StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: Spotlight on David Sanborn

This week, StLJN's video spotlight shines on saxophonist David Sanborn, who's coming back to his hometown to perform starting next Wednesday, June 6 through Saturday, June 9 at Jazz St. Louis.

Sanborn, whose most recent St. Louis appearance was in April 2016 at the Bistro, hasn't released a new recording since 2014, when he put out Time and the River under his own name and Enjoy The View with Bobby Hutcherson, Joey DeFrancesco, and Billy Hart.

Nevertheless, he's continued his usual busy schedule of live dates, and also is working on a new video series, "The Sanborn Sessions," which will document unrehearsed jams featuring Sanborn, his band, and a different special guest each episode. (Sounds a bit like a jazz version of Live at Daryl's House, the long-running series hosted by Daryl Hall of 1980s hitmakers Hall & Oates.)

Sanborn in the last year also has debuted a new quintet, which has him for the first time in decades sharing the front line with another horn player, trombonist Wycliffe Gordon, plus a guitar-less rhythm section geared as much for straight-ahead jazz as for funk/R&B, with Billy Kilson on drums, Ben Williams on bass, and Andy Ezrin on keyboards.  

You can see this new quintet in action in the first video up above, recorded in January of this year at B.B. King's in New York City.

After the jump, there are two more clips of the new quintet, both recorded in September 2017 at the Blue Note in NYC. While the second one is just a camera-phone video, it documents the new band playing the Sanborn standard "Maputo," and thus provides a potentially revealing opportunity to compare and contrast with previous versions. 

Having thus pretty much exhausted the supply of online videos of Sanborn's new band, the rest of today's clips offer looks at some live performances recorded in 2017 since his last visit here.

The next video is a full set recorded in May of last year at the The Jazz Kitchen in Indianapolis, with an ensemble including Sanborn, Ezrin, and Kilson, plus bassist Andre Berry and guitarist Nicky Moroch.

Then there's a version of Stevie Wonder's "Another Star," recorded with the electric band at the Safaricom Jazz Festival in Kenya, and last but not least, another Sanborn staple, "Camel Island," as performed at the Newport Beach Jazz Fest in California.

You can see the rest of today's videos after the jump...