Top 35 David Sanborn Quotes

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 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.’

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

Well, I guess my unease with that is… I’m always a little uneasy with that phrase – smooth jazz, as opposed to what?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

You’re only as good as your last record.

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.

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, 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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