David Sanborn Quotes

#1. 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.

David Sanborn

#2. 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.

David Sanborn

#3. 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.

David Sanborn

#4. 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.

David Sanborn

#5. 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.

David Sanborn

#6. 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.

David Sanborn

#7. 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.

David Sanborn

#8. 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.

David Sanborn

#9. 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.

David Sanborn

#10. 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.

David Sanborn

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

David Sanborn

#12. 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.

David Sanborn

#13. 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.'

David Sanborn

#14. 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.

David Sanborn

#15. 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.

David Sanborn

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

David Sanborn

#17. 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.

David Sanborn

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

David Sanborn

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

David Sanborn

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

David Sanborn

#21. 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.

David Sanborn

#22. 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.

David Sanborn

#23. 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.

David Sanborn

#24. 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.

David Sanborn

#25. 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.

David Sanborn

#26. 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.

David Sanborn

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

David Sanborn

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

David Sanborn

#29. 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.

David Sanborn

#30. 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.

David Sanborn

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

David Sanborn

#32. 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.

David Sanborn

#33. 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.

David Sanborn

#34. 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.

David Sanborn

#35. 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.

David Sanborn

#36. 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.

David Sanborn

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

David Sanborn

#38. 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.

David Sanborn

#39. 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.

David Sanborn

#40. 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.

David Sanborn

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

David Sanborn

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

David Sanborn