RIP David Sanborn
Posted: Mon May 13, 2024 9:03 pm
Saxophonist David Sanborn, 6-time Grammy winner, has died at age 78
David Sanborn, whose keening cry on alto saxophone was as bright and steadfast as a lighthouse beacon during a career that spanned nearly 60 years and included collaborations with everyone from David Bowie to Stevie Wonder, died on Sunday in Tarrytown, N.Y. He was 78.
According to an official statement, the cause was complications of prostate cancer, which he had been battling since 2018.
With a string of crossover hits in the 1970s and '80s, Sanborn set a sturdy template for the radio format known as smooth jazz, though he himself never warmed to the term. He had more than a dozen albums break into the Billboard 200, and won six Grammy awards — four of them in consecutive years during the mid-to-late '80s. Two of those winning albums — Straight to the Heart, a solo effort, and Double Vision, a collaboration with pianist Bob James — are cornerstones of the commercial genre often labeled contemporary jazz.
https://www.npr.org/2024/05/13/12510067 ... -at-age-78
David Sanborn, whose keening cry on alto saxophone was as bright and steadfast as a lighthouse beacon during a career that spanned nearly 60 years and included collaborations with everyone from David Bowie to Stevie Wonder, died on Sunday in Tarrytown, N.Y. He was 78.
According to an official statement, the cause was complications of prostate cancer, which he had been battling since 2018.
With a string of crossover hits in the 1970s and '80s, Sanborn set a sturdy template for the radio format known as smooth jazz, though he himself never warmed to the term. He had more than a dozen albums break into the Billboard 200, and won six Grammy awards — four of them in consecutive years during the mid-to-late '80s. Two of those winning albums — Straight to the Heart, a solo effort, and Double Vision, a collaboration with pianist Bob James — are cornerstones of the commercial genre often labeled contemporary jazz.
https://www.npr.org/2024/05/13/12510067 ... -at-age-78