Pharoah Sanders, one of jazz’s most inventive figures who pushed his saxophone to the limit and felt equally at home in Indian and African music, died on Saturday. He was 81.

His record label Luaka Bop said he died peacefully surrounded by friends and family in Los Angeles.

“Always and forever the most beautiful person, may he rest in peace,” reads a label statement.

Taking the open-mindedness of the free jazz movement to new heights, Sanders practically attacked his saxophone, violently overblowing on the mouthpiece — of which he had collected hundreds — biting the reed and even screaming into the instrument’s bell.

Sanders, a student of John Coltrane who played aggressive solos on the jazz master’s late-career classic Live in Japan, was often viewed as something of a successor to the cosmopolitan legend after Coltrane’s sudden death in 1967.

Ornette Coleman – probably the most important pioneer of free jazz – called Sanders “probably the best tenor player in the world”.

But Sanders, who also played soprano and alto saxophone to a lesser degree, divided audiences and never achieved the same commercial success as Coltrane, Coleman, or other historic jazz innovators.

With solos ranging from screeching and shrieking to silky and melodic, Sanders has been described as the godfather of spiritual or even cosmic jazz, though the reticent musician brushed aside labels.

Among his best-known works was “The Creator Has a Master Plan,” a nearly 33-minute track off his Karma album on which Sanders sounds like he’s casting out demons before returning to a heavenly state.

Leon Thomas sings at the forefront of the counterculture on the track released in 1969 with the lines: “The Creator Has A Master Plan / Peace And Happiness To Every Man”.

‘Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt’ from Sanders’ influential 1967 ‘Tauhid’ album builds on guitar tones and a gentle xylophone paying tribute to African tradition, while Sanders storms in with a saxophone that sounds like anguished howling.

“I don’t really see the horn anymore. I’m trying to see myself,” he said in the liner notes for Tauhid, his first album on the Impulse! Label that issued Coltrane.

“And as for the sounds I get, I’m not trying to scream on my horn, I’m just trying to put all my feelings into the horn,” he said.

Farrell Sanders—he changed the spelling of his first name at the encouragement of futuristic jazz composer Sun Ra—was born and raised in segregated Little Rock, Arkansas, where he played the clarinet in a school band and explored jazz from touring artists.

He moved to Oakland, California after high school, where he first enjoyed the freedom of attending racially mixed clubs and had a fateful first meeting with Coltrane when they were buying mouthpieces.

He later went to New York, where he became temporarily homeless, worked as a cook and even sold his blood to survive.

He met Sun Ra while cooking at a club in Greenwich Village. When Sun Ra and Coltrane discovered his musical talent, they hired Sanders as a band member, with Sanders coming into his own as bandleader after Coltrane’s death.

In a 1996 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Sanders described his style: “I have a dark sound; a lot of the younger guys have a bright sound, but I like a dark sound with more roundness, more depth and feeling in it,” he said.

“I want my sound to be like a scent that people will like — something fresh, like the smell of your grandmother’s baking cake,” he said.

Sanders — distinguished in his later years by his long white beard and fez hat — dabbled in pop music, beginning with 1971’s “Thembi,” named after his wife.

But his mainstream direction was brief, and he often found more musical kin outside of the United States. In 1969’s Jewels of Thought, Sanders explored mysticism from across Africa and began Sufi meditation for peace.

Decades later, Sanders collaborated on The Trance of Seven Colors with Mahmoud Guinia, the Moroccan master of spiritual gnawa music and the guembri lute.

Sanders’ 1996 album Message from Home explored influences from sub-Saharan Africa, including Highlife, the pop blend of Western and traditional music that originated in Ghana.

He also explored the Indian form through his collaboration with Alice Coltrane, the jazz master’s second wife who became a yogi.

Sanders expressed the greatest admiration for Indian musicians, including Bismillah Khan, who brought wider audiences to the shehnai, a style of oboe commonly played in processions across the subcontinent, and Ravi Shankar, who took the sitar internationally.

Sanders, used to the sharing of energy within jazz bands, described Indian musicians as enforcers of “pure music”.

“Nobody tries to cut each other’s throats. There is no ego,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle.

About his own music he said: “I want to take the audience on a spiritual journey, I want to shake them up, inspire them. Then I bring it back with a reassuring feeling.”