David Sanborn Speaks

Courtesy of Radio & Records - Nov. 21, 2003

David Sanborn, born July 30, 1945 in Tampa, is the most prolific and emulated pop, R&B, and crossover/fusion saxophonist of the past 30 years. In the early days of his career his uniquely passionate, emotional alto sound supported many Chicago blue greats, such as Albert King and Paul Butterfield (in whose psychedelically ablaze band Sanborn played at Woodstock.)

After playing with Gil Evan's band in 1973, Sanborn joined pop and rock acts, including Stevie Wonder, The Brecker Brothers, David Bowie, James Taylor, The Eagles, The Rolling Stones and Aretha Franklin, as a featured soloist. As America's first-call alto sax session player, his expressive performances - such as his immortal solo on Bowie's "Young Americans" - have graced countless artists' recordings. In fact, later in the evening of this interview he was scheduled to play a Lenny Kravitz session.

Exceptionally articulate and personally charming, Sanborn was chosen by Frank Cody to host a radio show for NBC's Source Network and for two seasons his late-night TV show on NBC presented duets by artists from diverse genres, such as Leonard Cohen and Sonny Rollins. Sanborn also sat in regularly on "Late Night with David Letterman." Sanborn's illustrious solo recording career began in1975 at Warner Bros. His latest album for Verve is timeagain, and I spoke with him recently about that project and the state of smooth jazz.

R&R: First I must congratulate you on timeagain. It's a wonderful achievement that our mutual friend Steve Williams described as Pearls II when he previewed it for me months before its release.

DS: I appreciate the comparison. There's a lot more of an acoustic reality to this record than there has been on some of my others. My motivation was to make a record that has a more intimate quality to it. That seems to be the direction that I'm going in.

R&R: Your choice of cover songs is always extremely imaginative, and your approach to them too. What is your intention when you do a cover?

DS: I don't go out of my way to find a tune to do for any reason other than that something about it resonates in me now in the same way it did when the song first came out. What I like about certain kinds of music and certain artists is that when you hear the song, you enter a world that is that or that artist, and for however long you're there, you are enveloped in that reality.

In the case of this particular record, there are songs - "Tequila" and "Harlem Nocturne" - that have always had a noir-ish, tough quality that made them almost punch line, but they never had that quality for me. There was more an element of danger, a mysterious kind of thing.

R&R: One of your most offbeat choices on timeagain is "Cristo Redentor," an absolutely incredible song, and one very rarely covered. What made you choose it?

DS: It just kind of came to me. I really responded to it when Donald Byrd recorded it back in the late ‘60s. It has a very introspective, meditative quality that I relate to. That's the quality that I respond to and always relate to in music.

R&R: "Coming' Home Baby" was No.1 for 11 weeks - longer than any song in 2003. You have been very outspoken in your criticism of smooth jazz radio in the past, but I wonder whether it's easier for you to love smooth jazz when smooth jazz loves you?

DS: I don't mean to single out smooth jazz; I can be equally critical of jazz shows that are more mainstream. What seems to be happening in radio now is a very exclusionary kind of attitude.

R&R: Meaning?

DS: It's what they don't play. My feeling is that if you're going to use jazz in your description, the word jazz covers a lot of ground. When you apply the modifier smooth, that can have a lot of connotations. Smooth jazz, to me, can mean Miles Davis ballads or John Coltrane ballads. I don't mean to be hypercritical of smooth jazz: I am equally as critical of the so-called jazz police, the people who say this is and this isn't jazz.

I understand the impulse on that side to be kind of protective of a music that is becoming increasingly marginalized in this culture, but I also have to say that I've sensed a different attitude recently, especially since I've gone around the country and done interviews with this record. I've felt a real change among some smooth jazz programmers who want to stretch the boundaries and open playlists a bit.

When a format grows nameless and faceless, it's terrible for the artist and it's definitely terrible for the format, because then there is nothing to define it and nothing to get excited about. Maybe what is working in smooth jazz right now is not having people get excited about anything. Maybe it's all about the format just being there, unobtrusive and indistinguishable from any other easy listening station.

Smooth jazz radio is an easy target - it's just what's right in front of me - but its shortcomings are not limited to the format. You'll hear the same complaint from country musicians and pop musicians. It's the balkanization of these formats, where everything becomes so homogenized after a while that you don't get a representation of a full range of human expression through the medium of music. I think that short-changes people. To me, music isn't a lifestyle accessory with a disposable aspect to it.

R&R: Music seems to have far less cultural importance in today's consumer-driven society than it once did - and not that long ago.

DS: In America there's always been an uneasy balance between art and commerce. That's true of music and journalism and a lot of other mediums. It's just when the balance becomes so overwhelmingly commerce and so minimally art that it becomes trouble to me. Then it become just about product. You start to feel that you're selling cat food. Maybe it's because there aren't many expressions of different points of view as a result of consolidation. A few companies own most of the radio stations, and there's pretty much one point of view that gets expressed.

Clear Channel, for example, is a publicly held company that reports to its stockholders. They have to show a profit every quarter. What are they going to do as businessmen? What's their obligation to the community? There may be two different questions, but the answers are certainly interdependent.

R&R: What issues and challenges do you, as an artist, face in this reality?

DS: Quarterly reality is killing the record business. It's incredibly frustrating not just for artists, but also for the people who work for record companies. In the last six or eight months Universal cut about 1.500 people. Now Universal plans to buy DreamWorks' music division.

R&R: For $100 million.

DS: So what does that say? It means we're selling cat food. I grew up, like you, in a time when music was a cultural force for change, not merely a commodity or an advertisement for something else.

R&R: In June 2002 David Bowie was quoted in the New York Times as saying, "I don't know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, because it's not going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way. The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place in 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it… I'm confident that copyright, for instance, and authorship and intellectual property are in for such a bashing. Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So take advantage of these last few years, because none of this will ever happen again. You better be prepared for doing a lot of touring, because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left." Do you agree?

DS: That's pretty harsh way of saying it, but in essence, that's the truth.

R&R: What's your take on the general state of the music industry?

DS: The record companies are slow out of the gate with change, and they blew it big time early on.

R&R: Can the music business recover from the current downturn?

DS: There is a difference between talking about music and talking about the music business. The music business is pretty much on its last leg. Recordings once were advertisements for live shows. They weren't as big a part of the economic pie for an artist as they became in the '60s and '70s. When I started out, no artist owned his publishing. That really was an oddity for someone like Irving Berlin.

Bob Dylan was one of the early ones in our generation who managed to hold on to his publishing. That began to change everything for musicians, because the money was in writing and publishing. Overnight, singer-songwriters became a big deal, and the money just exploded. People like folk singers were making millions of dollars.

All of a sudden music moved into another era, and in the early stages there still enough youthful idealism. I remember the slogan from those ads Columbia did: "The man can't take our music." Columbia was the man, but there was still a sense of change and positive attitude about it. I don't mean total disrespect to lawyers and accountants, because I have one or more of each, but when they started running the business and making the decisions instead of record guys like Walter Yetinkoff, Bob Krasnow, Clive Davis and Mo Ostin, who were passionate about the music, it's like what happened with Vegas.

R&R: Which morphed from someplace sleazy and fascinating into a family-oriented theme park?

DS: It's like blood without plasma! The nature of the business has changed. We can bitch and moan about it all we want, but the genie is out of the bottle. The Internet is here. Record companies are being a little disingenuous blaming the decline of the business on piracy.

I don't mean to minimize the impact of privacy, because that's part of it, but the motivation to download stuff is not just because people want to get something for nothing. It's also that there's not much out there that they to buy, especially younger kids. They hear a record with one or two good cuts and say, "Why should I buy the whole record for $12 when I only like two tunes? I'm going to download them instead."

R&R: How are your CDs sales now compared to the past?

DS: Nobody is selling as many records as they use to.

R&R: But your records have never contained only one or two good tracks, plus you're at the top of you artistry. How do you explain the decline in your sales?

DS: My audience and the audience of my generation tend to be more passive. It takes a lot more to get them going today. Maybe music does not play as big a part in their lives as it once did. Maybe I don't represent to them what I represented to them in the '70s and '80s. Maybe now they want to buy Norah Jones or Diana Krall and music that suits their lifestyle better. I don't market research what I do before I do it; it's the luck of the draw for me. I do a record and hope lots of people are going to live it, but ultimately, I don't have any control over it. I am unwilling and unable to try to figure out what people want before I do it.

R&R: Have you ever downloaded a song?

DS: Never have. I still like the experience of getting a CD, but I also have an unusual attitude, and I don't know if anybody shares it: I don't particularly like the sound of CD. When I listen to a CD as opposed to a record, it does not excite me as much as listening to an album. There is a coldness and surreality. The biggest battles I have always fought making CDs is trying to warm them up. I listen to CDs because they are handier, but I don't get as emotionally involved with them as I did with records.

R&R: What do you think listeners are looking for in smooth jazz?

DS: I don't know. That's not my job. I don't want it to be my job. I have an entirely different set of motivations for doing what I do. Mine is to express myself and respond to what's going on around me in a non-articulated way. I react to what's around me, but I don't do it in any specific way. That's as close as I can get to a description of what I do. You send the experience of the world filtered through your own personality back out there. A certain part of that equation is your interior landscape, and a certain part of it is your perception filtered through that experience.

R&R: What do you want for yourself?

DS: I want to be able to continue to do what I'm doing. I want to continue to make music. I would like to make a living playing music, whatever is involved.

R&R: I imagine that one of the most rewarding aspects of being an artist is speaking to people and being heard.

DS: I certainly appreciate an audience out there, because it becomes a circuit. You get energy from them, and you send it back out there.

R&R: Like a feedback loop.

DS: Yes it is, exactly. You get a lot of payback from that. It's a great profession.

R&R: Most idealists have exacting standards along with great hopefulness. How does the future look from your perspective?

DS: I'm really hopeful that music does have meaning in people's lives. I always want to believe the best of people. Maybe right now it's just harder to get to people. I don't know exactly what that is. My response is to just continue to go out there and play and try to connect with as many people as I can. I think that music is a healing force in the world.

R&R: I'm with you.

DS: On so many levels music clarifies, and it inspires and enriches people's lives. Whatever happens in terms of how music gets to people, the fact of the music is always here. Whatever the new model becomes that's what needs to happen. It probably has something to do with everybody getting a little less greedy, including musicians. I certainly don't think it will be in the same way that it was. The important thing is that the music is always going to be there and that the impulse to make music is always going to be there. Everything else has just got to work out. Music is not going to disappear, but the economic models are going to change radically. Music was around a long time before there were radio or records.