Saxophonist

An alto Saxophonist with a signature squeal, David Sanborn is a musician at the height of his career. Indeed, after spending years developing his own sound, the artist now finds that other saxophonists are trying to imitate him. "A cursory twirl of the radio dial or channel selector might suggest that every commercial musician and would-be alto star out there is aping Sanborn's sound," observed Bill Milkowski in the introduction to his interview with the star for down beat. The Sanborn of the eighties, however—busy juggling live performing with studio playing as well as scoring films and hosting a radio show—has little time to worry about copycats.

The St. Louis native's struggle to the top began during the 1960s, when he played with rhythm and blues bands in the midwest. After sharpening his skills with Albert King and Little Milton, he headed for San Francisco, where he joined the Paul Butterfield Blues Band around 1967. By the early seventies he was gaining visibility for his work with such stars as David Bowie, Stevie Wonder, and Bruce Springsteen, and in 1975 he cut his first solo album, Taking Off. Since 1981, when he received a Grammy Award for best rhythm and blues instrumental performance for Voyeur, Sanborn has found his career on a stellar trajectory.

Although his playing is rooted in rhythm and blues, the saxman has made a splash in jazz circles, with a number of his albums securing top spots on the jazz charts. Sanborn, however, denies that he is a jazz musician. When down beat interviewer Gene Kalbacher noted that Sanborn used "a certain amount of improvisation and jazz phrasing and swing, which are essential ingredients or components of jazz," the musician agreed but qualified Kalbacher's remarks, explaining: "I don't see myself in a direct line in the tradition of jazz. I didn't come out of that tradition. . . . Most of the contexts I've played in have been either blues-based or r&b or straight-out rock & roll. What experience I've had in playing jazz has been pretty sporadic. . . . And I'm not trying to distance myself from jazz in any way. I'm just trying to clarify how I think of myself. See, I don't want to misrepresent myself, and I don't want to misrepresent the music."

Disinclined to be limited by any label, Sanborn has devoted himself to developing an individual style, and many critics and fans have credited him with success. But he has also eschewed his acclaim as an innovator, telling Milkowski that he sees himself not as an original so much as a synthesizer. "I'm not doing anything new," he remarked. "I was just distilling a lot of my influences. You know, I was always trying to sound like Cannonball or Phil Woods or Jackie McLean or Hank Crawford or other people I greatly admired."

Regardless of his tactics and his disclaimers, Sanborn is generally regarded as a saxophonist who has managed to create his own singular sound. "He goes for the heart," assessed down beat interviewer Robin Tolleson, adding that "a Sanborn contribution to an album may only be three minutes long, but always conjures up a range of feelings, and always leaves a mark." Similarly, Albert de Genova, also writing for down beat, commented that Sanborn has the ability to communicate "intense musical emotion to a capacity crowd . . . with every scream, with every honk, with every crying blue note" he strengthens "the empathy between musician and listener."

Discussing his technique with Tolleson, the artist explained that he enjoys experimenting with dynamics—gradations of volume—in his soloing not only because it's "another element of music and improvising, and melodic creativity" but because he believes "you shape a line using dynamics—in terms of attack and crescendo, decrescendo, and phrasing, legato, and staccato." In this respect, the saxophonist revealed that he has learned the most from Stevie Wonder, with whom he worked in the early seventies. "I picked up a lot of his little turns, and mordents, and appoggiaturas, and all that—things that he did on harmonica. And I think probably Stevie more than anybody else influenced some of the little grace notes—the mannerisms of my playing that I hear a lot of other people imitating when they're trying to sound like me. Those little 'da-de-aada,' those turns and stuff."

Indeed, because Sanborn's sound is perceived as both original and commercially successful, it has spawned many copiers. But Sanborn, who lived through many impoverished years before finding financial success, believes that it's fruitless to adopt a particular musical approach strictly for commercial purposes. "Because when you do that, you die inside," he reflected in his conversation with Milkowski. He continued: "The ironic thing is if you die musically then you die commercially too. I believe that. Maybe I'm naive in that regard. But I really believe that the true sense of being commercial in the long run is to be yourself and hope that people will buy that. But if you go into it thinking about trying to calculate what people are going to like and trying to figure out what they might buy and then you go and do that, then you're screwed."

The saxophonist, who defines success in terms of opportunities to make music rather than in economic terms, confessed to Tolleson that for him, even becoming a musician was a calling rather than a conscious choice. "I don't feel like I really chose to be a musician. I feel like it just happened, and that it almost chose me. It was part destiny, part free choice. Music became what I had to do. It was never something I thought about, nor did I have any goals or aspirations in that area. It was just my means of expression, my way of expressing how I felt about the world. It just became my voice."

Finding that voice has opened the door to many opportunities for the saxman. From his early days as a studio musician and member of rhythm and blues bands Sanborn has gone on to tour with his own band, score films, and host his own radio program, "The Jazz Show." But above all he has earned a reputation, in Kalbacher's words, for "rhythmic directness," for becoming "the alto saxman whose semisweet-yet-masculine tone and rhapsodic rhythm & blues drive have endeared him to the doyens of rock and pop."

—Nancy H. Evans