David Sanborn Owned His Game

An appraisal, not a defense. The distinction matters.

David Sanborn, whose alto saxophone has surely played some role in your listening experience, died yesterday at 78. His fight with cancer was not a secret, but the timing still came as a shock. I wrote an obituary for NPR Music this afternoon, and did my best to compress a lot of context into a modest word count, on deadline. To wit:

The key to Sanborn’s…