David Sanborn born 30 July 1945

David Sanborn (July 30, 1945 – May 12, 2024) was an American alto saxophonist. He worked in many musical genres; his solo recordings typically blended jazz with instrumental pop and R&B. He played with many of the jazz greats and collaborated with David Bowie and Stevie Wonder. 

David jamming at 16 years old.

Born David William Sanborn, in the city of Tampa, Florida, he was brought up in Kirkwood, Missouri, a suburb of St Louis. At the age of three, he suffered polio damage to his lungs and his left arm and leg. At 11, having already begun studying the piano, he was advised by a doctor to switch to a wind instrument to improve his breathing. His parents loved jazz, and soon he was falling heavily under the spell of Hank Crawford, the featured alto saxophonist with the band of the singer Ray Charles, a player whose work combined the elements of jazz, blues and gospel music. By his mid-teens he was visiting St Louis nightclubs to sit in with such visiting R&B artists as Albert King and Little Milton and playing with a trio including the Hammond organist Don James, a disciple of Jimmy Smith. 

He studied music first at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and then at the University of Iowa. One summer in the early 60s he also attended the National Stage band camp in Indiana, where he met other promising teenagers, including the pianist Keith Jarrett, the vibraphonist Gary Burton and the trumpeter Randy Brecker. Back home in St Louis, he spent time with the trumpeter Lester Bowie, the drummer Phillip Wilson and the saxophonists Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake and Hamiet Bluiett, adventurous local jazz musicians who would go on to establish themselves as leading figures in the avant garde of a later generation. It was through Wilson that in 1967 he joined Paul Butterfield, with whom he made his recording debut on an album titled The Resurrection of Pigboy Crabshaw. In 1969 Sanborn  appeared at the Woodstock festival with Butterfield’s Blues Band, filling the breakfast slot on the final day between Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and Sha Na Na. 

                                    

Arriving in New York at the start of the 70s, he joined Randy Brecker and his brother Mike, the tenor saxophonist, in a horn section that was soon much in demand for recording sessions with younger artists. He was a member of Wonder’s touring band (1971-73) before joining David Bowie for the 1974 tour to promote the release of Diamond Dogs and to perform songs from the forthcoming Young Americans – on which, he said, he took the role normally occupied by a lead guitar. Many jazz fans were also becoming aware of him through his prominent role in the Gil Evans orchestra, with which he was featured on Evans’s recasting of Jimi Hendrix’s Angel, performed during a memorable concert at the Royal Festival Hall in London in 1978. 

Familiar to the US television audience in the 1980s through his appearances with the house bands on Saturday Night Live and Late Night with David Letterman, he also co-hosted, with Jools Holland, a series called Night Music between 1988 and 1990, whose guests ranged from Fontella Bass and Lyle Lovett to Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins. Sanburn with the guitarist Hiram Bullock and the drummer Omar Hakim, and bass guitarist Marcus Miller, were the resident band of the series. It was a friendship with Marcus Miller that intensified the influence of funk on Sanborn’s music. 

When his solo recordings took flight, after finding favour with disc-jockeys on jazz radio stations, Sanborn toured extensively under his own name, playing clubs and festivals around the world. His commercial success could be measured in his six Grammy awards, one platinum album (Double Vision, co-led with the pianist Bob James in 1986) and eight gold albums. 

He was certainly not unfamiliar with accusations that here was yet another white populariser enjoying the sort of material rewards denied to Black innovators. But he cherished his links with his origins, continuing to collaborate with musicians from the jazz world, including the vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, the bassist Charlie Haden and the organist Joey DeFrancesco.  When challenged on his authenticity as a jazz musician, Sanborn responded that his music came from R&B and gospel as well as jazz. “It wasn’t any one of those things but it was all of them kind of mixed together,” he said in a radio interview in 2008. “And that, to me, is kind of the essence of American music.” 

Sanborn was married to his fourth wife, French-born Alice Soyer Sanborn, a pianist, vocalist, and composer, whom he met at the Jazz à Vienne festival in 2016. His first three marriages ended in divorce. Sanborn died of complications from prostate cancer in Tarrytown, New York, west of White Plains, on May 12, 2024, at the age of 78. He was diagnosed with the disease in 2018. 

(Edited from Richard Williams obit @ The Guardian and Wikipedia)