Words matter. These are the best David Sanborn Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
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.
You’re only as good as your last record.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Instrumental music is increasingly marginalized and there’s just no outlet, there’s no venue for it, in terms of media.
I kinda always wanted to be a tenor player, but I’m a small guy, and tenor was just too big.
When I make records, I never listen to stuff after it’s done. Ever.
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.
Music is just kind of an expression of who I am. It’s what I do.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Music is like an open sky. You know it’s out there… and there you are.
I always wanna be in the process of evolving and growing.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
