At the end of her Late Junction episode on January 1, New Year, New Horizons, dedicated to “sounds of hope and kindness”, the wonderful Jennifer Lucy Allan played Pharoah Sanders’s Love Will Find a Way in its epic entirety of 14 minutes, because she “absolutely refuse[d] to cut this”. She also said that Love Will Find a Way is her “absolute favorite feel good, spirit lifting track of all time” and that she used to listen to it once a week.

There is very little music that can be listend to weekly over years without loosing its power for the listener. To say about a piece of music that it can be listened to repeatedly without wearing out is therefore one of the highest praises it can be given. Love Will Find a Way is certainly such a piece of music, which is all the more astonishing, because it is a very simple piece of music.

Love Will Find a Way is the first piece on side B of Pharoah (1977). This record has received mostly bad reviews. Here is an example:

“Pharoah (aka Harvest Time) (1977, India Navigation) marked an ebb in his creativity. It features one of his least interesting bands on lesser material. Bassist Steve neil and drummer Greg Bandy are the only high points of Sanders’s arrival at rock bottom.”

(Todd S. Jenkins: Free Jazz and Free Improvisation: An Encyclopedia, Volume 2, Westport, Conn, 2004, p. 299)

Jenkins does not mention guitarist Tisziji Muñoz, who plays the killer guitar solo on Love Will Find a Way. This solo is special, one line only, no tricks at all, but pure musical content, unique guitar playing, in spirit the equivalent to Sanders’s sax playing. Sanders himself praises the spiritual quality of Muñoz’s playing:

“Tisziji is a man of self-knowledge. He is the kind of genius who has to write his own books and play his own music. He thinks and plays on a higher level. Tisziji plays with that spiritual quality that is about being Free. That is in his music, that unique Sound. If you want to know about Tisziji, you have to listen to his music.”

Pharoah Sanders about Muñoz, cited on his web page.

Jenkins sees Sanders’s musical development in the 1970s as a move away from Coltrane towards “the popular mainstream”. This bias prevents him form hearing the musical quality of Love Will Find a Way and the exceptionality of Tisziji Muñoz’s guitar playing.

The “least interesting band” on Love Will Find a Way:

Bass – Steve Neil
Drums – Greg Bandy
Guitar – Tisziji Muñoz
Organ – Jiggs Chase
Percussion – Lawrence Killian
Tenor Saxophone, Percussion, Vocals – Pharoah Sanders