David Sanborn

You’ve got to be willing to put stuff on the line, otherwise it doesn’t have much meaning.

Instrumental music is increasingly marginalized.

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

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

Knowledge speaks, wisdom listens.

Art is a subject that is inundated with opinions. In fact, that’s all it is about is opinions.

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

I thought Eric Clapton was good. He still is. Not only is he good – he’s rock’s #1 guitarist, and he plays blues better than most of us.

Music should never be harmless.

They’re not particular about whether you’re playing a flatted fifth or a ruptured 129th as long as they can dance to it.

Music, of course, is what I hear and something that I more or less live by. It’s not an occupation or profession, it’s a compulsion.

People now have been conditioned to believe they should only buy one song at a time, that nobody can make an entire record that would merit you paying, you know, $7, $8, $10 when CDs in the ’90s were $18, $19 and people bought millions and millions and millions of them.

Why Jazz? This is just the way I see music.

All the music that was ever heard came from the inner silence in every musician.

It’s like a language. You learn the alphabet, which are the scales. You learn sentences, which are the chords. And then you talk extemporaneously with the horn. It’s a wonderful thing to speak extemporaneously, which is something I’ve never gotten the hang of. But musically I love to talk just off the top of my head. And that’s what jazz music is all about.

I don’t have a favorite song that I’ve written. But I do have a favorite song: ‘Always on My Mind,’ the Willie Nelson version. If I could sing it like he do, I would sing it every night. I like the story it tells.

When you’re on stage you have a very strange knowledge of what the audience is. It isn’t exactly a sound – it’s a hum, like the streets.

Monk encouraged me to emancipate the drums from their subservient role as timekeepers.

I expect the audience to come up to my level.