David Sanborn

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

Instrumental music is increasingly marginalized.

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.

I’ll always remember when I first heard Lester [Young]. I’d never heard anyone like him before. He was a stylist with a different sound. A sound I’d never heard before or since. To be honest with you, I didn’t much like it at first.

There’s a sadness to all kinds of music if you want to hear it. There’s also happiness to it if you want to hear it. Blues was started by the slaves and I think everybody thinks that it all should be sad… even some of the slaves had fun with it.

Composers tend to assume that everyone loves music. Surprisingly enough, everyone doesn’t.

In classical music, only two people are important, the composer and the conductor. Everybody else is a serf. In jazz, a thing of beauty is created collectively with everybody getting to express an idea. And that reflects what democratic society is – or should be.

People like the idea of the trio and so I did mostly trio.

We’re more popular than Jesus Christ now. I don’t know which will go first; rock and roll or Christianity.

Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.

Last time I saw Count Basie, he was in a wheelchair. They wheeled him up onto the stage, he sits down at the piano, and he gives the downbeat, and that band played like they were in heaven. And right in the middle, the band cuts. He had to take one hand and put the other on it, and he comes down with one note. And it was the greatest note I ever heard in my life.

If you’ve only got one horn playing, I still want the sense of ensemble.

I cannot say what I think is right about Music. I only know the rightness of it.

It’s not technique — it’s what you have to say.

What we do as artists is a combination of experience and imagination. How that creeps into your work is not so linear.

It’s very difficult for me to dislike an artist. No matter what he’s creating, the fact that he’s experiencing the joy of creation makes me feel like we’re in a brotherhood of some kind… we’re in it together.

Those who wish to sing, always find a song.

Music should always be an adventure.