Tisziji Muñoz

Tisziji Muñoz has earned recognition simultaneously as a guitarist whose playing often features spontaneous lyrical eruptions and as a dedicated spiritual adept whose yogic outlook has drawn unqualified admiration from figures such as Pharoah Sanders, Rashied Ali, Marilyn Crispell, Henry Kaiser, and Bob Rakalam Moses. Elements of his most inspired guitar work align with approaches associated with Carlos Santana, John McLaughlin, and Sonny Sharrock. Brooklyn served as his birthplace on July 15, 1946; he took up drumming at age three and, during his teenage years, participated among players connected to Mongo Santamaria. A ukulele constituted his initial stringed instrument. In 1959 he helped establish the interracial doo wop ensemble the Arrogants, whose remaining members consisted of Sal Giarraffa, Franky Ayala, Marshall Rivera, and Augie Miuzzo. The quintet performed on sidewalks and in ballrooms, committing to disc the earliest of its three released 45 rpm singles in 1960. Two years afterward the Arrogants traveled to the West Coast to cut “Canadian Sunset” b/w “Mirror Mirror,” supported instrumentally by the Mar-Keys, and maintained their collective activity through 1965. Muñoz completed U.S. Army service as a drummer in the 440th General’s Band, received an honorable discharge in 1969, and settled in Toronto, where he engaged with that city’s creative-music scene. There he appeared as guitarist in the productions Hair and Godspell while forming an enduring association with keyboardist Paul Shaffer, later widely known as musical director for Late Night with David Letterman.

During the mid-1970s Muñoz relocated to New York and initiated a six-year partnership with Pharoah Sanders, appearing on the saxophonist’s India Navigation album Pharoah, issued in 1977. His own debut release, Rendezvous with Now, followed on the same label in 1978. By 1984 he had taken up residence in Schenectady, where he established both Anami Music Productions and the spiritual center called The Illumination Society. Since the early 1990s he has maintained an extensive working relationship with bassist Don Pate. Additional recorded collaborations with Pharoah Sanders comprise Spirit World, issued by Harmonia Mundi in 2000, and Divine Radiance, captured in the immediate wake of the 2001 World Trade Center attacks and released by Dreyfus in 2003. Muñoz’s sessions alongside Pharoah Sanders, Rashied Ali, Ravi Coltrane, and Marilyn Crispell rank among his strongest statements. A practitioner of Surat Shabda Yoga—a discipline rooted in the cosmology of sound currents and the profundity of silence within the eternal present—he has adopted the motto “not entertainment, inner-attainment.” His plainspoken poetic articulation of ideas occasionally recalls the prose of Sun Ra. Numerous volumes have appeared under his name, among them an incisive examination of human sexuality that offers guidance to women whose dignity has suffered violation. Pharoah Sanders has stated that Muñoz “…thinks and plays on a higher level, with that spiritual quality that is about being free.” The esteem in which numerous advanced creative musicians hold him as a spiritual master supplies a further facet to the profile of this singular artist.