David Sanborn

The more you play, the more you hear and the more you hear, the more you want to play.

You never get it figured out. You just keep playing.

Instrumental music is increasingly marginalized.

Its all about finding the right note at the right place and knowing when to leave it alone.

Eliminating the piano means that I’ve always worked closer with the bass than most players.

Blues is a tonic for whatever ails you. I could play the blues and then not be blue anymore.

If you don’t know what it is, don’t mess with it.

Music gives us a lot of things and it only wants one thing back… your attention.

I think I was supposed to play Jazz.

Back in college, when I got kicked out of school, I was still in school, I’d just written the song that got me my record deal. If I hadn’t gotten kicked out of school I wouldn’t be where I am now. Three months after that, I got my record deal and the rest is history.

To keep creating you have to be about change.

Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life.

That’s where I heard feedback first – from Les Paul. Also vibratos – even before B.B. King, you know. I’ve traced a hell of a lot of rock and roll, little riffs and things, back to Les Paul – it’s all there. I mean, he’s the father of it all: multi-tracking and everything else. If it hadn’t been for him, there wouldn’t have been anything really.

When you begin to teach Jazz, the most dangerous thing is to teach style.

An entertainer pleases others while an artist only has to please himself.

People love us when we play what we want to play but we’re starving.

I sought some kind of freedom in music, in the promise of transcendence and the idea that the purity and the innocence of a mythical god could somehow deliver me from darkness.

Music is a calling that you must bring your best to, whether listening, practicing or performing.

I don’t believe that a lot of the things I hear on the air today are going to be played for as long a time as Coleman Hawkins records or Brahms concertos.