Jazz fusion sax star brought singular style to big hits in ’70s, ’80s
David Sanborn, a musical chameleon whose wailing alto saxophone helped shape the sound of jazz fusion in the 1970s and ’80s, as he sold millions of albums while adding his touch to the performances of dozens of musical stars from Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins to the Rolling Stones, David Bowie and Linda Ronstadt, died May 12 at his home in Tarrytown, N.Y. He was 78.
Statements on his website and social media platforms said he had complications from prostate cancer, which he had battled since 2018.
Sanborn, who won six Grammy Awards throughout a six-decade career, began as a sideman working in St. Louis blues and jazz clubs before appearing at Woodstock in 1969 with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.
By the early 1970s, he was a mainstay at recording sessions with high-profile musicians, playing memorable improvised sax solos on Bowie’s Young Americans, Paul Simon’s Still Crazy After All These Years, James Taylor’s How Sweet It Is (to Be Loved by You) (all from 1975) and Ronstadt’s 1978 recording of Smokey Robinson’s Ooo Baby Baby. He toured with Taylor, the Stones and Stevie Wonder.
Effortlessly sliding from pop to rhythm-and-blues to jazz, he was simultaneously performing in a group led by Gil Evans, who had been an influential jazz arranger and bandleader since the 1940s.
“I don’t think I’m particularly innovative, and I’m not sure I’m even a jazz player as such,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 1989. “I just have a sound and a style that seem to connect with a lot of people.”
That sound was bright, strong and piercing, often pitched in the upper register of the alto saxophone.
“When you’re playing with four other horns and an electric guitar, you’ve got to cut through it,” he told Newsday.
In 1975, he released the first of his 25 solo albums, Taking Off, which appeared during the emergence of jazz fusion, an electrified hybrid form of jazz and rhythm and blues perfectly suited to Sanborn’s style. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, his distinctive tone became a mainstay on so-called “smooth jazz” radio stations, predating other saxophonists, including Kenny G, Dave Koz and Najee.
Sanborn’s breakthrough 1980 album, Hideaway, sold more than 500,000 copies. His followup, Voyeur, in 1981, earned Sanborn his first Grammy, for best instrumental R&B performance.
His 1986 recording with keyboard player Bob James, The Other Side, went platinum, with sales topping one million, and won the Grammy for best jazz fusion performance.
Later recordings included the romantic Pearls (1995), with string arrangements by Johnny Mandel. Sanborn explored elements of hiphop on 1992’s Upfront, which Entertainment Weekly reviewer Josef Woodard called a “funkified, ear-twisting musical mix in which hiphop manners meet Booker T. and James Brown.”
Critics were not always appreciative of his work. Purists complained his style was not worthy of the label “jazz.”
“I don’t have any control over what people call my music,” he told the Christian Science Monitor in 1991. “I don’t call it jazz; I never have and I never will ... the rhythmic basis of my music is primarily funk music.”
In the 1980s, Sanborn made TV appearances as a member of the Saturday Night Live band and later in regular appearances with Paul Shaffer’s band on David Letterman. In 1986, Sanborn hosted a syndicated radio program, The Jazz Show. From 1988 to 1990, he had a show called Sunday Night and later Night Music.
David William Sanborn was born on July 30, 1945, in Tampa, where his father was stationed while serving in the military. He grew up in Kirkwood, Mo., outside St. Louis. His father was an ad executive, and his mother a homemaker.
At three, young David was stricken with polio and spent a year in an iron lung. He had to relearn how to walk and had other long-term effects. A doctor suggested playing the saxophone might help strengthen his lungs.
He was 11 when his father took him to hear Ray Charles. One of Charles’s band members, alto saxophonist Hank Crawford, had a formative influence on Sanborn’s musical approach.
“That music had everything to me,” Sanborn said in the Monitor interview. “It had elements of bebop, gospel, rhythm-and-blues; it was earthy, popular, soulful.”
By 14, Sanborn was sitting in with blues greats Little Milton and Albert King.
Later, he played with musicians including jazz trumpeter Lester Bowie and saxophonists and Julius Hemphill and Oliver Lake, who became key figures in the jazz avant-garde.
Survivors include his third wife, Alice Soyer, and a son from his first marriage.