Learn to work the saxophone, I play just what I feel

About a year ago, I wrote a tribute to a brilliant musician who passed away named David Lindley, a multi-instrumentalist who appeared on dozens of popular albums in the ’70s and ’80s. He was widely respected among other musicians, and his performances made a substantial difference on many records known far and wide among the listening public, even if they didn’t recognize his name nor know much about him.

This week, once again I have the task of writing a tribute to another extraordinary musician — the superlative sax player David Sanborn — who passed away May 12 of prostate cancer at age 78. Like Lindley, Sanborn’s name may not be widely known to the public at large, but much of his work will be instantly familiar once you realize he was the guy responsible for so many brilliant alto sax solos on hit singles and deeper tracks alike.

So that you fully appreciate Sanborn’s oeuvre and the contributions he made during his 50 years in the business, I strongly urge you to immediately start the Spotify playlist I assembled that will demonstrate how often you’ve heard and admired his work without even knowing who it was.

Big hits by David Bowie, James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, Carly Simon, Kenny Loggins, Pure Prairie League and Steely Dan were all made more memorable by Sanborn’s delicious sax solos. Same goes for album tracks by The Eagles, Stevie Wonder, Bryan Ferry, Michael Stanley, J.D. Souther, Elton John, Bonnie Raitt, Karla Bonoff and Phoebe Snow, on which his solos are prominently featured. His credits also include appearances on albums by Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, The Rolling Stones, Paul Simon, Toto, Roger Waters, Todd Rundgren, Little Feat, Roger Daltrey, Shawn Colvin and dozens more.

And that’s just among notable pop stars of the ’70s and ’80s. Sanborn also played sax with major blues artists like Paul Butterfield, Mose Allison, Robert Cray and Eric Clapton; R&B icons like James Brown; and leading jazz musicians such as George Benson, Michael and Randy Brecker, Bob James, Maynard Ferguson, Michael Franks, Al Jarreau and Gil Evans.

Somehow, concurrently with all these guest appearances on albums, Sanborn maintained a prolific solo career, releasing 25 albums of his own over a 40-year stretch between 1975 and 2018. Twice he won Grammy awards for Best Contemporary Jazz Album (“Voyeur” in 1981 and “Double Vision” in 1987) and four other Grammys as well.

There’s more: He spent a few years as a member of Paul Shaffer’s band on “Late Night With David Letterman” in the 1980s; co-hosted with Jools Holland a syndicated jazz-oriented TV show called “Night Music” in 1989-1990; and co-wrote orchestral, jazz and blues soundtrack music for the “Lethal Weapon” movies in the ’80s and ’90s. More recently, he hosted jazz radio programs and podcasts.

Sanborn with Bob James, 2003

“The loss of David Sanborn has deeply saddened me,” said Bob James, the jazz pianist who collaborated many times with Sanborn. “I was so privileged to share major highlights of my career in partnership with him. His legacy will live on through the recordings. Every note he played came straight from his heart, with a passionate intensity that could make an ordinary tune extraordinary.”

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Born in Tampa and raised outside St. Louis, Sanborn began his lifelong relationship with the alto sax by way of a medical recommendation. He had contracted polio at age 3, which had long-term effects on his growth. When his musically inclined parents started him on piano lessons at age 9, his doctor suggested the boy switch to a woodwind instrument as a way to strengthen his weakened chest muscles and improved his lung capacity.

He took to it quickly, learning the alto, tenor and soprano sax and flute, and became a passionate devotee of both jazz and blues. He was only 14 when, thanks to a referral from family friend Hank Crawford, who played alto sax in Ray Charles’s band, Sanborn performed with blues musicians Albert King and Little Milton. By the age of 22, he was invited to join The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, where he remained as an active member for four years, including their performance at Woodstock in 1969.

He broke into contemporary pop/rock/soul in 1972 on sessions for Stevie Wonder’s “Talking Book” album, and then Todd Rundgren’s “A Wizard, A True Star” in 1973. By 1975, his sax solos were all over the Top Ten on hits like David Bowie’s “Young Americans” and James Taylor’s “How Sweet It Is To Be Loved By You.” Both of these turned into TV performances and touring opportunities for Sanborn.

Sanborn (left) in a TV performance of “Young Americans” with Bowie

He became an active participant in the jazz fusion scene at that point, teaming up with the Brecker brothers on his solo debut “Taking Off,” which jump-started his recording career. Although he won accolades as a reliable practitioner of the genre known as smooth jazz, he never warmed to that description of his musical oeuvre. “Not everything I play is smooth,” he chuckled during a 1988 interview. “I think it’s more accurate to say I enjoy many different musical styles.”

Indeed. Some of his solo work was more experimental and freeform, some vibrant and exhilarating, and some mellow and soothing. It was that versatility that made him so influential and in demand among artists ranging from Ian Hunter and Dr. John to Aretha Franklin and John McLaughlin.

“The ‘Sanborn’ sound is more of an extreme sound tone-wise,” the saxophonist and educator Steve Neff wrote on his blog in 2012. “It’s very raw, bright, edgy and tough sounding. It’s right in your face. What Michael Brecker did for the tenor sound, Sanborn did for the alto sound. It’s not a middle-of-the-road thing at all.”

He and James were the toast of the town in 1987 when their collaborative work “Double Vision” won a Grammy, with the opening track “Maputo” gaining a modest amount of airplay.

Among his more notable LPS was 2008’s “Here & Gone,” a tribute to Ray Charles and his musical influences. “That music was everything to me,” Sanborn said. “It kind of combined jazz, gospel, and rhythm and blues. It wasn’t any one of those things, but it was all of them kind of mixed together, and that, to me, is the essence of American music.”

Sanborn in 2018

Ahmir Thompson, the drummer/producer/music journalist known professionally as Questlove, recalled performing with Sanborn in Aspen, Colorado, in the early 2000s. “Doing concerts at a 6,000-foot altitude is a nightmare for many musicians. You have to acclimate your system to having less oxygen, and some cats can only play at a level 5 or 6 under those conditions. Many need a break during their sets to hit the oxygen tank backstage. I know I did. But even though (Sanborn) had dealt with diminished lung capacity all his life, he laughed and playfully scoffed, ‘I always play at a level 10. Speak for yourselves!’ He told me that since being diagnosed with cancer, he got a renewed vigor, and played like his life depended on it.”

Although he found touring to be challenging due to his declining health, he continued going out on the road regularly over the past 20 years. He was still doing upwards of 150 gigs a year as recently as 2017, mostly in Asia, Africa and Europe, where jazz has a wider appeal. As he told The New York Times, “I still want to play, and if you want to play for an audience, you’ve got to go where the audience is.”

Sanborn is survived his wife, Alice Soyer Sanborn, a pianist, vocalist and composer; his son, Jonathan; two granddaughters; and his sisters, Sallie and Barb Sanborn.

An obituary in The Guardian this week opened by saying, “So distinctive was the soaring, heart-piercing sound of David Sanborn’s alto saxophone, and yet so comprehensive in its instant evocation of the spirit of a certain essence of US popular music, that it became familiar to many millions who knew nothing of the jazz world from which it had emerged.”

This week, I have been listening to classic ’70s tracks like Michael Stanley’s “Let’s Get the Show on the Road,” Carly Simon’s “You Belong to Me,” “Michael Frank’s “Jive” and James Taylor’s “You Make It Easy” just to marinate in Sanborn’s luscious sax work. I suggest you do the same.

Rest In Peace, good sir. Your musical reputation is intact.

When it’s time for leaving, I hope you’ll understand

Throughout the 1960s, most rock bands had two guitarists — a rhythm guitarist who played chords and established the song’s basic structure, and a lead guitarist who provided the multi-note solos that soared above it all and often stole the spotlight.

Then in 1969 came The Allman Brothers Band, which featured two supremely talented lead guitarists in Duane Allman and Dickey Betts. One would play lead while the other supported on rhythm, then they’d switch roles. Most impressive, though, was when they played lead guitars simultaneously. In the studio, these passages were precise and rehearsed, but on stage (and captured on live albums), Allman and Betts were master improvisationalists. Hearing the way these guitarists played off one another, giving each other room while adding a harmony solo to the melody solo, was truly special, and it was a primary reason the Allman Brothers were regarded, for a while, as the best band in the country.

Dickey Betts in the 1990s

Duane Allman died shockingly young, at 24, in a motorcycle accident just as the band was becoming successful. And now Dickey Betts has died as well, succumbing to cancer and pulmonary disease at age 80 last week.

As Betts put it in “One Way Out,” the 2014 biography of the band, “Because of the name of the band, a lot of people assumed Duane was the lead player and I was the rhythm guy. He was so charismatic and I was more laid back then. But he went out of his way to make sure people understood we were a twin-guitar band. ‘That was Betts who played that solo, not me,’ he would say. ‘We have two lead guitarists in this damn band!’

“Duane and I talked about how scared we got whenever the other played a really great solo. But then he’d chuckle and say, ‘This isn’t a contest. We can make each other better and do something deep.””

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Betts was drawn to music at a young age, learning ukulele at age five, then mandolin, banjo and guitar as his hands got bigger. His musical family listened to a lot of country music, Western swing and bluegrass, and as a teen, Betts became fascinated with rock ‘n’ roll and the blues. He played many dozens of gigs with different rock bands all over Florida and up the East Coast. In 1967, he met bassist Berry Oakley and formed Second Coming.

Betts in 1968

“In our band, Berry and I would take a standard blues and rearrange it,” Betts said. “We were really trying to push the envelope. We wanted to play the blues in a rock style like what Cream and Hendrix were doing. We liked taking some of that experimental stuff and putting a harder melodic edge to it. One of our favorite things to do was to jam in minor keys, experimenting freely with the sounds of different minor modes. We allowed our ears to guide us, and this type of jamming eventually served to inspire the writing of songs like ‘In Memory of Elizabeth Reed.’

“But we weren’t some garage band. We were a nightclub band. We had brought ourselves up in the professional world actually playing in bars, and that gives you a lot more depth. Duane and his brother were doing the same thing, so we all had a lot of miles under our belt when we met, despite our ages.”

When The Allman Brothers Band came together in 1968, they featured two drummers (Butch Trucks and Jai Johanny “Jaimoe” Johnson), bassist Oakley, Gregg Allman on vocals and organ, and the Betts-Allman guitar attack. They focused on blues with a rock edge, and while their self-titled debut album in 1969 performed poorly on the charts, it established them as a force to be reckoned with.

Betts’ first attempts at songwriting, which came on their next LP, “Idlewild South,” were impressive indeed. “Revival” opened the album with a burst of uptempo optimism — “People can you feel it, love is everywhere” — while the instrumental track “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” built on an infectious riff and showcased both Betts’ and Allman’s complementary styles.

The Allman Brothers front line (from left): Duane Allman, Dickey Betts, Berry Oakley in 1970

But the band knew that something was missing from those first albums. They didn’t capture the excitement and ferocious output you’d hear when they played in concert, and they knew they needed their next release to be a double live album, where they had the chance to stretch out and show their phenomenal skills as an improvisational jam band.

“At Fillmore East” was that album, produced by the great Tom Dowd from performances at the famed New York City venue in March 1971, featuring seven extended songs over four sides. In particular, “Whipping Post” and “Liz Reed” were a revelation, showing how the guitarists had been inspired by freeform jazz greats like John Coltrane and Miles Davis, and the album ended up peaking at #13.

Said Betts: “It’s very hard to go freestyle with two guitars. It’s easy to sound like two cats fighting if you’re not careful. Duane would almost always wait for me to come up with a melody and then he would join in on my riff with the harmony. A lot of his notes are not the notes you would choose if you sat down to write it out, but they always worked. Our band came along at a wonderful time for improv, and we felt free to just play and work things out on the fly. Doing that gave it all a certain spark.”

They toured relentlessly and also continued writing and recording new material for their next album. Betts wrote the sunny, joyous “Blue Sky,” a love song to his then-wife, a Native American named Sandy Blue Sky, “but I decided to drop the pronouns and make it like I was thinking of the spirit, like I was giving thanks for a beautiful day. It made it broader and more relatable. It was a bad marriage, but it led to a great song.”

Betts said he and Allman often played acoustic guitars together backstage and in hotel rooms and buses, working out things they would later play electrically. “Little Martha,” a brief instrumental duet on Dobro guitars, came out of that.

Betts and Allman working out arrangements on acoustic guitars, 1971

Then, as the album was nearing completion, disaster struck. In a flash, Duane Allman, the band’s spark plug and spiritual leader, was gone. “We thought about breaking up and all forming our own bands,” said Betts, “but the thought of just ending it and being alone was too damn depressing.”

Thom Doucette, harmonica player and Duane’s confidant, noted, “It was kind of a leaderless operation there for a while. It very easily could’ve ended right there, but Betts pulled it out of the fire. Dickey’s personality and ego were pretty big, so he sort of took over. Someone had to, and Gregg hated responsibility and confrontation, and didn’t want to do it.”

The album, “Eat a Peach,” reached #4 and included both live and studio tracks, both with and without Duane’s contributions. On the road, the group proceeded as a five-piece, though Betts found it frustrating. “I had to learn to play Duane’s slide guitar parts, and we no longer had that dual guitar thing going. But we got through it by just playing, all the time. It’s all we knew how to do, and it’s what Duane would’ve wanted.”

Betts leading the band in 1972-73, with Gregg Allman (left) and Jaimoe (right)

The entire band tended to be excessive in their use of drugs and alcohol, but Oakley took Duane’s death particularly hard, diving deeper into the escape they provided. When he was killed in October 1972 under eerily similar circumstances, again the remaining members were faced with how to proceed. As Betts put it, “We found another bass player in Lamar Williams, but replacing Duane with another guitarist was simply out of the question.”

The answer, they found, lay in using a different instrument as the second lead: the virtuoso keyboard work of Chuck Leavell, who’d been playing with Dr. John. “When we added Chuck, it gave us a new wrinkle that energized us,” said Betts. “I’m not sure the band would’ve lasted as long as it did if it weren’t for Chuck. He was such a strong player.”

Betts, meanwhile, hit his stride as a songwriter, composing four of the seven tracks that comprised their 1973 album “Brothers and Sisters,” which reigned as #1 in the US for two weeks that autumn. The galloping “Southbound,” the front-porch country blues track “Pony Boy” and the exhilarating instrumental “Jessica” (with Leavell featured prominently) showed the diversity of Betts’ musical influences. His leanings toward country music manifested themselves most famously on “Ramblin’ Man,” which peaked at #2 as their highest charting single ever.

The song initially met some resistance from within. Drummer Butch Trucks recalled, “We knew ‘Ramblin’ Man’ was a good song, but it didn’t sound like us. It was too country to even record. But we made a demo to send to Merle Haggard or someone, and ended up getting into that long guitar jam (with guest guitarist Les Dudek adding the dual lead), which kind of fit us. So we put it on the album after all, and it ended up being our biggest hit.”

The fame that came with that album and single proved to be a double-edged sword. It made them a bigger concert draw than ever, packing arenas, stadia and festivals, but it also ramped up the partying and internal tension. For his part, Betts dipped his toe in solo waters with the country-heavy “Highway Call” LP in 1974, while Gregg Allman became more withdrawn and distracted by his own solo album (“Laid Back”) and tour, and a whirlwind relationship with pop star Cher. When he was threatened with prison on drug charges, he chose immunity by testifying against his roadie/drug dealer, which left such a bad taste that the band broke up in 1976.

Betts in 1976

A self-described workaholic during that period, Betts soldiered on with a new band and album, “Dickey Betts & Great Southern,” which saw Betts teaming up with guitarist Dan Toler on seven songs all written by Betts, notably the seven-minute piece “Bougainvillea.” A second Great Southern LP, “Atlanta’s Burning Down,” followed.

When Allman and Betts mended fences to reunite The Allman Brothers Band in 1979, it would be with Toler and bassist David Goldflies in the lineup in place of Leavell and Williams, who chose not to participate. The group came storming back with the strong “Enlightened Rogues” album, which made the US Top Ten, but again, there were storm clouds on the horizon, this time because of new record label demands and changing tastes in the music industry.

Betts (right) with Toler at a 1979 concert in Cleveland (photo by Bruce Hackett)

“When the music trend started turning away from blues-oriented rock towards more simple, synthesizer-based dance music arrangements,” Betts said, “the suits at Arista Records started pushing us hard in that direction, but we were never able to do that convincingly, mostly because we didn’t want to. Sure, we wanted a hit, but not if we had to make concessions. We broke up in ’82 because we decided we just better back out, or we would ruin what was left of the band’s image.”

Betts and Allman each kept their tools sharp through the Eighties by playing clubs with their own bands, and when the 4-LP box set “Dreams” was released in 1989 to commemorate the Allman Brothers’ 20th anniversary, the time seemed right to try again.

The arrival of the classic rock radio format created a favorable climate, as did the emergence of blues guitar virtuoso Stevie Ray Vaughan. “He opened the whole thing up,” said Betts. “He just would not be denied, and kept making those traditional urban blues records, and people got to appreciating the blues again. We didn’t want to record without touring first, but it was hard to tour without a record to support and generate interest. The box set took care of that.”

With both Trucks and Jaimoe back on drums, and Betts’ colleagues Warren Haynes and Allen Woody on slide guitar and bass, the band was reborn a third time, churning out three new studio albums in four years (“Seven Turns,” “Shades of Two Worlds” and “Where It All Begins”), liberally sprinkled with great Betts songs. The group performed nearly 100 dates annually, and not only were original fans thrilled to have the group back in the picture, but a new generation of listeners embraced their music as well.

Betts (right) with Warren Haynes, 1993

Still, as always with this star-crossed band, problems surfaced. First Allman and then Betts fell victim to their own addictions and excesses, sometimes missing shows because of an inability to perform (Allman) or a mercurial temper and difficult ego (Betts).

“Dickey was capable of being really great, knowledgeable about all sorts of things, musical genres, art, news of the world, all of that,” said Danny Goldberg, the band’s manager for a spell. “But he was also capable of being really mean and physical, mostly when he was drinking. People were scared of him.”

In 2000, Betts lost two close friends within a few days of each other, which threw him for a loop and exacerbated his demons. Betts became so difficult to work with that the rest of the band felt they had no choice but to move on without him. Sadly, he never performed nor recorded with his old bandmates again after that.

In the years since, Betts stayed as active as his deteriorating health would allow, playing clubs and releasing a handful of live albums on smaller labels. When Allman was near death in 2017, working on one last album, he contacted Betts and asked him to join the sessions, but time ran out before that could happen.

Betts mellowed quite a bit in his final years, refusing to badmouth Allman or other members in the press. He was more than willing to concede his own part in the estrangement that plagued his relationships. “Substance abuse is an occupational hazard of being a musician,” he reflected. “It’s like working in an industrial waste factory. That shit is around, and so easy to get. And you can go for three hours and feel like a king, but it doesn’t work in the long run. Man, I’ve been there.”

Betts in 2018

In the wake of Betts’ death last week, Haynes spoke highly of his compadre’s musical talent. “Dickey played awesome straight traditional blues, but he also had this Django Reinhardt-on-acid side of him that was very unique. Most cats that can play blues as convincingly as Dickey cannot stretch out to that psychedelic thing like he could.”

Duane Allman’s daughter, 55-year-old Galadrielle Allman, spoke glowingly about how Betts and her father created magic together. “It’s so hard to respond to losses like this, to try to comprehend that we all just keep losing the originals, the creators, the artists who wrote the book,” she said. “My father could not have reached the heights he reached without Dickey beside him. They raised one another up and created a sound together that changed music. We are so lucky that, although everything else eventually goes, the music stays.”

R.I.P., Dickey. I’m cranking up your music a lot these days…

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The playlist below collects Allman Brothers Band songs written (and usually sung) by Betts, as well as songs he wrote for his solo LPs. Perhaps my favorite, “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” appears twice — in the incendiary electric version from 1971, and again in a live acoustic performance from 1995.