From The New York times
Jazz Review | David Sanborn
A Coolly Lyrical Sound, but Not Exactly Smooth
By NATE CHINEN
Published: November 10, 2005
When the alto saxophonist David Sanborn released his first album as a leader 30 years ago, there was no way of auguring the genre that would bubble up in his wake. Smooth jazz is unimaginable without Mr. Sanborn; his coolly imploring brand of lyricism runs through all its iterations, including the latest, urban jazz and chill.
This is a source of some ambivalence for Mr. Sanborn, whose playing has always suggested the grit of rhythm-and-blues. At the Blue Note on Tuesday night, he made a point of starting strong, with explosive and rhythmically complex strands of Latin jazz.
Mr. Sanborn has the right musicians for the task. The keyboardist Geoffrey Keezer, the bassist Mike Pope and the drummer Terreon Gully are a well-calibrated rhythm section, and the percussionist Don Alias brings a welcome layer of texture. On Horace Silver's "SeƱor Blues," the group backed Mr. Sanborn's chirping phrases with a satisfying heavy churn. The second song, Gil Fuller and Chano Pozo's classic "Tin Tin Deo," was even more doggedly propulsive, peaking with a blistering exchange between Mr. Alias, on timbales, and Mr. Gully, on snare drum and toms.
The remainder of the set was so much more temperate that it almost felt like a different show - the one, of course, that the audience had paid handsomely to see. There were scattered cheers when Mr. Sanborn introduced "Maputo," a polished track from his 1990 album with the keyboardist Bob James. A similar response greeted "The Dream," a treacly pop ballad by Michael Sembello that he inflated to grand dimensions, like a float in a parade.
Still, "smooth" is not the best characterization of Mr. Sanborn's style. His tone is tart, not velvety, and he often phrases in staccato bursts. He spends a lot of time straining for cathartic high notes and then holding them aloft - a gesture not so much of intimacy as of triumph. What distinguished his strongest playing of the set, on "Lotus Blossom" - not the Billy Strayhorn standard but a Don Grolnick ballad with a vaguely Brazilian lilt - was that he worked quietly and patiently, drawing the audience in before leaping into flight.