David Sanborn was important, not just because of the records he released or even the numerous sessions that he played on, though that is part of the story. He’s an important musician because he altered the sound of popular music, defining the sound of the alto saxophone for a generation of fusion artists and session musicians. Emerging in the mid-seventies, he became part of a nexus of musicians who were associated both with Saturday Night Live and with David Letterman’s Late Nite as well as the Brecker Brothers, who had experience playing with high profile rock musicians.
His sound was considered the sound to be emulated if you were an up and coming saxophone student, which I was. My private saxophone teacher, a really talented player and arranger as well as a very kind man, was named Bill Uher. I remember him telling me that I needed to keep my tone bright and not lapse into a ‘Guy Lombardo’ vibrato. Mr. Uher could play saxophone in any style, from classical to bop to lush big band arrangements, but when he played straight ahead, he adopted Sanborn’s bright, acidic tone. Because when you are a professional musician, you master the styles, you don’t let the styles master you.
In 1974, David Sanborn released his first record, Taking Off, featuring the Brecker Brothers and musicians such as Will Lee and Hiram Bullock, who were fixtures of the Late Night Band, where Sanborn was a frequent sit in guest. Far from the smooth jazz tag that Sanborn is often associated with, it’s a funky R&B-based instrumental record.
The same year that Taking Off was released, Sanborn scored a gig playing sax and flute on David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs tour. The tour kicked off in June and July, then took a month off, returning to the road in September. This was a huge tour with a skyscraper backdrop intended to stage the Diamond Dogs album theme. In October, Bowie scrapped the elaborate staging, dubbing the tour the ‘Soul Tour’ or the ‘Philly Dogs Tour.’ Sanborn continued to be part of the touring group for this leg of the tour, which included songs from the forthcoming Young Americans album.
Sanborn was an important part of that album. “There was no lead guitar, so I played the role of lead guitar. I was all over that record,” he remembered in a later interview. That’s true. He’s remembered for playing the iconic sax solo on the funky title track, but he’s on virtually every other track in some capacity. On some (“Win”) he’s mixed well into the background, while on others (“Fascination” “Right”) he’s out front, creating a large part of the song’s character. He can also be heard on the two-LP set David Live, recorded during the Soul Tour at Philadelphia’s Tower Theatre.
David Sanborn continued to release records as a leader yearly as well as contributing to a who’s who of pop artists’ hit records. In the ’80s he began to combine what some described as smooth jazz with an R&B focus. He worked frequently with bassist Marcus Miller and keyboard player Jason Miles, both of whom are also composers and producers. This formula proved be very successful, as Sanborn racked up six Grammy wins from a pool of 16 nominations. Naturally, this approach earned him his share of detractors. With the emergence of jazz’s Young Lions in the ’80s, commercially successful artists like Sanborn were suspect, lacking ‘real’ jazz credentials. A former band mate from high school jazz band posted a comment after Sanborn’s death about how while attending a university jazz music program, it was uncool to like Sanborn.
Which would be one thing if he were some kind of pretender who couldn’t play complex changes, or play fast, or freely improvise without any notes at all, but he could do all of that. As Nate Chinen noted in his comments on the saxophonist, he could really play. But he also knew, like a bunch of other instrumentalists who grew up during the rock and roll era, that he wasn’t going to make a living playing bop. On top of that, he made it cool to want to play the saxophone, to want to play music as a career, and to emulate rock and pop artists. I’ll be the first to admit–I didn’t want to be Bird. I wanted to be David Sanborn.
The saxophonist cemented his place on the hip list when he became cohost of the Lorne Michaels-produced show Night Music, an hour of late Sunday night television featuring a house band of Omar Hakim, Marcus Miller, Philippe Saisse, Hiram Bullock, Jools Holland, and Sanborn along with a variety of jazz, alternative, and avant-garde musical guests. A random sampling of those who appeared on the program during its two year, 44 episode run includes George Duke, James Taylor, Milton Nascimento, Eddie Palmieri, Mark Knopfler, Al Green, Marianne Faithfull, John Zorn, Donald Fagen, Curtis Mayfield, Philip Bailey, Van Dyke Parks, Pere Ubu, Philip Glass, Carla Bley, The Pixies, Sun Ra, and Lounge Lizards. It was the best music program that had been on since Midnight Special, and the best late Sunday evening program since Monty Python’s Flying Circus (IYKYK).
I still have VHS VCR tapes of Night Music which I will never part with even though I play them rarely, looking instead for clips from the show on YouTube and other internet venues. But it’s good to know that they are there, just in case it all goes poof and the whole thing seems like a hallucination. Because it seems hard to believe that a show this good that was about nothing but a group of talented musicians from wildly different backgrounds and sometimes different countries getting together to create music for an hour was on network television. Not Top of the Pops stuff, not American Bandstand or even Midnight Special. It was much more than that, and Sanborn, along with British pianist Jools Holland, were my passport to the music I wanted to hear, sometimes before I’d even heard of it.
Sanborn wasn’t the first saxophonist to become popular playing pop instrumental music–King Curtis and Boots Randolph had their time in the sun, but along with Tom Scott, he updated the idea that an instrumental artist could make, market, and sell records and play shows just like a rock band. Whether you classify some of his work as smooth jazz or R&B influenced jazz, there’s no question that David Sanborn helped influence the careers of future young saxophonists like Dave Koz and Mindy Abair.
Time and The River (2015) was David Sanborn’s last new studio release, and it’s a reminder of just how vital a musician he still was at this late date. Working again with Miller as well as a combo of young studio aces, he delivers a set of music that holds the listeners’ interest as well as relaxing the mind. Sanborn delivers energetic versions of D’Angelo’s “Spanish Joint,” David Amram’s “Overture from The Manchurian Candidate,” and a bonus track of Hermeto Pascoal’s “Little Church.”
Even with serious health issues, Sanborn had continued to tour until recently, and he had booked shows into 2025, as any professional musician would do. It is unfortunate that those concerts won’t be played, those audiences won’t get the chance to connect with the energy of his musicianship. Fortunately, future generations can still stream his music or drop a needle to hear what all the fuss was about.
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