DAVID SANBORN
"You get to a certain age and you start looking back at things
that inspired you early on.” David Sanborn was born in Tampa,
Florida on July 30, 1945, which makes him a Floridian by birth. But,
he was raised in St. Louis, Missouri. He began to play the sax at
the suggestion of his doctor as a way to exercise his lungs, which
had been weakened by polio as a young child. His St. Louis rearing
exposed Sanborn to a new and wide range of music while growing up.
“I always wanted to pay tribute to some of that music.”
Langston Hughes asked this question, “What becomes of a dream
deferred?” I say that ‘a deferred dream will not be denied,
just put on hold for some day surely to unfold.’ Well, that
someday has arrived for iconic saxophonist David Sanborn with the
August 2008 release of Here and Gone, which features special guests:
Eric Clapton, Sam Moore, and Joss Stone. David Sanborn, up close and
personal …
Influenced by the music he heard growing up in St. Louis, Sanborn
reflects fondly on yester-year. “The music at that time was
heavily Blues based. Jazz, Gospel, and R&B were kind of all mixed
together and became part of the experiences of a lot of the musicians
that were making music at that time. They really didn’t differentiate
between the various styles. The blues was really an extension of the
kind of lives that they lived; an honest expression of their lives.”
Is that what drew you to “this” music? “I think
so. There is just something so immediate and emotional about whatever
that quality is that the blues has. That’s really what drew
me in.”
The spirit or the driving force behind the making of Here and Gone,
Sanborn said, was connecting to the music that he grew up playing.
He went on to say that the blues was the bedrock, the foundation of
his playing, no matter what the context. “Creating a musical
context was more conducive to expressing the emotional part of my
playing.”
Ray Charles, Hank Crawford, and Gil Evans are cited by Sanborn as
three of his biggest musical influences. However, the list expanded
as we spoke to include Gene Ammons, Stanley Turrentine, along with
Lou Donaldson and David Newman, whose nickname is “Fathead.”
Now, this is when I got a little something more. Check this out! I
said, ‘isn’t Fathead an odd name?’ And Sanborn laughingly
agreed, going on to say this. “You know, Ray Charles gave him
that name. ‘Did you mean this to say, Newman wasn’t smart,
he was asked?’ No, Ray responds, ‘just the opposite. His
brain was so big that his head was fat, because he was so smart.’
These were the guys that influenced me early on to want to play the
saxophone. Hank Crawford particularly, because he had such elegance
and simplicity and I mean simplicity in the most positive way in the
sense that Miles Davis had a great simplicity and elegance to his
playing. The idea was that the sound and the silence were of equal
importance; you used the silence to make the music as well. In other
words, the music doesn’t stop when you stop playing the note.”
Oooh, that’s a wonderful concept. “I learned early on
from him the importance of space in music. And “Fathead,”
what did he bring to the table that is still with you? “Fathead,
like Hank and Ray, grew up with equal parts of Jazz, Gospel, and R&B
in his playing. And for me, these are the three great forms of American
Music and they really formed the wellspring from which all the other
genres of American Music come from.
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