David Sanborn contracted polio at age three and spent close to a year in an iron lung; the saxophone came afterward, on doctors' advice, as a way to help rebuild his chest and breathing muscles after the illness left him with a shortened left arm and impaired respiration. He grew up in Kirkwood, Missouri, outside St. Louis, and by fourteen was already sitting in with blues players Albert King and Little Milton in local clubs — an unusually direct, unglamorous entry into music for a future pop-radio fixture. He studied at Northwestern University before transferring to the University of Iowa, where he worked with saxophonist J.R. Monterose.

In 1967 he joined the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, recording on four of their albums as both horn-section member and soloist, and playing Woodstock with them on August 18, 1969. That blues-band foundation, more than any jazz conservatory training, shaped the vocal, cry-in-the-voice quality that became his signature alto sound. Through the 1970s he became one of the most in-demand session horn players in music, period — not just jazz: he's on Stevie Wonder's Talking Book (1972), David Bowie's Young Americans (1975), and James Taylor's Gorilla (1975), among many others, before he'd released a note under his own name. His debut as a leader, Taking Off, also arrived in 1975.

The Bowie session is the one non-musicians know him for without knowing his name: "There was no lead guitar, so I played the role of lead guitar," Sanborn said of the "Young Americans" date. "I was all over that record." What followed over the next two decades is the clearest possible demonstration of what "crossover" means in practice. Sanborn won six Grammy Awards across four different categories: Best R&B Instrumental Performance for "All I Need Is You" (1979 ceremony, from Voyeur) and later "Chicago Song" (1988); Best Jazz Fusion Performance for Straight to the Heart (1985) and, the following year, for Double Vision (1986), his collaboration with keyboardist Bob James; Best Pop Instrumental Performance for Close-Up (1988); and Best Contemporary Jazz Album for Inside in 1999/2000. Six wins, four categories, over roughly twenty years — the same player, the same Academy, filed under whatever genre box the Grammys had that year.

He wasn't only a hit-making sideman and leader. In 1980 he played in the original Saturday Night Live band. From 1988 to 1990 (sources differ slightly on the exact end date) he hosted his own NBC show — first titled Sunday Night, later Night Music, co-hosted for a stretch with Jools Holland — built on his own idea: put musicians from completely different worlds in the same room, have them play material other than their hits, and let them jam together at the end. Guests included Miles Davis, Sun Ra, and Pharoah Sanders. The same saxophonist scoring pop and R&B radio hits was, at the same time, putting free jazz on NBC on a Sunday night.

Sanborn spent much of the 1990s and 2000s as a prolific leader and first-call session player, released over twenty albums in total, and continued performing and hosting virtual sessions during the COVID-19 pandemic. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2018 and died from complications of the disease on May 12, 2024, in Tarrytown, New York, at age 78. Throughout his career he pushed back on being filed as a jazz musician at all: "I'm not a jazz musician," he told Down Beat in 1993, and later, to the Los Angeles Times: "I sometimes get looped with jazz musicians because I play sax and improvise." He never fully claimed the word. He also never fully left it.

Sanborn's alto tone is instantly identifiable: a vocal, blues-inflected cry that traces directly back to his teenage apprenticeship with Albert King and Little Milton and his years inside the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, rather than to a conservatory jazz lineage. Critic Scott Yanow called him, in 2012, "the most influential saxophonist on pop, R&B and crossover players of the past 20 years" — a claim borne out by how many other saxophonists of his generation are still measured against his sound. Despite the smooth-jazz and pop-radio associations that dominate his commercial reputation, he studied free jazz in his youth with Roscoe Mitchell and Julius Hemphill and returned to that vocabulary periodically throughout his career, which is part of why his own NBC show could put Sun Ra and Pharoah Sanders on national television without it reading as a stunt.