David Sanborn
David Sanborn
David Sanbornis an American alto saxophonist. Though Sanborn has worked in many genres, his solo recordings typically blend jazz with instrumental pop and R&B. He released his first solo album Taking Off in 1975, but has been playing the saxophone since before he was in high school. Sanborn has also worked extensively as a session musician, notably on David Bowie's Young Americans...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionSaxophonist
Date of Birth30 July 1945
CityTampa, FL
CountryUnited States of America
I think a valid approach to being a musician is to take all of the experience of your life and filter it through your personality and send it back out there, and that's what art is.
I think as different songs kind of cross your path from one source or another, I approach them with the idea of, can I get inside this song and really kind of inhabit it and bring something of myself into that song?
I think ticket prices are too high, but it costs so bloody much money to get anything together anymore.
I was playing with James Taylor at the time. James agreed to let me open for him, if I played with him also. So I got to be the opening act and I got a lot of exposure that way.
I'm somebody that pretty much operates by instinct, and I kind of have to follow my instincts.
I was actually in an iron lung for about a year, and then I was paralysed from the neck down for another year after that. So I spent a lotta time just lying down as a kid. And some of my earliest memories from then are of listening to the radio.
My whole contention, and my feeling in general about radio is, not just jazz radio, or smooth jazz radio, or whatever-radio in general is, I would like to see a little more variety within each one station.
My recollection of listening to radio was listening to a personality on the radio play music that he was connected with, and having a wide variety of music to play.
My manager and I had been talking about trying to do a TV show. There was a series of shows back in the '50s, where they'd get a bunch of musicians together and they'd jam.
I sat in with them, and I remember their jaws dropped. I could actually play. I had some degree of sense of time.
I think the kind of chronology of the whole thing was that I was making records in the 70's and 80's that used pop production values, but instrumental music; like improvising with R&B kinds of song structures, but with improvisation in them, and pop production values.
I think the problem is when a genre or style becomes limiting, when it starts to define what you're going to do, then it becomes a problem.
I think with the acoustic bass it allows you to explore the fuller dynamic range.
I have a certain temperament, a disposition that I think lends itself to not playing outside the lines that much. But I do test the boundaries, certainly, and break one or two of my own. Some people are mystified by it, but not me.