asked to rank as “very good,” “good,” or “fair” sellers. Blank space was provided to add unlisted titles. Points were then derived from those answers and rankings established. Fewer efforts were deployed to establish charts dedicated to jazz: only twenty-five outlets were surveyed and radio exposure was not factored in. [1]

If the validity of this fairly opaque procedure is accepted, it remains that the only thing charts actually said is that product A sold more than product B. They did not indicate how much A or B sold, what the extent of the gap between them might be, or give any idea of the market’s total volume.

In his book on Impulse Records, the company for whom Sanders started to record in the late 1960s, Ashley Kahn wrote that “sales reports collected by the label itself are long lost.” [2] In absence of archives, personal memories can provide pointers regarding how to interpret chart positions. In his memoir, Impulse producer Bob Thiele wrote that John Coltrane’s sales over a year usually reached a “tremendous” 25–50,000 units and that A Love Supreme was his bestseller, reaching a six-figure number. [3] Billboard did not yet rank jazz releases, and how the album would have fared is not known. Thiele also noted, in passing, that Sanders’s Karma LP (AS-9181) "was at the top of the Billboard jazz charts for 12 weeks,“ confirming that it does constitute information worthy of attention. [4]

Kahn’s book includes another memory of sales number, Impulse general manager Steve Backer recalling Gato Barbieri’s Chapter One (AS-9248) shipping around 100,000 copies and selling an “astounding“ 70,000. [5] Chapter One entered the Billboard jazz charts in November 1973 and stayed there for twenty-two weeks, until April 1974. [6] Sanders’s Village of the Pharoahs (AS-9254) exited the jazz charts simultaneously, after a shorter twelve weeks. It was Sanders’s last Impulse album to chart and not his best performing. Sanders’s final Impulse albums, Elevation (AS-9261) and Love in Us All (AS-9280), both released in 1974, did not appear in Billboard charts.

“Pharoah Sanders, who we have just signed, and has had no recordings released in five years, was a very high selling artist in the mid and late ’60s, as was John Coltrane’s music,” Backer said in a promotional piece for the Arista label in 1977. “Coltrane in fact had a couple of gold records, as hard as it is to believe. Pharoah Sanders sold a couple of hundred thousand records on his Karma album.” [7]

In the 1970s, no Coltrane record had actually been certified gold, i.e. as having generated $1 million in sales at manufacturer’s level or, starting in 1975, having sold 500,000 units. Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew, which entered the jazz charts in 1970 and dominated them for a sizeable chunk of Sanders’s presence, was only certified gold in 1976. Coltrane’s albums had to wait until reissues in the 2000s. [8]

In 1976, Billboard published a “Best of Jazz Albums” chart based on its year-end recapitulations for the 1969–1975 period. The number one spot was held by Bitches Brew. Out of 182 titles, Karma was ranked 106, Jewels of Thought 126, Thembi 162, and Live at The East 167. [9] Barbieri’s Chapter One ranked a little lower than Karma, at number 115. Barbieri’s album made it to Billboard’s “Bubbling Under the Top LP’s” category, but not to the “Top LP’s,” the general pop top 200 itself, unlike Sanders’s Karma and Thembi.

It should be noted that Sanders’s Arista “crossover comeback” album, Love Will Find a Way, gave him his highest “Top LP’s” position, peaking at 163 and staying there for five weeks in 1978. [10]

Many unknowns remain and much care should be exerted in interpreting the data below, but it does say something of the magnitude of the diffusion of Sanders’s music. A diffusion that went far beyond the territories generally covered by musicians who came out of the avant-garde, a magnitude corroborated by the breadth of the tributes that appeared in the wake of Sanders’s passing in September 2022. [11]