David Sanborn Quotes

If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.

What I believe to be jazz is constructed and improvised music which is in the air right now. But I don't think that's most people's definition of jazz, you know? We don't know what we're talking about, because we don't know the definition.

Jazz is an interesting music. It's one of the few forms of music where everyone that's performing the music has a creative stake in the music. In jazz, everyone's improvising, and everyone's creating at the same time.

Jazz took too much discipline. You have to come in at the right place, which is different than me singing the blues, where I can sing, 'Oh, baby,' if there's a pause in the melody. With jazz, you better leave that space open, or put in something real cool.

Jazz music creates so many phenomenal figures.

As long as there are musicians who have a passion for spontaneity, for creating something that's never been before, the art form of jazz will flourish.

To me, Bill's musical heart is in Earthworks, in the jazz they are playing, in the acoustic kit.

If it has more than three chords, it's jazz.

Jazz, for me, is a closed circuit, like the term baroque in the world of classical music.

I don't think I've ever been true to jazz. There's always a kind of jazz element to what I do. There are a very few genres that I haven't tried out, really, in what I've been doing. As a jazz musician, you can kind of mess about with things with a certain level of musicianship, which helps.

One performer whose band played my music better than I could myself was Art Farmer. He recorded 'Sing Me Softly of the Blues' and 'Ad Infinitum'.

People think jazz music is all standards and the Great American Songbook. But it's really about the sensibility, the feel you bring to the music.

Jazz is a hard music, and you have to really work hard and also have fun performing; that's the most important thing.

That's the thing about jazz: it's free flowing, it comes from your soul.

That's the exact concept behind the music: to take that kind of, I guess whatever you want to call it, jazz sensibility - but not have it be about solos.

When I heard Charlie Parker, I knew that that was going to be the new wave, the new way to play jazz. From that point on, I was sold with... the idea of bebop.

The Metropole Orchestra is like Count Basie or Duke Ellington with strings... it's strings that swing. Strings that swing like Dizzy Gillespie... keep swinging, baby. And when you have all of that special excellence of the Metropole Orchestra, then your music just flies - it soars in a way that's really magical.

I don't want to do free jazz! Because free jazz - which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering - isn't actually free at all. It's just constrained by what your muscles can do.

But I don't really listen to much be-bop at all at the moment.

In my view a jazz musician is a great musician.

Coltrane would do what you'd get a Roland Pro Tools module to do but with a group of jazz musicians.

What is jazz? It, It's almost like asking, What is French? Jazz is a musical language. It's a musical dialect that actually embodies the spirit of America.

I like to listed to the adventurous guys - the Coltranes, Miles Davis, the guys who just let it loose.

So the whole basis for jazz music is based on the fact that the bass player could not play his instrument.

I think that the jazzy approach that I have is based on the way that I hear music and in the way I play a supporting role to the other people in the band.