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
Ninety-nine percent of the music that was of any interest to me when I was growing up came out of the black community.
I tend to play in a way that feels natural to me. To me that's authentic for myself. I play by where I'm led by some sense of where I feel I'm supposed to be.
Music is just kind of an expression of who I am. It's what I do.
You never get it figured out. You just keep playing.
Its all about finding the right note at the right place and knowing when to leave well enough alone. And that's a lifelong quest.
When you have an acoustic bass in the ensemble it really changes the dynamic of the record because it kind of forces everybody to play with a greater degree of sensitivity and nuance because it just has a different kind of tone and spectrum than the electric bass.
But certainly the idea of making records that had a mainstream appeal instrumentally was nothing that we invented.
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.
I didn't go on the road until right after my second album.
I did the first album, and it did much better than anyone expected.
I did full demos of all the songs at home, and then I took the demos into the studio and played them for everybody, and we then went ahead and did live versions.
Well, if I'm really playing, I'm hopefully not thinking.
Well, I did all the pre-production and I did full demos of all the songs and then I took it into the studio and played it for all the guys and then we kind of took that as the template and did the album live very quickly.
To me, a record needs to have a focus. It needs to have a core.