Let's Just Say Goodbye

A farewell to the great David Sanborn

Sometimes it is death that drives home the importance of a person or our connection to their art, as happened with David Sanborn’s passing on May 12, the news of which sparked re-interest in his music, which never faded completely.  The newer stuff, and by “new” I mean the last 30 years—jazz like psychoanalysis moves slowly—brings a melancholy joy; hearing the older favorites is more of a re-listening, imaging an addled young man grabbed by this legendary horn player’s funky, synth-driven beats.

In 1983 his music first caught my ear, on Pittsburgh’s “Black” radio station, WAMO, a format then called “urban contemporary.”  I heard Prince on that frequency long before white radio played “1999,” along with Luther, Jeffrey Osborne, Shalamar, Deniece Williams, Run-DMC, the Gap Band, Kashif, and other 80’s gems.  (A surprising amount of it holds up.)

WAMO (“we are moving on”) was pretty much the only station I listened to in high school.  I remember a DJ breaking down on air, the morning after Marvin Gaye was shot.  I felt a similar grief on May 13, David Sanborn dead after a long fight with prostate cancer.  I remembered almost instantly unwrapping the first Sanborn cassette (!) album I bought in junior year of high school, after hearing music without words but still head-nodding.  I read the cassette insert, astonished the dude was white. 

Buying an album was something of an event, at ten or eleven bucks a pop, mediocrity a betrayal at those prices, as with Kool and the Gang, who had great singles but too much filler. But no disappointment upon hearing 1983’s Backstreet, the first single of which was “I Told U So”.  What is this, I wondered.  It was unlike anything else, with sparkly synths and a driving but still chill “urban” beat, upon which Sanborn’s alto melody surfed. It felt like driving to the junior prom hoping to score, riding around Pittsburgh in the hope that some hip adult would buy us beer, or trying my first joint.

There is a distinctiveness to that alto, in that particular era, as so many musicians recognize in general; initially I found something like enlightenment in that beautiful squawk riding on the backbone of Marcus Miller’s bassline, the synths underlining rather than dominating the groove, unlike much 80’s semi-pop.

The ear-worm was planted, all systems go. 

The music was funky, hooky, atmospheric, the perfect soundtrack for a precociously cynical, still romantic young man stoned on sex and (allegedly hip) sensibility. Sanborn seemed to understand something, “get something” in a way that was hard to put my finger on. He’d been around but wasn’t destroyed by it all.

I heard it in the title track of 1980’s Hideaway or in the first track of Voyeur, from 1981 (from which I take the name of this column), a way of getting on, that rhythmic pulse of starry-eyed horniness ever-present, those earthy glimmers driving us but easy to miss, like George Carlin’s idea that comedy just reminds you of funny shit you forgot.

Consider for a moment Sanborn’s covers, one of my favorites being “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes,” from 1995’s Pearls.

Musicians of course do their own thing with standards.  Miles finds a way inside the song, dismantling and reassembling it in his own cubist-like fashion.  Monk plays it like he hears it, as if to say “this funky mess is the song, friends” in his own asphalt-covered, black and white way; you can see taxis whooshing by in the rain, the honk of horns, splash of potholes.

With Sanborn the song is in color, neon bouncing off the rain-soaked street. You’re alone, stood up again, she’s probably with your best friend, and here’s the one bar or diner still open downtown.  One’s romantic longings are safe from nihilism, preserved albeit unmet.  There is beauty here, and beauty in isolation, and Sanborn finds it, riffing in a way that pays tribute to the essence. He is (was) a humble talent, reverent and lucky, as evidenced in his terrific WBGO podcast, As We Speak.

A part of that reverence is being present for but not “owning” the song, locking it into airtight possession.

Sanborn was one of the “it” session guys of pop music, from the late 60s well into the 90s.  I recently discovered he played at Woodstock with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, later live and in recordings with Aretha, Clapton, Sting, Springsteen, Donald Fagan, George Duke, Sonny Rollins, and many others, some found on clips from his once-in-a-lifetime TV show for music-heads, Night Music.

That distinctive alto is also heard in back of the vocals on Bowie’s “Young Americans,” Sanborn paired with Luther and friends. Another key solo, perhaps my favorite, is right at home on the Stones’ “Pretty Beat Up,” from Undercover of the Night, a vastly underrated song (and LP), almost cheerfully nihlistic.  (The Stones get away with it, with the trail of rhythm and groove left behind.)

Sanborn understands the spell of a song, its aura, the ambience the smooth jazz format shamelessly chased.  (The dentist will see you now.)  It is easy to mock and hard to believably create. As with many gifted horn players, he hears and reflects to us both the melody and its presence, inviting us toward the empty chair waiting for us stage side.  

His covers of “Smoke,” “I Got News For You,” “You Don’t Know Me,” or Randy Newman’s “Same Girl,”  are tributes to the originals and the hearing of them in the now moment of contact.  He says similar things in his podcasts; perhaps because music saved his life almost literally. When he was 11 he was sick with polio, his left hand forever stiff. He obliged his doctor by taking up a wind instrument to build his breathing skills. Music for him was ever athletic, rigorous. All the more remarkable his music acknowledges the reverence of music’s power and his joy in taking part.  He is cool like Monk, not as indifferent as Miles.

Along the way he mentored and supported younger musicians such as Hiram Bullock and Marcus Miller, Miller going on to work with Miles (for the still-playable Tutu) even as he penned two memorable songs on Double Vision (1989), a collaboration with Bob James and essential for those who like the synth-funk end of the spectrum, despite its smooth jazz adjacency. 

Miller paid moving tribute to his old friend on Facebook last week (May 21), reminding us he understood Sanborn’s ear and what his friend “needed in a song,” said friend introducing Miller at one point to the woman Miller eventually married.    

More personally, Sanborn was my entry into a longstanding love of jazz, as with those friends catching the bug after borrowing Backstreet.

Ditto the cassette I nabbed soon after, 1980’s Hideaway, still a personal favorite, also considered Sanborn’s “breakout” album.  Soon going into heavy rotation was Sanborn’s live album, Straight to the Heart (1984), which—along with Double Vision, with Bob James, preceded by A Change of Heart and Close Up (1987 and 88, respectively)—rounds out what we could roughly call the r&b/Marcus Miller era.  Sanborn said he needed to move on a after that, trying on a more traditional sound starting with Upfront in 1992, on a current playlist called “belatedly discovered.”

I knew what he needed in a song. And I too the song in 1984, newly licensed and ready for the world, borrowing my father’s stick-shift Renault, equipped only with AM radio. I perched an old-school cassette player in the corner of the windshield, watched as it teeter with every turn.  Still, I wanted Dave with me on the drive, even as the tape-player (already a relic) slid clunkily to the floor, caught by my friend, including one of my reliable companions, Dan. 

Dan was himself a musician, a damn fine pianist. Upon hearing Sanborn he said, cool but respectful,  “A bit commercial, but he’s got the chops.”  High praise indeed (where are you, Dan Friedman?).  Dan accompanied me to my first jazz club, where he assuredly told the skeptical bouncer staring at our underage asses that, “We’re here to listen, not drink.” It somehow worked.

Dan made me tapes of Miles, Brubeck, Bill Evans, Coltrane and (bless you, brother) Thelonious Monk.  After a few plays of Kind of Blue, Take Five, A Love Supreme and Alone in San Francisco (There’s danger in your eyes, cherie!), I was a convert.  Still Sanborn remained the gateway drug.  It was the live versions of “One Hundred Ways” and “Lisa,” from Straight to the Heart, that played in the corner speakers as I lost my virginity to Tami in that tender, senior year crushing of innocence. (I mean, c’mon…)

This is also, undoubtedly, why the loss on May 12 was melancholic—with, as always with death, a touch of terror, given time’s no-exceptions erasure.  That time, that era of funked-up, confused yet overwhelming sexualized teenagedom, is completely gone…and now so is Sanborn. 

Perhaps it is the quiet marvel of those first hearings, the introduction to the music that I hear, now, that early wonder of discovery, before the disillusionment of life’s disappointment, the ravages of addiction, so beset me.

Along the way, Sanborn turned up in the unlikeliest of places.  My college roommate and I overlapped more on temperament than music (potentially volatile for two music-heads), but Sanborn kept the peace, especially Double Visions.  We also liked Benson and Jarreau, that trio inspiring a genre I can never love.  

In fact I saw Sanborn and Jarreau in concert once, like life way too short.  And now they are both gone. 

Music weaves its way into the very fabric of our memory.  It is not so much that “there will never again be a new album” (though there is also that), but also what we know now about what we didn’t know then, in a past both ambered and grim.  The music returns the Polaroid of the moment in a way that words and memory alone cannot.

I see a similar excitement in my fifth-grade daughter’s passion for Taylor Swift, and the music she connects to. 

It was a talk with my own analyst that brought it all home.  Mine was a fairly lonely childhood and like many awkward teens I formed a tight bond with my favorites, including Sanborn (Springsteen, John Lennon, and Prince were the others), just as many of my classmates learned to love The Police, the Cure, Morrissey, Depeche Mode, or Peter Gabriel: all fine artists, though I somehow hew to Sanborn’s genre-flexibility, in his backup work and on his own, those solo inflections of blues, gospel, and r&b: America’s soundtrack, our country’s own invaluable soundtrack, its genre-splicing and endlessly energetic renewal.  (Ray Charles was Sanborn’s childhood hero.)

Sanborn didn’t provide an identity for the young Darren so much as clarify its expression, the ambience I needed for such longing.  His music was, in Robert Stolorow’s phrase, a kind of relational home, at a time of aching homelessness. This included the wild yearning at the empty center of romantic love, whose unfulfillment is painful in a way we rarely hear about.  (Sanborn often paraphrased his friend Wayne Shorter’s notion that it is the reaching and not the grabbing of the note that counts.)

Such innocence was also the blues, hidden in seduction, for those of us still heartbroken but hungry for a melody.  I tried clumsily to capture all this in my fan letter to Sanborn circa 1989 or 90, banging it out in cornball fashion one summer midnight on my Mac.  I would like to think, in my tinted imaginings, that Dave received and even read it.  RIP my friend, honk brightly into that good night.