David Sanborn – HuffPost 10.5.12

[Note: This is taken from one of my interviews with David Sanborn that I believe is both informative and inspirational.]

DS: …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.