Problems (ft. Pharoah Sanders)

"Problems" featuring Pharoah Sanders is Floating Points — Sam Shepherd — bridging electronic composition and spiritual jazz with reverent precision. Built around the late saxophone titan's breathy, searching tone, the piece unfolds slowly, Shepherd's modular synths and delicate keys laying a shimmering bed for Sanders to wander across. The production is gorgeously spacious, every breath and reed-rasp captured intimately, the electronics never overpowering but conversing with the horn like a respectful younger partner. Emotionally it lives in contemplation and yearning, a meditative ache that recalls the cosmic searching of Sanders' Impulse-era work while feeling entirely contemporary. There are no words; the saxophone is the voice, gnarled and tender, carrying decades of spiritual-jazz history in its phrasing. Emerging from the sessions that produced the acclaimed Promises collaboration with the London Symphony Orchestra, this captures the same alchemy of generations and disciplines meeting in mutual awe. It's music for stillness — dawn light, a quiet room, the kind of deep listening that rewards patience and surrender. Culturally it represents a beautiful late-career grace note for Sanders and a profound act of curation by Shepherd, a neuroscientist-turned-producer who understood that the highest electronic music could serve emotion rather than spectacle. Hushed, devotional, and quietly devastating, it asks only that you slow down and breathe with it.