How Floating Points Made the Best Jazz Album of the Decade

Promises, the 2021 collaboration between electronic producer Floating Points, legendary jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, and the London Symphony Orchestra, is one of those rare recordings that defies every genre category while achieving something genuinely transcendent. Nine movements built around a seven-note harpsichord motif, four years to complete.

Sam Shepherd conceived the project after years of admiring Pharoah Sanders' spiritual jazz recordings. The initial sessions were intimate, just Shepherd on keyboards and Sanders on saxophone improvising in a London studio. The London Symphony Orchestra parts were added later, building orchestral swells around the duo's improvisations.

Two details explain the record's patience. Shepherd finished a PhD in epigenetics at UCL while making dance music, and Promises accumulated across four years of sessions rather than a booked studio week. It came out on Luaka Bop, the label David Byrne started in 1988 for music that fits nowhere, in March 2021, which is roughly why nobody tried to cut a single out of it.

The result is 46 minutes of music that moves from near-silence to cosmic grandeur and back. Sanders' saxophone enters tentatively, then soars. The orchestra swells beneath him. Shepherd's harpsichord motif repeats throughout, providing a meditative anchor. The dynamics require headphones or a good speaker system to appreciate fully.

Treat it as one piece, because that is what it is. The nine movements are index points on a continuous recording, and streaming services will shuffle, cross-fade and interrupt them if you let them. Turn all of that off. The quiet passages sit far enough below the loud ones that a car, a laptop speaker or a kitchen simply deletes the first three minutes, and the album stops making sense the moment you cannot hear the harpsichord underneath the strings.

Sanders passed away in September 2022 at age 81, making Promises one of his final major recordings. That context adds weight to an already heavy piece, transforming it into something elegiac. His playing throughout is restrained compared to his earlier free jazz intensity, but the emotion is overwhelming.

If Sanders is new to you, go backwards next. He played on Coltrane's Ascension and Meditations in the mid-sixties, then made Karma in 1969, whose opening piece The Creator Has a Master Plan runs past thirty minutes and travels from hymn to shriek and back. Hearing that first changes how the restraint on Promises lands: a player who spent decades at full volume choosing, in his eighties, to leave most of the space empty.

Critically, the album was universally celebrated. It appeared on year-end lists across genres, from electronic music publications to jazz magazines to Pitchfork and The Guardian. The project proved that boundaries between electronic, jazz, and classical music are entirely artificial when the musicians refuse to acknowledge them.

Shepherd's own catalogue is worth following. Elaenia in 2015 and Crush in 2019 are the records that made his name, and Cascade in 2024 went back to the dancefloor without apology. None of them sound like Promises, which is rather the point.

Promises matters because it models what collaboration across musical traditions can achieve when ego is removed. Shepherd didn't try to make a jazz album. Sanders didn't try to make an electronic record. They made something that belongs to neither category and both simultaneously.

https://floatingpoints.co.uk/