A Conversation with David Sanborn – HuffPost 10.5.12

Mike Ragogna: David, let’s get into Then Again: The David Sanborn Anthology, your new doubledisc anthology. You participated in the track selection?

David Sanborn: Yeah, I actually selected all of the tracks that are on this particular collection. So what I did was I went over all of the CDs that I made at Warner Brothers or Elektra, which is all part of the Warner group over the last twenty years, from ’75 until sometime in the mid-nineties. What I tried to do was make this a little bit different from some of the other collections that had been put out because I didn’t really have much of a hand in putting together those collections. What I wanted to do on this particular one, when they came to me and asked if I would be interested in doing it, was to try to represent not only the chronology of the records and the music and the evolution from ’75 on, but also to kind of give the listener a sense of what I consider to be representative of the particular period from which the songs came. The first song on the CD is a tune called “The Whisperer,” which is also the first song on my first CD, so I thought that was kind of fitting. It kind of represented where I was coming from at that point, and kind of what led me to make my own CD, which is some of the people I was playing with at that time who were on that particular tune; Mike and Randy Brecker, and a piano player named Don Grolnick, who also wrote that song. I believe Steve Gadd is on that tune, and Will Lee’s playing bass. These were all people that I was playing with, with The Brecker Brothers in New York and in other situations in other cities. I think what this collection represents is that chronology, plus some things that had not been on other CDs–either things that had been alternate takes or, in particular, the second song on this collection, which is a tune called “Benjamin,” which is on a CD that is now out-of-print. But I thought it was such a great tune that James Taylor wrote for that particular CD. I thought it was a great representation of not only where I was at musically at the time, but I was also working as a side-man with James Taylor while I was also doing my own thing.

MR: Ah, you fell into my James Taylor trap! My favorite recording in the world is “You Make it Easy” by JT, on which you play an amazing sax solo. I brag about it virtually to everybody, including his son Ben Taylor, and his mother Carly Simon, who revealed that “You Belong to Me” was written in response to “You Make it Easy.” I love how all of you have been so interconnected creatively over the years.

DS: Well, that’s great. Thanks. As you pointed out, that’s kind of what was going on at the time.

MR: David, you’ve been “the sideman” and I hate that term, because the sidemen add a lot of the front and center “hooks” and meat and potatoes to records. Your saxophone playing, your particular style, including on others’ projects, is so identifiable, like you’re the featured artist, when you add your part to those records. How do you do that?

DS: Well, that’s a hard question for me to answer because, in the first place, it’s very flattering that you say that, but in whatever situation it was, I was just responding to whatever was going on around me musically. I was just reacting to that, and however I responded to that is just a reflection of how I saw my role in that particular song and kind of the nature of the way I play. I came out of the blues tradition, and I grew up in St. Louis, so that was a very strong aspect to my playing. When I hear the various things I played on as a sideman, I kind of hear a consistency of my approach to playing music in general, with just some slight adjustment to whatever the time, feel, or stylistic realities of the song are.

MR: What I mentioned earlier about your signature sound? There’s L.A. Law, where that sax could have only been David Sanborn. Not every musician can achieve as synergistic a relationship with their signature sound that you and these artists, whose projects you play on, have created.

DS: Thank you. 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. Most of the sessions I played on were with people I was already working with on the road, people like James Taylor, or people related directly to that, like Carly, and Linda Ronstadt and David Bowie and people like that. So it was kind of a natural outgrowth of being in live situations with them. Having the benefit of that added familiarity with their music and kind of how they dealt with their music on a day-to-day basis made going into the studio with them no great stretch for either James adjusting to me or me adjusting to James, because we had already developed a kind of language about how to do that. Fortunately, most of these people I was either on the road with or people who called me just to do whatever it is that I do.

MR: Let’s get back to the anthology. It’s a double-disk set that finally covers much more territory than previous collections, and it shows the artist from the artist’s perspective–in this case, yours.

DS: Well, it’s a little bit closer. I could’ve used one more CD, and then I could’ve covered some of the other things that I really would have liked to cover. At first I thought, “How am I going to fill two CDs?” and then I thought, “Holy crap, what am I going to have to leave off?”

MR: You have nice, healthy helpings from a few of the albums, and you even include things like your work with Bob James.

DS: Yeah, yeah. There was a lot that had kind of escaped off to the side and people didn’t really catch notice of it. I wanted to remind people and myself how really nice some of those tunes were. When I make records, I never listen to stuff after it’s done. Ever. So unless it’s by accident, some of these things I hadn’t really heard since I did them, like the stuff off the first CD. I hadn’t really listened to “The Whisperer.” I kind of had a memory of it. I remembered it being a good tune, but when I got a chance to go back and actually hear it, I thought, “Wow, that’s not bad, that’s actually really good.”

MR: Nice. By the way, let’s remind everyone you’ve also been a guest member of Paul Shaffer’s band on David Letterman’s show. You’ve had an amazing career, David. So what advice do you have for new artists?

DS: Well it depends on in regard to what? In regard to music, or in regard to the business?

MR: Let’s take music.

DS: 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. Don’t dismiss something out of hand because you think it’s either beneath you or outside of the realm of where your interests lie. 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 listen to it without prejudice. I just hear it for what it is and if it moves me, it’s irrelevant what genre it comes from. That’s just kind of the way I came up as a player and the kind of people I was around when I was growing up. That sensibility really shaped who I am as a player. I believe that it’s an important thing to keep in your mind, to always be learning something. Always be inquisitive. Always believe there’s something else to learn.

MR: Is that the advice you would give to the young David Sanborn who was part of Paul Butterfield’s band?

DS: Absolutely. And make sure you work as much as you can on playing the piano.

MR: It does seem to be the backbone.

DS: Well, absolutely. It’s the foundation of how you learn how to write; it gives you the ability to kind of visually see how chords move, and understand voice-leading. 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.

MR: Is that what you did when you worked on the Lethal Weapon movies?

DS: That was primarily because of a good friend of mind named Michael Kamen, who was the principal composer and arranger on all of the Lethal Weapon movies. He brought Eric Clapton and myself on to contribute thematic stuff. The way that movie was structured musically was like an opera, where Eric played the part of Mel Gibson and I played the part of Danny Glover. So when Danny’s character was on, it was me playing. That was the thematic element to it, and I worked on Danny’s melodic phrase, as did Eric on Mel Gibson’s.

MR: There are players you’ve recorded with over the years such as Marcus Miller and Steve Gadd, regulars in your musical circle.

DS: Absolutely. With somebody as talented as those guys, it’s hard not to go back to them, because they provide you a musical foundation that allows you be free about what you do, because they listen to you, they respond to what you’re doing, and they’re such strong musical presences that it’s a kind of situation that allows you to breathe and to leave space. And whenever you can feel confident enough in the forward motion of the music to leave space, that’s when you know you’re in a good situation.

MR: Now you’ve received a few Grammys of your own. Were you surprised when you won them?

DS: I was surprised by all of them. I was very grateful and very flattered to have received them, and I think that it was very comforting to know that I reached enough people in the musical community to warrant them saying, “We’d like to acknowledge you.”
MR: Is there one album where you look at it and say, “Wow, I’ve really created something special here.”

DS: There’s never one whole album that I completely feel is representative. I think that there are certainly cuts that represent what I was trying to do at that time. In that sense, if I did a song and it came out more or less how I envisioned it, or better, I would’ve felt pleased, not necessarily that it was the best thing I’d done in retrospect, but it was what I set out to do and it was a close realization of what my intent was.

MR: You have like twenty-nine songs on this collection, fifteen on the first disk and fourteen on the second disk, and you end the project with an interesting song that I relate to, having grown up watching the children’s classic, Hans Christian Andersen.

DS: Oh, so you know that movie, too!

MR: Oh, yeah! I heard “Anywhere I Wander,” and I thought to myself, “Oh, that…right!”

DS: That one was a sentimental thing for that very reason–I’m sure you understand. When I was a kid, that movie had a big impact on me, and it was the music that really did it. Tunes like “Inch Worm” and “Thumbelina” and “Wonderful Copenhagen” and “Anywhere I Wander.” That particular song was so moving to me, because it just had such a bittersweet yet hopeful quality to it. Somehow it really hit me deep, that song.

MR: David, I love how you referred to the song “Wonderful Copenhagen.” It was the most touching pieces I remember from that movie.

DS: Yeah, and “Inch Worm” was a great song.

MR: What a beautiful movie, we could talk for an hour on it.

DS: You know who wrote the music for that? Frank Loesser, the guy who did The Most Happy Fella and Guys and Dolls, all that great Broadway music. He was a Broadway songwriter.

MR: Yeah. I’m afraid that Hans Christian Anderson has fallen out of the culture.

DS: Well, yeah, and it was not a big hit when it came out, and I don’t think it was Danny Kaye’s favorite movie when it came out. I’m so emotionally attached to it that I can’t really evaluate it with anything close to objectivity.

MR: Me too. There are certain movies like that for me. I tend to love sci-fi as well, but that’s another discussion. I don’t want to keep you, because I know that you’ve got things to do.

DS: That’s alright, I’m enjoying this, so we can hang for a while longer.

MR: [laughs] Excellent! Let’s go to a big question. What do you think of the state of jazz these days?

DS: I think it’s better than people think it is, and the reason is that there are so many great players now. Everybody’s searching–people like Robert Glasper, people like Roy Hargrove, that are looking to reach beyond the boundaries of what has traditionally been called “jazz,” and that these guys, while being accomplished jazz musicians that can certainly play the repertoire, are also influenced by music outside of that particular culture, like pop music, hip-hop, rap, everything that represents the culture. 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. It seems to me that if you’re living in America in 2012, it’s pretty hard to ignore other kinds of music that are going on, that have currency not only with the public, but also have some musical value and depth. It can’t all be crap. If you isolate yourself in some kind of vulcanized vision of what music is and jazz is, this precious thing that if you breathe on it too hard it’ll blow away, I think jazz is the final evolving art form and while you need to pay attention to tradition, you really need to pay attention to the other side of the tradition, which is growth and change and evolution.

MR: To that point of your taste being ecumenical, I feel the same way. I guess maybe it’s because maybe I grew up in the same era you did, but I feel that’s the way it survives. Like you said, jazz can’t be ignoring what’s going on across the board musically, but it also seems like a natural process. And then I would throw in groups like The Bad Plus and Marco Benevento as examples of all that. There are people out there creating experimental jazz that, in a strange way, the genre hasn’t done before. It seems like when jazz experimented earlier on, for the most part, it became fusion or fusion-ish.

DS: Yeah, well, I think that was one period. Bebop grew out of swing music, and when bebop started to be ascendant, people were decrying in all of these publications the death of jazz, that bebop was killing jazz. They said the same thing about swing music in relation to Dixieland. “Swing music is killing jazz, it’s gone, it’s losing the thread, blah blah blah.” Everyone’s talking about how jazz is dead. Well, I’m sorry, I don’t agree with that. There’s room for all of the music. You need to preserve the great music of Duke Ellington and certainly Louis Armstrong, but it can’t stop there. It’s got to keep growing and changing. Some of that involves, if a musician is so inclined, to incorporate elements from music that other people consider to be outside of the canon of what they consider to be jazz. “That’s not jazz because you’ve got a real backbeat, or a hip-hop vibe or whatever.”

MR: I think also people defer to the jazz stereotype, which would be that everybody has to be the descendants of Miles Davis or John Coltrane.

DS: Yeah. There’s nothing more boring to me than hearing a tenor player who can play the s**t out of “Giant Steps,” but sound like Coltrane. It’s like “Yeah, okay, now what?” That’s great, but what do you have to say? Who are you? It’s about telling a story. You’ve got to tell a story. If you’ve got no story to tell or you’re telling someone else’s story, you’re just an impressionist and, okay, great, but how many impressionists do you need?

MR: Exactly. That’s the main advice I would say as far as vocalists, too. A lot of the “pleasant” vocalists out there are one thing, but when you have a vocalist who’s actually connecting with whatever the lyrics are and communicating whatever’s going on in the music as a story, that seems to be the most effective and the most…not authentic, but…

DS: …well, it’s authentic if you’re committing as a player, as an artist, as a singer, and you’re committing 100% to that moment. It’s all about living 100% in the moment, and when music does that with a level of expertise, at a level of technical competence, that’s really what it is. And then an interesting story to tell. That’s really what this whole thing is all about.

MR: Right, and everybody is, of course, a different kind of storyteller.

DS: Absolutely, and some people are more interesting storytellers than others. Some artists draw you in. You want to inhabit their world with them. You want to get inside those landscapes of Van Gogh. Get inside the situation of people in Rembrandt paintings.

MR: That’s why maybe the singer-songwriters are so endearing. You’re able to climb into those worlds they’ve created.

DS: Absolutely. But there are instrumentalists like that. Miles Davis was certainly one of them. Bill Evans is certainly one of them. Cannonball Adderley, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong… They create this world of their own that’s welcoming and inclusive.

MR: Absolutely. David, what are you listening to these days?

DS: There’s no one particular thing that I’m listening to, I listen to kind of everything. Right now, I’m being very random about what I listen to. I’m very random. I go to my CD collection and just reach in and grab something. The places that I visit the most often are early sixties Miles Davis and that Sonny Rollins period. The late fifties, early sixties Sonny Rollins, that’s always a great place for me to go to. James Brown of that same period, the sixties. “Cold Sweat” and songs like that are really always engaging to me.

MR: And also, the levels of improvisation. I think, to this day, you can still feel the “unexpectancy,” which is not a word, but you can always feel how the next phrase comes out. It’s always so…

DS: …surprising.

MR: Surprising.

DS: Yeah, it makes you laugh. One of the aspects of early rock ‘n’ roll that I like… People like Jerry Lee Lewis or Little Richard, you felt this element of danger, like while you were playing, at any moment, you felt there could be gunplay.

MR: [laughs] God, that’s the perfect way to say that. “You felt there could be gunplay.”

DS: And that edge, that little, “What the hell is going on here?” Elvis, Big Joe Turner, Mama Thornton, all of those people. Ray Charles! There was just really great edge to the music, but yet comfortable at the same time.

MR: And on the other side of that, you have artists like Dave Brubeck, who are more intellectual in their approach.

DS: More cerebral.

MR: Right on, more cerebral, and then you see his musical dynasty that ended up including artists like Donald Fagen.

DS: I think that especially with Paul Desmond, a lot of his brilliance escapes a lot of people, because maybe they were turned off by his sound. Maybe it was too light and airy and they thought it was too non-committal. But if you listened to what he was playing, it was just so inventive and creative and intelligent. That’s what I mean. I come from more of a blues-based tradition, but I love Paul Desmond because of that lyricism and that intelligence in his playing. It’s very different from the way I came up.

MR: What do you think is the major evolution from the seventies ’til now in David Sanborn?

DS: It’s hard for me to really put my finger on. Hopefully, I’ve gotten a little more concise about what I do, but it’s really a hard question for me to answer because it’s almost an objective question, and I can’t give you anything but a subjective answer. I can’t step outside myself to really say what that is. I can say what that is internally, but I can’t really give it much meaning. It has to do with expression and phrasing and just kind of trying to space things a little bit differently and play with a little more confidence.

MR: What I was going to say was that my observation would be that it’s “phatter,” and also more assertive.

DS: You mean now as opposed to then?

MR: Yeah.

DS: Well, possibly. I guess that’s possible. I would characterize it more as just confidence, rather than assertiveness, but I guess if assertiveness is confidence, then yeah, I would tend to agree with you. I think that because I’ve played so much for so long, I’m more comfortable just kind of letting go and responding to the situation. I have enough experience of being able to hear things and where things are going that in those few seconds or a minute before I play, I tend not to think, “Okay, how am I going to enter into this?” I don’t spend any time like that, because I have no idea what’s going to happen at that moment that I enter. The less I think about that, the better.

MR: Then it’s a form of improv, every time you’re going in and doing this.

DS: Absolutely. Every moment is, if you’re doing it right.

MR: So are you working on any new David Sanborn projects?

DS: Well, I just finished putting together the CD collection and I’m kind of in between things. I hesitate talking about what I’m planning because I don’t want to jinx it, but I’ve got a couple of things I think are really kind of exciting that I’m going to be doing next year. As far as this year I’m doing a couple of different things. I’m continuing playing some shows with my group. We’re going to be in the States in October and November, and then we’re going to be going to Southeast Asia and Japan in the end of November and in December, and then back at The Blue Note in New York in early December. I’m also doing a TV special with Don Was, who’s putting a bunch of artists together to play this concert for the Dalai Lama. I think it’s going to be a TV special. We’re going to do that in October, and I’m playing a tribute concert for James Moody in October in New Jersey. Things like that, things that are interesting to me. I’m trying to do more things that are like, “Wow that sounds like a fun thing to do,” and picking and choosing. I’ve always been a little picky about stuff, but I think even more than I used to be.

MR: Well, over the years, every time you listen to a David Sanborn record, no matter which one it is, or David Sanborn playing on others’ projects, a theme song to a television show or whatever, it always brings a smile. You’re that player.

DS: I’m glad to hear that. That certainly is the intention or the hope.

MR: Anyway, please, if you would, continue to be thoroughly awesome?

DS: Well, thank you very much, and I really appreciate your compliments. It’s very flattering.

MR: David, again, this has been a pleasure. All the best, and good luck.

DS: Thank you.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne