David Sanborn Quotations

Everyone goes through the ups and downs of living - fretting about the future, worrying about what happened. Music teaches us how to be in the moment.

Music is like an open sky. You know it's out there... and there you are.

Jazz music should be inclusive. Smooth jazz to me rules out a certain kind of drama and a certain tension that I think all music needs. Especially jazz music, since improvising is one of the cornerstones of what jazz is. And when you smooth it out, you take all the drama out of it.

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.

Jazz music by its very nature is just a conglomerate of a lot of different kinds of music.

As a melody instrument player, it's all about getting from one note to the next, and those intervals and how you navigate your way through these vertical structures of chords. You realize that everything's moving forward, and it's all linear.

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're on stage, unless you surrender to the moment, you're not telling the truth. I look for people that tell me the truth.

Instrumental music is increasingly marginalized and there's just no outlet, there's no venue for it, in terms of media.

Music is just kind of an expression of who I am. It's what I do.

My drummer, Gene Lake, is Oliver Lake's son. So I certainly have wide tastes, in not only what I listen to, but what I play as well.

I became a musician because I love music, and that is what has sustained me; it's not because I thought it was a great way to make a living. Music saved my life.

In regard to music, I just think that it's always best to have an attitude of being a perpetual student and always look to learn something new about music, because there's always something new to learn.

I always wanna be in the process of evolving and growing.

I kinda always wanted to be a tenor player, but I'm a small guy, and tenor was just too big.

I think that, given a real choice, people would like to hear something interesting, not something bland and right down the middle.

I think, in a lot of ways, it's easier to play a smaller room. You can exploit the quieter dynamics you would shy away from in larger venues.

I try to do things that keep me interested. And play music that moves me. I like to move around and play in a lot of different ways.

Ninety-nine percent of the music that was of any interest to me when I was growing up came out of the black community.

To me, the object of practicing is to allow you to play what you hear. But you're always hearing new things, so you never get to the end of it.

Well, I guess my unease with that is... I'm always a little uneasy with that phrase - smooth jazz, as opposed to what?

When I make records, I never listen to stuff after it's done. Ever.

You're only as good as your last record.

When you see the same familiar faces, it's nice when you get a chance to play with the same musicians. You start to develop this shorthand so everybody knows where you're at and where you're going, but then again, there are always surprises. But the more people are comfortable with the material, the more free you can be with the music.

All the music that I've made in the past I've believed in. I think some of it has been more commercially successful than others, but it wasn't premeditated.

Music is an expression of individuality; it's how you see the world. All art is, for that matter. You take how you experience the world, interpret it, and send it out there - express it - whether it's sculpture, dance or singing.

Pop used to actually routinely sell 10 million records. Now if they get there at all it takes them quite awhile.

Somebody like George Coleman has an approach and a pedagogical approach to teaching and can really kind of lay it out with exercises and demonstrations and different things that will improve your playing.

Maybe I call the shots, but it's not about them and me. It's about me as a part of everything.

I did the first album, and it did much better than anyone expected.

I didn't go on the road until right after my second album.

So I get it worked out beforehand so I can be really efficient in the studio.

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.

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.

But certainly the idea of making records that had a mainstream appeal instrumentally was nothing that we invented.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

I'm somebody that pretty much operates by instinct, and I kind of have to follow my instincts.

I think with the acoustic bass it allows you to explore the fuller dynamic range.

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 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 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 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 ticket prices are too high, but it costs so bloody much money to get anything together anymore.

The problem often times with trying to recreate some moment is that you kind of try to do part two or a sequel.

Usually there's some kind of clue, whether it's a rhythmic foundation or sometimes its very abstract - just an emotional kind of landscape - and then you just kind of start someplace.

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.

Mostly because I don't really feel that I have a methodology.

Well, I really enjoyed the process of making the last album so much that it's like kind of not wanting the party to end in a way.

Well, I had been doing albums that were a little more pop/commercial and it was really only reflecting one side of my playing and I felt the need to express another side of myself.

There are some logistical and legal nightmares tied to that show, ... for me, the great thrill of doing that show was playing with people I've been a fan of.

When I was 17 or 18 and it was time to figure out what to do with my life, I realized that I didn't enjoy anything as much as I enjoyed playing music. I felt that I had no choice: that I had to become a musician.

We're living in an age now where that's the business model. And it's kind of hard to operate economically in that kind of climate because it stifles creativity.

Well I think that one of the things that I've learned over the years - some of it by experience and growth, and some of it just by the gradual physical falling away at certain things - that its really important to try to make less mean more.

While St. Louis is technically regarded as part of the Mid-West, it's actually - geographically and emotionally - more part of the South. I mean, the sensibility of St. Louis is really very much that of a Southern Mississippi river-town.

We were in Europe, and what's great about going to Europe, is you get a chance to hear a lot of really great music.

You never get it figured out. You just keep playing.

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.

I'll just sit at the piano a lot an play like through different chord exercises and kind of just throwing my hands down on the piano from one chord to the next to see what happens.

I think that that's the way the music grows and changes and becomes new and creative and vital. It's by synthesizing elements from all around it and not to maintain this kind of rigid myopic kind of tunnel vision, in a sense, trying to maintain a certain kind of purity, or whatever.

In most of the stuff that I've done over the years as a sideman, I wasn't really a session musician, because to me, a session musician is a guy who makes his living in the studio, and I never really did that.

I think 'Horace Silver' was actually the first live jazz group I ever heard back when I was a kid in St. Louis. So along with most players of my generation, I have a real affection for the music of 'Horace Silver.

I look at the artistic process as like experiencing the world, channeling it through your personality and sending it back out there. That's the process.

I have pretty ecumenical tastes. I'm interested in a lot of different kinds of music, so I don't listen with a jaundiced ear to music because it's in a certain category, whether it's country or opera or hip-hop or bebop or whatever it is.

I just kinda like playing. I don't necessarily go on tour to promote my albums. I'm on the road all the time. The fact that I have a new record is out is a coincidence.

My name is on the thing, but the reality of it is, when I get up there on stage, I'm part of a band. I'm part of a unit. It's like a basketball team.

Instrumental music is increasingly marginalized.

I started out, obviously, as a sideman, and I had some really good gigs as a sideman.

To me, a record needs to have a focus. It needs to have a core.

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.

Well, if I'm really playing, I'm hopefully not thinking.

While I believe my background makes me one of the most qualified people there is for this position, the convergence of a number of factors bring me to the conclusion that I cannot effectively serve my country, you, and the U.S. maritime industry.

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.

I'm trying to kind of keep my mind a blank for a while, and just see what filters in, and be non-specific about what I listen to.

I'm moved by a lot of different kinds of music, whether it's pop music or R&B or straight-ahead jazz or free or opera or music from all parts of the world.

I listen to some things that I've done, and I think they're pretty good, but that's not one of them.

I'm one of those people that wants to bring a lot of disparate elements together.

I'm just saying that the basic concept of creative freedom and growth creatively is a continuous process.

I love working with these guys. But I certainly don't begrudge them when they want to go off and do their own stuff.

If you're playing with somebody from another idiom, you can't react to them in the same way that you react to somebody that is closer to your idiom. You don't fall into the same habits. You find a new way of communicating.

No, it's unfair to the musicians and the people that work for the record labels, because they're scrambling to make their numbers every month or three months, or they're out of a job.

I hope this doesn't sound like false humility, because I don't mean it to, but I'm just a member of the band.

The audience is interested in different stuff, not the same old, same old.

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.

I know guys that live in New York, but I never see them play because they're always out on the road. I run into them in Europe.

But I never had any illusions at that time that it was going to be how I was going to make a living. I thought, well, I'll make a solo record, and it'll be fun.

But hey, look, I became a musician because I love music.

I didn't try to think what my audience wanted and then make the music accordingly. I made the music and hoped that as many people liked it as possible.

I remember one summer, right after my second album came out, James Taylor was nice enough to allow us to open for him.

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.

And I think that in the case of these last few - the musicians I had - the reasons I used the same people I did on the two albums was I really felt that these guys were not only great players in their own right but really understood the concept of functioning as a band.

And record companies are always quick to blame piracy and the Internet but I think that's only a small part of it. I think it's the corporate bottom line mentality.

It's tough to be in a relationship with a musician, because it reads sometimes as this ego and self-involvement when it's really just concentration and focus.

It's always difficult to define what jazz is or what jazz isn't. To me, the only definition that I can think of is it's music where a lot of different elements are played at the same time. The harmonic, the melodic... You're pushing the boundaries on every level. That could be true of rhythm and blues as well. I'm a musician.

I basically played the music that I felt all my life, and whatever label people put on it is kind of really none of my business.