Horn players don`t sing on television. They don`t dance. They seldom make jokes, though sometimes trumpeter Doc Severinson exchanges a word or two with Johnny Carson. They don`t even wave their arms and make faces, as keyboard player Paul Shaffer does on David Letterman`s show.
They just play their horns. Television producers usually don`t think that`s interesting enough to watch, which is why we don`t get to see or hear them very much on network television. The one big exception to that, of course, is 43-year-old David Sanborn, the lean, quiet alto saxophonist whose crying, screaming solos used to rise over the closing theme chords of
”Saturday Night Live”. The same David Sanborn who keeps showing up on the Letterman show, playing his sax in semi-darkness down at the end of Shaffer`s band.
Well, he moves out of the TV shadows tonight-at 11:30 on Channel 5-when
”Sunday Night” makes its network debut with Sanborn as host of the hourlong musical-variety show-a kind of program that, in itself, has become rare on TV.
Actually, Sanborn is co-host along with Jools Holland. ”Jools is the keyboard player who works in Squeeze, the English pop band,” says Sanborn.
”At one time, he was host on an English TV show called `The Tube,` which was a musical-variety show. He`ll actually be doing a lot of the talking and the introduction/emcee kind of functions, and my band will accompany the guests.
”The idea of `Sunday Night` is to get two or three guests on each week who maybe you wouldn`t think of as having anything in common-but who, in fact, do have some bonds that will not only allow their music to work in a thematic context, but also perhaps to do something together.
”James Taylor and Milton Nascimento, for example. Or Robert Plant and Koko Taylor and Bonnie Raitt. Or Mark Knopfler and Randy Newman. And some of the more obvious ones like Bobby McFerrin, Al Jarreau and Chaka Khan; or Joe Jackson, Benny Carter and Diane Schuur; Dizzy Gillespie and almost anybody-Eddie Palmieri. These are the kind of people we`re going after on the show, versatile people, out of the norm of what you`d expect to see on television. It`s not a format for somebody to do their latest single.”
It`s an ambitious project, all right, which is yet another reason Sanborn has been so busy lately. He returned recently from another around-the-world tour, playing concerts and festivals, and had hardly recovered from jet lag before plunging into daily, all-day-and-evening rehearsals for ”Sunday Night” (the show is taped over two days), while taking an evening off once a week to jockey discs on his taped, syndicated radio program, ”The Jazz Show” (heard 7-9 a.m. Sundays on WLUP-FM (98 FM) in Chicago). In one of the rare moments when he had time to relax, he talked about his first love: Music.
”Rhythm-and-blues was really what inspired me,” he says. ”My first interest in music was generated by the Ray Charles band. The thing that I liked about him was that he combined R & B and gospel and a little bit of bebop, and bebop phrasing worked in that rhythmic context. I liked the saxophone players in the R & B idiom-they`re dramatic players, and very lyrical and soulful.
”I heard Ray Charles live in St. Louis when I was 11 years old, and Hank Crawford (Charles`s altoist) was what clinched it for me deciding to become an alto player.” At the time, Sanborn`s doctor had told his parents that the boy should learn to play a wind instrument, to help regulate his breathing. David had been a polio victim when he was 3 years old, and had spent a long period of his childhood in an iron lung.
”I don`t think I had the foresight to say, `Gee, someday I`m gonna be able to use these licks,` but Hank was initially one of the major influences on me. A lot of it was because he was a fairly simple player, and he also was very emotionally direct, and he had just a beautiful kind of southern sound.” A southern sound? ”There`s a certain kind of cry, a plaintive quality, and a certain kind of rhythmic intensity to certain players. I associate that sound with people like Ornette Coleman and Hank Crawford.” It`s a ”cry”
you can hear again and again in David Sanborn`s own solos, sometimes in grainy, split tones, other times in a clear, pure alto saxophone note that he bends to the blue side. It`s one of the trademarks of his style.
Growing up in St. Louis, Sanborn made friends with several young R & B musicians who later became major figures in avant-garde jazz. Like two of them, trumpet innovator Lester Bowie and drummer Phillip Wilson, Sanborn lived briefly in the Chicago area in the mid-`60s. It was during part of Sanborn`s incomplete pursuit of higher education that he attended Northwestern University; he also went to the University of Iowa briefly. By 1967, though, he was playing music in San Francisco, where he met ex-Hyde Park harmonica man Paul Butterfield.
He joined Butterfield`s popular Chicago-style blues band, which included Phillip Wilson, and since it gave him plenty of room to solo, David Sanborn became well-known as a hot young alto man.
After three years with Butterfield, he spent two years touring with Stevie Wonder-”We had a good horn section, and it was such a groove playing with Stevie, you know?” After that came tours with a veritable queue of rock stars-David Bowie, James Brown, James Taylor, the Eagles, Rickie Lee Jones among them-as well as popular jazz figures such as the Brecker Brothers and, for five years, arranger Gil Evans and his big band.
He recorded with most of them, and others, including John Scofield, the Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen. But, Sanborn is quick to point out,
”I`ve never made my living in the studios. People may have the impression that I was an active studio musician because I got called to play solos on certain records that had a high visibility. But I`ve really been on the road most of my life.
”It`s very hard sometimes when you feel like there`s nothing you can add to a situation, or that it`s not really a give-and-take. That`s kind of why I stopped doing sessions, because No. 1, overdubbing is such a trip. It`s easy to lose your spontaneity, hearing the same damned thing over and over again. You can fall into patterns of responding to it-`Well, yeah, that little thing worked last time, so I`ll do it in the same place`-you end up writing the solo.”
It wasn`t until mid-1977 that he began touring with his own band, formed to follow up on his second album as leader-”A surge of creativity, there, and we called it `Sanborn.` ” Since then, apart from the time he spent on
”Saturday Night Live” in 1979-80, he has spent most of his time working with his own musical ideas, to steadily increasing fame: His new album,
”Close-Up” (Reprise) is selling well, and the two previous Sanborn discs,
”Change Of Heart” and ”Double Vision” (with Bob James)-both Warner Brothers-went gold.
Indeed, Sanborn`s clean alto sax tone and blue sound, his high, crying notes and precise musical diction, all played over fetching rock rhythms-and sometimes in heartfelt ballads, like Randy Newman`s ”Same Girl”-have made him one of the favorite instrumentalists of the 1980s.
Considering his success, has he become an influence on younger musicians? ”I don`t really hear it that much,” he replies, thoughtfully.
”Sometimes, I hear people that remind me of my sound a little bit-a certain spread I get on certain notes, a certain approach to the sound and phrasing. Nothing major-I think a lot of it is that I happen to be what people heard-what`s available.
”But then, maybe they move on to some of the great players, and this whole other world opens up, and it`s like, `Oh, I see.` I listen to (alto saxophone giants) Charlie Parker and Ornette Coleman a lot for enjoyment and education; to me, you practice things you can`t do. I don`t think it shows up in my playing, really-maybe superficially. Because it`s very hard to apply that kind of sensibility to an R & B context.”
