David Sanborn

“Well, I guess my unease with that is... I'm always a little uneasy with that phrase - smooth jazz, as opposed to what?”

“If you're playing with somebody from another idiom, you can't react to them in the same way that you react to somebody that is closer to your idiom. You don't fall into the same habits. You find a new way of communicating.”

“Music is like an open sky. You know it's out there... and there you are.”

“I didn't try to think what my audience wanted and then make the music accordingly. I made the music and hoped that as many people liked it as possible.”

“I think a valid approach to being a musician is to take all of the experience of your life and filter it through your personality and send it back out there, and that's what art is.”

“I have pretty ecumenical tastes. I'm interested in a lot of different kinds of music, so I don't listen with a jaundiced ear to music because it's in a certain category, whether it's country or opera or hip-hop or bebop or whatever it is.”

“In regard to music, I just think that it's always best to have an attitude of being a perpetual student and always look to learn something new about music, because there's always something new to learn.”

“All the music that I've made in the past I've believed in. I think some of it has been more commercially successful than others, but it wasn't premeditated.”

“I think 'Horace Silver' was actually the first live jazz group I ever heard back when I was a kid in St. Louis. So along with most players of my generation, I have a real affection for the music of 'Horace Silver.'”

“In most of the stuff that I've done over the years as a sideman, I wasn't really a session musician, because to me, a session musician is a guy who makes his living in the studio, and I never really did that.”

“I always wanna be in the process of evolving and growing.”

“When I make records, I never listen to stuff after it's done. Ever.”

“Jazz music by its very nature is just a conglomerate of a lot of different kinds of music.”

“I kinda always wanted to be a tenor player, but I'm a small guy, and tenor was just too big.”

“Music is an expression of individuality; it's how you see the world. All art is, for that matter. You take how you experience the world, interpret it, and send it out there - express it - whether it's sculpture, dance or singing.”

“When you're on stage, unless you surrender to the moment, you're not telling the truth. I look for people that tell me the truth.”

“I'm moved by a lot of different kinds of music, whether it's pop music or R&B or straight-ahead jazz or free or opera or music from all parts of the world.”

“I tend to play in a way that feels natural to me. To me that's authentic for myself. I play by where I'm led by some sense of where I feel I'm supposed to be.”

“I think that, given a real choice, people would like to hear something interesting, not something bland and right down the middle.”

“Ninety-nine percent of the music that was of any interest to me when I was growing up came out of the black community.”