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
They thought there was a market out there for instrumental music. They were trying to broaden their roster of artists. I got in on that.
You might have a slight edge in terms of leverage if you've had some past success, but I don't think that really goes very far.
The music is going to change anyway, whether or not the record companies get behind it or not. The music is there, and it's happening, and it's going on out there.
I think with the acoustic bass it allows you to explore the fuller dynamic range.
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 sat in with them, and I remember their jaws dropped. I could actually play. I had some degree of sense of time.
I think ticket prices are too high, but it costs so bloody much money to get anything together anymore.
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.
People who really understood the use of space and the fact that the sound and the silence are of equal weight and that what you're doing is really manipulating space. It's the same as a painting except that you're doing it aurally.
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 think Norah Jones is a perfect example. Here's somebody who was playing the music she wanted to play and did it with some conviction, and it happened to be at a moment in time when there was a highly receptive audience for that kind of music.