David Sanborn Quotes & Sayings (Page 4)

“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 don't think I'm modest so much as I'm realistic. I know what I can do and what I can't do. I know what I am, and more importantly, I know what I'm not. I'm not really a major innovator; I don't know if I contribute to the language of the saxophone or of jazz. I don't consider myself an innovator of jazz. I've just got a distinctive voice.”

“I have a certain temperament, a disposition that I think lends itself to not playing outside the lines that much. But I do test the boundaries, certainly, and break one or two of my own. Some people are mystified by it, but not me.”

“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 was actually in an iron lung for about a year, and then I was paralysed from the neck down for another year after that. So I spent a lotta time just lying down as a kid. And some of my earliest memories from then are of listening to the radio.”

“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.”

“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.”

“It's always difficult to define what jazz is or what jazz isn't. To me, the only definition that I can think of is it's music where a lot of different elements are played at the same time. The harmonic, the melodic... You're pushing the boundaries on every level. That could be true of rhythm and blues as well. I'm a musician.”

“It's tough to be in a relationship with a musician, because it reads sometimes as this ego and self-involvement when it's really just concentration and focus.”

“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.”