In June of 1965, two young saxophonists, Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp, gathered at New Jersey’s famed Van Gelder Studio as part of an 11-piece band convened by John Coltrane. At the time, Coltrane was leading his so-called classic quartet, one of the most celebrated bands in jazz, but he was looking toward a wilder, more expansive sound. And he’d enlisted a crew of hungry up-and-comers to help him get there. Joining fellow new faces like Marion Brown and John Tchicai on the date — the results of which came out the following year as Coltrane’s watershed free-jazz epic Ascension — Sanders and Shepp both brought their avant-garde A games, stoking the session’s fire with hoarse cries and bizarre textural effects wrung from their respective tenor saxes.

More than 55 years later — with both Sanders and Shepp now into their eighth decades, and sixth on the jazz scene — each musician is still pushing his sound forward, even as they’re inspiring today’s jazz trailblazers like Kamasi Washington and Shabaka Hutchings. As heard on their new albums, Let My People Go and Promises, the states of their respective art, and the paths they’ve taken to this point from those heady Ascension days, are strikingly different.

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