Pharoah Sanders was born Ferrell Lee Sanders on October 13, 1940, in Little Rock, Arkansas, the only child of a school cafeteria cook and a City of Little Rock employee. He came to music through the church, accompanying hymns on clarinet, and for a time expected to be a visual artist rather than a musician. At Scipio Jones High School in North Little Rock his band director introduced him to jazz records, and he switched to tenor saxophone, working local blues clubs and touring with a group called the Thrillers between 1957 and 1959. He graduated in 1959 and moved west to Oakland, California, to live with relatives, enrolling at Oakland City College and studying both art and music.

The Bay Area gave him his apprenticeship. Known around town as "Little Rock," he worked alongside saxophonists Dewey Redman and Sonny Simmons, pianist Ed Kelly, and drummer Smiley Winters. In 1962 he moved to New York City, where the transition was brutal: he pawned his horn more than once, slept on subway trains, and took work outside music to survive. Two things pulled him through. The first was the loft-and-club circuit around the emerging avant-garde, where by 1963 he was playing with Don Cherry and Billy Higgins and had come to the attention of Eric Dolphy and John Coltrane. The second was Sun Ra, who gave him a place to stay, clothes to wear, a chair in the Arkestra, and the name he would keep for the rest of his life. Sanders's own account was that his grandmother had wanted to name him for the biblical pharaohs; when he joined the musicians' union, "Pharoah," misspelling included, is what he wrote down. His first record as a leader, cut September 10, 1964, in engineer Jerry Newman's Manhattan loft and issued on ESP-Disk in 1965 as Pharaoh (later retitled Pharoah's First), paired him with a rhythm section far more conventional than his own instincts, and he spent decades distancing himself from it. He was on firmer ground with the Arkestra at Judson Hall on New Year's Eve 1964, subbing for John Gilmore during the Jazz Composers Guild's "Four Days in December" concerts, a tape that went unreleased until 1976.

Coltrane called him in the following summer. Sanders first recorded with him at the Ascension session on June 28, 1965, one of eleven players in a room built for four, and joined the working band that September. What followed is the most scrutinized stretch of either man's discography: Om (October 1, 1965), Kulu Se Mama (October 14, 1965), Live in Seattle from the Penthouse, and Meditations, recorded November 23, 1965, with Elvin Jones and Rashied Ali both at the drums. Sanders stayed through the group's final configuration, playing on Live at the Village Vanguard Again! (May 28, 1966), the July 1966 Japanese tour tapes, Expression, and the Olatunji Center concert of April 23, 1967, Coltrane's last public performance. Where Coltrane climbed, Sanders detonated: long, overblown, multiphonic solos that pushed the tenor past pitch into pure texture, and that plenty of listeners in 1966 heard as an assault. Coltrane heard something else, and the influence ran both ways. Ali, who arrived in the band the same season, stayed a colleague long afterward; the two of them turn up together again on Alice Coltrane's A Monastic Trio and on Journey in Satchidananda, recorded November 8, 1970, with Charlie Haden on the live half taped at the Village Gate.

Impulse! signed Sanders as a leader in his own right, and between 1966 and 1974 he made the run of records that defined spiritual jazz as a category. Tauhid, cut November 15, 1966, at Van Gelder Studio, was first, its title borrowed from the Islamic doctrine of divine unity. Karma followed on February 14 and 19, 1969, at RCA Studios, with vocalist Leon Thomas, Julius Watkins on French horn, Ron Carter among three bassists, and Billy Hart among two drummers. Its side-long "The Creator Has a Master Plan," built on Thomas's yodeled "umbo weti" vocal, got FM radio airplay, an outcome nobody had planned for a piece of avant-garde jazz. The albums came fast after that: Jewels of Thought (October 20, 1969), Summun Bukmun Umyun (Deaf Dumb Blind) (July 1, 1970), Thembi (November 1970 and January 1971), the single-track Black Unity (November 24, 1971) with Stanley Clarke and Cecil McBee on twin basses, Live at the East from the Brooklyn cultural center of that name, Village of the Pharoahs, Elevation, and Love in Us All. Pianist Lonnie Liston Smith anchored the band from 1969 to 1971, McBee held the bass chair across most of the run, and Joe Bonner took the piano seat for the later dates. Sanders also cut Izipho Zam (My Gifts) in January 1969 for the musician-owned Strata-East label, though it sat in the can until 1973.

Impulse! and Sanders parted after Love in Us All, and the next decade found him working out what to do with a style that had already made its point. Pharoah, recorded in August and September 1976 for Bob Cummins's small India Navigation label, was the most consequential of the transitional records, its twenty-minute "Harvest Time" floating on a harmonium drone played by his then-wife Bedria Sanders. Its reputation grew slowly for forty-five years and then all at once. Love Will Find a Way (Arista, 1978) went the other direction entirely, a Norman Connors-directed R&B session with Phyllis Hyman and Lenny White that his core audience largely refused. Stability arrived in 1980 with the San Francisco independent Theresa Records, where he made six albums in seven years: the double LP Journey to the One (recorded December 1979), Rejoice (1981), with Bobby Hutcherson, Elvin Jones, and Billy Higgins in a large cast, the two-club live set Live..., Heart Is a Melody, taped at the Keystone Korner on January 23, 1982, Shukuru, a reunion with Leon Thomas, and A Prayer Before Dawn. A Grammy came in 1988, shared: Blues for Coltrane: A Tribute to John Coltrane, recorded July 9, 1987, with McCoy Tyner, David Murray, Cecil McBee, and Roy Haynes, took Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Group. Alongside the Theresa run he cut a tight, straight-ahead quartet trilogy for the Dutch label Timeless, starting with Africa on March 11, 1987, and a series of Coltrane-repertoire ballad albums for Japanese labels, among them Crescent with Love, recorded at Sear Sound in October 1992.

The 1990s brought a second act as a collaborator. Producer Bill Laswell took him to Essaouira, Morocco, in June 1994 to record The Trance of Seven Colors with the Gnawa maalem Mahmoud Guinia, then produced his Verve return, Message from Home (1996), and Save Our Children (1998). Spirits, drawn from a July 4, 1998, Montreal Jazz Festival trio set with Hamid Drake and Adam Rudolph, appeared in 2000. He spent the 2000s and 2010s largely as a live act, touring festivals from Byron Bay to Melbourne, and in 2016 received a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters Fellowship. Then, at seventy-nine, he made the record that reached the widest audience of his life: Promises, a single forty-six-minute composition in nine movements written for him by the English electronic producer Sam Shepherd, who works as Floating Points, with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sally Herbert. Recorded at Sargent Recorders in Los Angeles in 2019 and completed with strings at AIR Studios in London in 2020, it was released March 26, 2021, reached number six on the UK albums chart, was shortlisted for the Mercury Prize, and topped year-end lists at Time and Paste. Sanders passed away at his Los Angeles home on the morning of September 24, 2022, at 81; Luaka Bop, the label that had released Promises, announced it, and no cause was given. Its expanded reissue of Pharoah, complete with two previously unheard live versions of "Harvest Time," arrived the following September and charted in three countries.

Sanders built his reputation on sounds the tenor saxophone was not designed to make: sustained overblowing, multiphonics, split tones, and screaming altissimo passages that traded pitch for texture, deployed at a volume and duration that made Ascension and Om genuinely divisive in 1965. What kept him from being merely the loudest man in free jazz was the other half of his playing, a warm, unhurried, almost vocal ballad tone that he used to open "The Creator Has a Master Plan" and then leaned on for the whole late period, from Crescent with Love through Promises. Ornette Coleman called him "probably the best tenor player in the world," and Albert Ayler placed him in the line of succession: "Trane was the Father, Pharoah was the Son, I am the Holy Ghost." His debt to John Coltrane was open, and the influence ran back the other way across 1965 and 1966; his own Impulse! records then supplied the working template for spiritual jazz, the modal vamp, the drone, the mass percussion, the chanted vocal, the title in Arabic or an African language, that several later generations reached for. Sanders himself declined the framing. "I never look at the word jazz," he said in his 2016 NEA interview. "I just play."