Like Ornette Coleman, Farrell "Pharoah" Sanders spent much of his early career being told he couldn't play by people who thought they knew better. A ferociously powerful tenor saxophonist who has always approached music as the building and sustaining of a transcendental mood rather than theme-and-variations on tunes, Sanders emits an elemental roar that is one of the most distinctive sax sounds in the music. Since the acid-jazz boom of the early 1990s, he also found himself reinvented as a purveyor of hypnotic dancefloor soul-jazz anthems.
Sanders, who is 65 next month, can be an unpredictable performer, highly sensitive to the right playing company and audience. This show's combination of these elements must have met most of his expectations, because towards the end he performed a dignified shuffling dance, introduced his musicians in a holy-roller yell that tingled the spine, and then beat his chest and delivered King Kong roars to the ceiling. As usual, Sanders left his trio to do a lot of the work (he likes partners to build up an intensity he can re-enter at typhoon velocity, which doesn't always happen), but with a regular partner in the Herbie Hancockish pianist William Henderson, the show was in good hands.
The first half, by London's African Jazz Allstars, might have put Sanders in party mood, delivering jubilant townships jive through Pinise Saul's powerful vocals and fine solos from Cuban violinist Omar Puente and saxist Tony Kofi.
Sanders arrived to a Coltrane-quartet rumble of piano and drums (Coltrane hired Sanders in the mid-60s and became his biggest influence), unfurling a passionate free-ballad in guttural long sounds and searing chords. Sanders loped easily through a standard swinger, drifted in and out of a Latin groove, and mingled lilting, lyrical lines, reverberating low notes and banshee squalls in My Favourite Things. He can be fiercer and more engaged than this, but the standing ovation confirmed that he'd done plenty enough.
· At the CBSO Centre, Birmingham, tonight. Box office: 0121-767 4050.
