Black Sabbath - Master of Reality & Pharoah Sanders - Black Unity

Through pure serendipity I threw on these two back to back this afternoonsy while OK got shellac'd by NC on the muted TV. Always best to watch basketball without the din of ex-jox warbling their inane horseshit over the top. Takes the art outta the game to add their half-baked lint trap observations. So, anycrap, these two records back to back as the snow melted, the Sooners got Tarheel'd. Something hit me. Whipped out my personal digital device and discovered, via the tubes -- I'll be hornswaggled -- these two records were released the same year - 1971.

Black Unity is just an genuine and beautiful record. At the same time transcendent and angry and desperate. And, just play along, I say the same for Masters of Reality - pissed, alone, a bit desperate but with an affirming belief in one's own power. Call the claim goofy or, in itself, desperate. Give it a try. There's a lot of love in each. And I got a good nose for love!

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Allmusic on Master of Reality: With Paranoid, Black Sabbath perfected the formula for their lumbering heavy metal. On Master of Reality Sabbath still were fresh and had a seemingly endless supply of crushingly heavy riffs to bludgeon their audiences into sweet, willing oblivion. If the album is a showcase for anyone, it is Tony Iommi, who keeps the album afloat with a series of slow, loud riffs, the best of which -- "Sweet Leaf" and "Children of the Grave" among them -- rank among his finest playing. Taken in tandem with the more consistent Paranoid, Master of Reality forms the core of Sabbath's canon. There are a few stray necessary tracks scattered throughout the group's other early-'70s albums, but Master of Reality is the last time they delivered a consistent album and its influence can be heard throughout the generations of heavy metal bands that followed.



Allmusic on Black Unity: By 1971, Pharoah Sanders had taken the free thing as far as he could and still live with himself. He was investigating new ways to use rhythm -- always his primary concern -- inside his music and more tonally strident ways of involving the front line in extrapolating tonal and harmonic diversions from the melodic framework of his music. To that end, he entered into a more groove-laden arrangement with himself and employed some funkier players to articulate his muse. Along with Cecil McBee and Billy Hart, who were frequent Sanders sidemen, a young Stanley Clarke fills the second bass chair, and Norman Connors fills out the second drum seat. Carlos Garnett accompanies Sanders on tenor, Joe Bonner on piano, and Hannibal Peterson on trumpet. Sanders also added a full-time percussionist in Lawrence Killian. The only cut on the album is "Black Unity," over 37 minutes of pure Afro-blue investigation into the black sounds of Latin music, African music, aborigine music, and Native American music, with a groove that was written into the standard three-chord vamp Sanders used, opening up a world of melodic and tonal possibilities while also bringing a couple of stellar talents to the fore -- Garnett being one of them and Connors being another. The heavy, hypnotic groove and a double-time tempo are controlled by dynamics and the groupings of instruments, signaled by Bonner with his stacked fifths, sevenths, and ninths. This is a solid, moving piece of work that seals the cracks in Sanders' vocabulary. His arrangement and the staggering of solos into the whole are magnificent. Here was Sanders as he saw himself in the mirror, a mass of contradictions, and the embodiments of the full fury and glory of music in one man.



HEAR Master


HEAR Black