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From the New York Times obituary section:
David William Sanborn was born on July 30, 1945, in Tampa, Fla., where his father was stationed in the Air Force. He grew up in Kirkwood, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis.
His life took a fateful turn at 3 when he contracted polio, which ravaged his left arm, right leg and lungs.
He was in an iron lung for a year, and he took up saxophone at 11 on the advice of a doctor, who thought learning a woodwind instrument would help him build respiratory strength.
The disease had lasting effects, some of them particularly challenging for a horn player. As an adult, Mr. Sanborn still suffered limited lung capacity, and his left arm was smaller than his right, with compromised dexterity on that hand.
“I don’t think of myself as a victim,” he was quoted as saying in 2005 by the Salt Lake City television station KSL. “This is my reality.”
In “The Young Americans,” is Sanborn imitating Bowie’s vocal style or is Bowie imitating Sanborn’s sax?
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Ah, those halcyon days before the saxophone had become an absolute nuisance in the world of music.
How do you do, fellow kids? Just popped in to say that the song/album title is “Young Americans,” , not “The Young Americans” .
Just one more example of great White man sax solos in rock/pop songs (even R & B–the sax solo in “Smooth Operator”, or as the ‘Marm might say, “The Smooth Operator”-LOL-was done by a White brother.)
“Careless Whisper”, “Baker Street”, “Year of the Cat”, “Who Can It Be Now?” “Just The Way You Are” .
All White sax soloists.
Not often I listen to Bowie and want him to shut up so I can hear the instrumental bit.
Maybe Suffragette City.
The obituary is inaccurate when it attributes the need for an iron lung in polio to “ravage” of the patient’s lungs. The diaphragm is unable to perform the work of breathing because of nerve damage caused by polio. Therefore an enclosed negative pressure cavity (iron lung) performs the work. With improved positive pressure ventilators and the near eradication of polio in the US, iron lungs became obsolete.
Saxophone – woodwind? That’s unusual.
I had tickets to go see Bowie on his Diamond Dogs tour. This tour involved an elaborate stage show. Right before reaching my hometown of Indianapolis, Bowie developed a sudden infatuation with the seventies Philly soul sound and dumped his elaborate stage show. The night I saw him the audience was surprised to see him come out with a trio of Black backup soul singers and doing the kind of music heard on his Young Americans album.
Bowie was known for his chameleon like changes throughout his career. Like a lot of early seventies teenagers, I first discovered him during his Ziggie Stardust period but continued to follow him through his later incarnations.
How’s Mr. Chase?
He was a talented guy at a time when talent and creativity were everywhere. It’s amazing how dead our culture has become in the last 20 years.
I’m hoping other countries in the West will get out from under the USA Thingie’s grasp and resume their own unique creativity.
Saxophone was once a commonplace part of Pop/Rock/R&B music. Now? Not so much.
Sanborn, along with the Brecker Brothers were A list session players. His own records were the epitome of smooth jazz. David had commercial chops. RIP.
BTW, Bowie played saxophone so I imagine his conversations with a top session saxman about what he wanted on a particular track were interesting and explicit.
Guardian expose on Lomez is out. It feels like winning. https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/14/far-right-twitter-identity-revealed
“In “The Young Americans,” is Sanborn imitating Bowie’s vocal style or is Bowie imitating Sanborn’s sax?”
Funnily enough, tonight me and my eldest were drinking and listening to saxophonist specials, and my boy said “is saxophonist a real word?” as we were listening to INXS’s Kirk Pengilly on Kick.
Saxophany is no longer a feature today but think about the huge songs of yesterday that featured saxophone:
Big two off the top of my head:
Baker Street
Bowies cover of Sorrow
In the 70’s the saxophone featured heavily.
Today it’s virtually gone extinct.
“In “The Young Americans,” is Sanborn imitating Bowie’s vocal style or is Bowie imitating Sanborn’s sax?”
There’s an apocryphal story about Lennon and McCartney with Bowie in New York and Bowie was so high anxiety to receive their opinions on his latest album, Young Americans, he played it to them three times in a row, and on the third play McCartney asked if there was something else to listen to?
Bowie never forgave him.
Can you think of a self-deflating Bowie song?
Lou Reed wrote the greatest self-accepting song of all time.
Even Christgau agreed with me and gave the album an A
New Sensations [RCA Victor, 1984]
This wonderful record feels like product at first–a solid but expedient bunch of songs like The Bells or Coney Island Baby or even Sally Can’t Dance. Although the title cut is definitely the centerpiece, and thematic at that, there are no grand statements like “Women” or “Legendary Hearts” and no tours de force like “The Gun” or “Betrayed.” And boy, does it sneak up on you. Instead of straining fruitlessly to top himself, Reed has settled into a pattern as satisfying as what he had going with the Velvets, though by definition it isn’t as epochal. The music is simple and inevitable, and even the sarcastic songs are good sarcastic songs, with many of the others avoiding type altogether. Think he can keep doing this till he’s fifty? Hope so. A
City Lights [Arista, 1985]
I say this because alot of people disparage me, they don’t realise I give more than I take.
He had limited lung capacity? Fooled me!
How famous was David Sanborn? He was famous enough for me, a non musician, to not only know of him but to own one of his albums, which I asked my parents for as a Christmas present.
How did this happen? Credit David Letterman.
Let us not forget Clarence Clemons. And we fortunately have Branford Marsalis still with us. Who is the 4th to be included on the Mount Rushmore of modern era sax player?
A plethora of woodwind instruments, and a gold microphone, won’t overcome the saxaphone solo
The group “Chase” was a band that had brass,
And their hit “Get It On” was a gas.
When they met David Sanborn
There was a new band born:
Chase and Sanborn, the band that whups ass!
The jazz-rock band Chase featured four trumpeters, including leader Bill Chase (né Chiaiese), but no sax. They could have added this guy and been…
Four of the nine (hence the album title Ennea) members, including Chase, were killed in a plane crash not all that far from Buddy Holly’s fifteen years earlier, and a year after Jim Croce’s. Chase was a couple months short of 40, and would have turned 90 this year.
Sanborn would be imitating Bowie. It’s like how people whistle. Only special people make up lyrics to the tunes we live by, so to speak— like Hail to the Chief (which, though no one knows what they are, actually does have lyrics).
The day the Muzak died.
David Sanborn with Marcus Miller (songwriter) and George Duke .
musicianship on a very high level.
I have never heard a “song” from Drake Or Lamar,never will.
“[I]s Sanborn imitating Bowie’s vocal style or is Bowie imitating Sanborn’s sax?”
Embrace the healing power of “and”…
OT — Twitter account Film The Police LA has rightly pointed out that tolerating Jewish violence guarantees escalation and has started identifying the Zionist terrorists who sought to intimidate students with pepper spray and 2x4s and explosives.
Tweets by FilmThePoliceLA
Is David Sanborn the most famous saxophonist there is? Lou Marini was in the Blues Brothers, but I don’t know if he himself is famous per se. In New Jersey Clarence Clemons of the E Street Band was famous but I don’t know if that translates nationally.
Clemons is hugely famous. Prolly the most famous at the moment, though distasteful to me, is Kenny G.
The answer to your question is “Yes, David Sanborn is the most famous saxophonist there is.”
And they ask me why I drink.
born in the window where saxophone still mattered in rock and pop. 10 years later and it gets iffy. 15 years later and he’s strictly a jazz player unless he finds a ska band 20 years later.
Foreigner’s saxophone player ripping a solo on their 1981 album that sold 6 million units. 10 years later there’s zero of these guys in rock bands. Huey Lewis and the News last prominent rock band with brass?
Sanborn achieved fame and fortune, and a measure of musical greatness, despite having polio.
I had heard of him but didn’t know this about him.
Talk about overcoming adversity.
Talent and determination can overcome even serious obstacles. He was a real ‘role model” though few knew of what he had overcome for success in a difficult career.
RIP
Unfortunately the most famous saxophonist would be one Kenneth Gorelick.
As to the question of who was imitating who… it seems far more likely that both of them were imitating (or not really imitating, just making use of) earlier musical styles.
As to cause of death, I believe Sanborn actually died of blunt force trauma from Brandon Marsalis elbowing him in the eye a la Kareem Jabar, on the grounds that only Blacks! are allowed to be great jazz saxophone players.
Bobby Keys was pretty well known.
Zoot from the Muppets and Bill Clinton. That’s it.
A lot of people had polio – Joni, Kim Fowley, Ian Dury, lemon-haired lady Mia Farrow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Polio_survivors
As children we’d see people hobbling with clunky calipers – big surgical boots with a metal brace to a clamp round the knee . Don’t see that much now.
OT — For the first time since the start of the SMO, the neocon Institute for the Study of War is hiding their interactive theater map.
https://www.understandingwar.org/interactive-map-russias-invasion-ukraine
My dad had an LP of “Voyeur” and I must have played it 100 times as a kid. His “Another Hand” CD was one of the first records I bought with my own money.
That blows.
Here’s Sanborn’s contribution to “Don’t Stop the Dance” (starting at 1:55) :
No, that would be Bill Clinton.
“Is David Sanborn the most famous saxophonist there is?”
Monetarily, the adult contemporary saxophonist Kenny G is probably the most successful in selling his brand. Your question brings an interesting topic of discussion. As an audio enthusiast, Sanborn is one of the performers from the smooth jazz genre that I never took the opportunity to see live. Whether it’s the delicacy found in the tune JoAnn’s Song from the movie Tequila Sunrise soundtrack, or the airiness found in the tune Little Flower from Bobby Hutcherson’s last recorded album Enjoy The View, I have always had a special interest in David Sanborn.
David Bowie sucks.
Sanborn did many much greater things than studio gigs with David Bowie.
For instance, that TV show of his was the greatest. It had actually good musicians on it, as opposed to David Bowie, who was just a kind of deep international state plant.
Kenny G, obviously
I’m not sure how I feel about you desecrating that landmark work of art.
Randy Brecker
You and Ripple Earthdevil are probably correct as he is one of the most famous and best-selling musicians in the world. Having said that, I did not know that his instrument was the saxophone. I never really thought about it before but I would have guessed he was a clarinetist.
This guy thinks the NYT is too pro-white. You really trust him that the pro-Gazans dindu nuffin? Do you also buy all his other framings regarding protests and police? Here’s a clue from his tweets:
That implies that either the “attacks” were unserious or the “violence” was mutual.
You philistines may not know the name Boots Randolph, but I’ll bet you all instantly recognize the most famous sax solo of all time.
“In “The Young Americans,” is Sanborn imitating Bowie’s vocal style or is Bowie imitating Sanborn’s sax?”
That is a prescient remark. I hadn’t thought of it before but listening again, yes, Bowie Is imitating the sax sound. Bowie had fantastic style-switching and mimicry abilities.
OT: Via Emil Kirkegaard, GWAS Study shows correlation between date of first walking (i.e., speed of development) and IQ (and other traits), which tends to vindicate Rushton’s Developmental Theory of Evolution. https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/rushton-vindicated-again-developmental?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
OT — Yuval Harrari said that a Russian victory would mean “the end of the global order” that starts a war every year, ended home ownership, nuked the family, collapsed education, opened the borders, enforced the lockdown, and then decades later surrenders anyway so yeah go Russia. Z. Plus this:
Interesting. I still see a version at the link archive versions of that page show.
https://isw.pub/InteractiveUkraineWarMap
Here is an update from yesterday.
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-may-13-2024
I wonder if your link breaking is a glitch or intentional.
After a year of college at Towson St, I enlisted in the Marine Corps. My first duty station was New River NC and the two Marines I roomed with in the barracks played David Sanborn (and other stuff) all the time.
My music of choice at that time was The Allman Brothers, Bob Seeger, Van Halen, AC/DC etc…
At first it pretty much annoyed me. And then I didn’t mind it too much. And after a while I started to like it.
RIP David Sanborn. I truly loved hearing you blow your horn.
Or, as with Clarence Clemons, just giving us a momentary break from an awful singing voice?
Phil Woods, Scott Hamilton, Michael Brecker, Hell, even Jay Beckenstein is no slouch.
One name that probably won’t be familiar is “Boney (sic) James”, the stage name of James Oppenheim, who is very good and wildly popular in the current smooth jazz/quiet storm/R &B genres. Most Whites don’t know him, but negroes all do–ask your negro “friends” LOL. He’s one of few White musicians who have a permanent “ghetto pass”, as a legit White performer who plays “black” music, kicks ass doing it, and is accepted, even loved, for it, like Teena Marie or Bobby Caldwell and very few others.
O.T: Dammit, Schoolmarm–my earlier post was first in this whole thread. It’s still in posting limbo, 11 hours later with 32 posts posted after it. Nothing “bad” in it. What the hell? My stuff always gets hung up for 1-2-3 days before it’s finally posted–eventually. Annoying.
Since I primarily listen to a Smooth Jazz station, I missed Saxs disappearing.
OT — “Imagine an enemy who could enfeeble you by making you stronger, shrink you by making you bigger, take you farther away from your destination by bringing you closer with each step.”
https://zworld.substack.com/p/could-i-make-you-eat-shit
They are hiding their interactive theater map now because the Ukraine is losing the war. The end effect of this proxy war will be the loss of several hundred thousand Ukrainian men, the 170 billion dollars we sent over there and a Russia-China-Iran alliance.
Meanwhile, here in the United States inflation is starting to rise again. The Federal Reserve will have to increase interest rates more to stop it. Higher interest rates will lead to higher interest payments on the national debt. The Fed prematurely stopped raising interest rates the last time because banks were going under.
So, we have two options. One is higher interest rates and exploding interest payments on the national debt plus a banking crisis. The other is keeping interest rates down and then have high levels of inflation and declining living standards as wages do not keep pace with inflation.
We need to pay attention to high inflation, high immigration, and high crime here at home and not some country on the other side of the planet.
The sax solo on Foreigner’s “Urgent” was by Motown great Junior Walker. He’d had numerous hits in the ’60’s, among them “Shotgun” and “What Does It Take (To Win Your Love)”. I’m guessing the white boys in Foreigner paid him more money than Berry Gordy.
That’s not Walker in the video.
Saxophones and xylophones. Back in the day, a lot of new wave, post-punk or whatever you want to call the bands featured one or both in their repertoires.
The Guardian have a “something must be done” editorial online, which is ruthlessly purged of all comments that don’t fit the “brutal dictator vs gallant democracy” framework. I swear JJ and Mr Hack could be the moderators.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/14/the-guardian-view-on-russia-new-offensive-ukraine-allies-must-renew-their-focus
Kenny G’s primary instrument is the soprano saxophone, which has a similar register to the clarinet.
All tree of my favorite Bowie tunes came out in 1975.
1. Fame
2. Golden Years
3. Young Americans
Saxophone 🎷 is a cool instrument in the right hands. Let’s go back to ‘75. All aboard.
Cue: Pick Up The Pieces by The Average White Band.
Bill Clinton?
The BossTones broke up two years ago because the rest of the band couldn’t deal with singer Dickie Barrett’s anti-jab attitude.
It’s Branford, not Brandon, and he was happy to play with white boys. He toured with Sting way back in the 80’s, and if anyone has fifteen minutes to spare check out his brilliant sit-in with this band of white boys:
I see Buzz was there first as well as the VP. Apologies.
Eddie Money sounded decent on the saxophone 🎷. RIP to The Money Man.
Cue: Take Me Home Tonight
Larry Elder used this as his theme song. It is flawless.
I have no opinion on your question but I’d like to put a plug in for a high school classmate who is a professional saxophonist. Definitely not the most famous.
Thanks Steve.
Silly question. Sandorn came in and recorded his part, as he did with all of his session work. And Bowie hired him because he liked his sound and the way he played. That’s all.
He did put a lot of thought in the arrangements and production of his own work, for obvious reasons, he could and it had his name on it. An excellent case in point (with the great Steve Gadd on drums).
Branford’s a good colored boy, I guess.
Or not:
Remember when he was the bandleader for Jay Leno’s Tonight Show? He has all the personality of a foot. Total a/hole. Even when he wasn’t blowing the sax, he was still blowing. Another black racist with a White wife.
KnowwhutImsayin’ dawg?
You must be a colored boy, too. I’d hate to think that somebody White wrote that post.
Bill really blows.
While I never heard of Sanborn, Clarence Clemons (Springsteen’s “Big man!”) was so famous he got to be an important cameo supporting character in the original Bill & Ted. He plays one of the three future leaders in this scene (he’s the black guy, duh).
As to saxophonists in general, I’m reminded of a quote from a Douglas Adams novel (I believe it was the Dirk Gently one) where he talks about a woman’s set of legs as being (bastardized half-remembered quote) “the kind that if this were a 1980s movie the filmmakers would for inscrutable reasons pan up them while having a wailing saxophone playing on the soundtrack.”
Well, at least he’s not related to Donk Mistress of Disaster Jamie Gorelick, so there’s that …
I’m fortunate to be old enough to have heard this music as kid, late nights on AM radio.
Sweet Soul music.
I hope it wasn’t another experimental drug that reignited and super-charged a subject’s former cancer in remission type-thing…
Michael was the sax man, Randy primarily played trumpet. Both very talented.
You mean Michael Brecker, who passed away far too young from a rare cancer. Brother Randy plays trumpet.
The Brecker Brothers (separate and together) and Sanborn all straddled the lines between smooth, fusion, funk, and “real” forms of jazz.
Way to rip off my first post on this topic (as well as ThatsNotAll). At least do us the courtesy of replying instead of pretending it was your idea… 🙄
“Today it’s virtually gone extinct.”
1986 or 1987 was about the last year it appeared in any new rock music. Phil Collins and Peter Gabriel still had brass. the Lethal Weapon soundtrack had a sax, which was, apparently, also by Sanborn. by 1988 it was totally out of rock. maybe not down to a 0% presence, but around there. appeared in 1% or less of new material. increasingly replaced by the synthesizer as well, so if you even needed a sax for some reason, you just punched up the sax sample on the increasingly improving synths. by the time of Lethal Weapon 3 in 1992, the sax theme sounded pretty outdated. like disco or hair metal, it didn’t instantly disappear, but went thru a rapid decline phase.
of course there were existing rock bands, who formed from the 60s into the early 80s, still playing live with a sax, but no new bands would be showing up with a sax player from then on. rock & roll had turned into hard rock. it’s an open question of whether sax rock & roll can even hang with hard rock – sax rock & roll was good music, but it rarely went into the diamond album territory.
after it was out of rock, sax was still in studio produced pop music from 1988 to around 1991 or so. it was still used in the synthesizer pop music era. pretty much gone from even studio produced pop by 1992 or 1993 tho. was never picked up in rap or hip hop. relegated to third wave ska stuff beyond 1994 or so.
David Bowie’s saxophonist, who once spent a year in an Iron Lung as a child from polio, dies at age 78.
Sounds awfully suspicious.
Well I’m glad to hear he has an even sillier name than Brandon.
I only picked him to make the joke clear: since jazz is essentially a dying art form, there are very few prominent living jazz sax players to make the point — if I had used say James Carter, no one would know what I meant.
As for “white boys”… Confucius say, If you’re going to trade in racial slurs, don’t get into a fight when all you have is a cheat-sheet, and your opponent has an entire dictionary.
Someone asked for a recent pop song with trumpets? 1992’s “Am I the Same Girl?” by Swing Out Sister doesn’t show them in the video, but they sound like trumpets to me. The song is from 1968 and was an instrumental hit then as “Soulful Strut.”
In this century, are there weird pop music trends like the amazing Baroque ‘n’ Roll songs of 1965-1967 like a Whiter Shade of Pale and the opening to Light My Fire?
Or is “pop” now defined not as what’s popular, which would include a lot of weird stuff as it did 50-60 years ago, but what the ten top pop divas are currently doing?
Kenny Garrett with miles davis playing the song “human nature” live in Montreux.
Google it. you’re welcome .
There’s good music including chamber pop but it’s been pushed into a niche. This is why I talk about weekend NPR music programs, you pretty much need to start there to hear a current chamber pop or neo-Motown song. And of course, some of it is garbage, so you have to browse.
https://wdet.org/shows/modern-music/
“He’s bisexual.”
“Yeah, he likes men and boys.”
That scene from Saturday Night Fever at White Castle while talking about David Bowie. lol.
King Curtis deserves to be famous for his sax playing, but alas isn’t.
No mention of Gilad Atzmon? Perhaps Jack is just imagining a local obsession with Jews …
He does indeed. He played with everyone from Buddy Holly to John Lennon to “Urethra” Franklin to Waylon Jennings–and of course, Sam Cooke. Curtis played sax on Cooke’s 1963 album Live From the Harlem Square Club, which is the best live album ever recorded.
Curtis was stabbed to death in front of his house by a Puerto Rican junkie.
And another. I think Mike Tre mentioned these guys in a recent thread.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UbSECloCYA&pp=ygUQd2hpc3BlciBtb3JwaGluZQ%3D%3D
I enjoyed David Sandborn, Kenny G, Chuck Mangione and others purveyors of the so-called “smooth jazz” set, which Wikipedia claims was the successor to and/or took over from Easy Listening as a favorite for contemporary adults.
Easy Listening had a long run from its beginnings as Muzak, which had a few people worried in the ’50s about mind control by music, especially after Ike raved about it, but I always liked instrumental interpretations of popular tunes, and that was Muzak, that was also Easy Listening, and to some extent it was also smooth jazz.
Even in the ’60s, there was a ton of Easy Listening music, both on albums and also radio stations. Every sizable city had at least one FM Easy Listening station. Heck, even AFRT’s Far Eastern Network or FEN carried Starlight Serenade with John Duremus (sp?) in the wee hours during the Vietnam era on AM.
I see Sandborn was 77, not a bad ride for a guy who passed through an iron lung and was smoking those coffin nails at least for his publicity stills, and a man who does that was probably a chain smoker.
RIP
Psst….Don’t “Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette.”
But putting all that aside for another occasion, let’s listen to some saxophone from the early days of Rock ‘n’ Roll:
Raunchy, Bill Justis, 1957 Billboard #2
Three more in the basement…
Wild Weekend, The Rockin’ Rebels, 1963 Billboard #8 (written in ’59)
Tequila, The Champs, 1958 Billboard #1
Honky Tonk (Part 1 & 2), Bill Justis, 1956 Billboard #2
Bowie was quite possibly the most intelligent person I ever met. He was a total omnivore, musically, culturally, intellectually, whateverly. The guy could talk about virtually anything with an air of seeming authority, even if only introduced to the topic five minutes ago. I never thought of it the way Steve says, but on reflection, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least that he would hear a great saxophone player like Sanborn and just say, Hey I can do that too. And then did.
You know what gets me. All these young conservatives on here whining about the homosexuals love David Bowie. Viscerally.
Dick Parry did all the sax work for Pink Floyd back in the 70’s. He sounded pretty good.
The saxophone ruled at the time when hit singles matter. It was a way to blast through the cheap speakers on the radio. A good example is Baker Street. It originally had a guitar sole. They got a sax player to play the guitar solo note for note. You saw what a great hit it was. I do not know what changed . Are radios better? Is the mixing better?
Good grief! I see I misspelled David Sanborn’s last name twice. I’ll take it as a nudge from Euterpe and her sister muses to play another saxophone tune or two, starting with a strong contender for my favorite saxophone instrumental:
Listen Here, Eddie Harris, 1967, The Electrifying Eddie Harris
Getting into an easy listening mode, from the same album…
Theme in Search of a Movie, Eddie Harris, 1967, The Electrifying Eddie Harris
No mention yet of the Blacks? You’d think an iSteve audience would be very focused on them:
The late, great Alto Reed
Your incurable “racism” is infectious…lol
White Christian Civilization is the greatest in recorded history. That’s why Jews and their band of hateful, envious misfit minorities seek to destroy it.
I’m no “boy of color”