Altogenarian: David Sanborn 80

David Sanborn Octet - Brother Ray

I have returned to close out July with this milestone berfday exercise in the Joy of Sax.

Today's hero de alto left us about 15 months ago, after a career the word eclectic doesn't begin to cover.

Often credited/blamed for being one of the artists the record industry used to smooth Jazz down to a dull, pale reflection of itself in the early 1980s, he really gets a bad rap, and for not a whole lotta good reasons if you ask me.

After all, this is the man who used that very same leverage to curate and mastermind what must surely be one of the craziest and most creatively-minded television programs of all times.

That he was able, for two full seasons, to somehow coerce the NBC network execs to put Sonic Youth and Sun Ra -- and a whole lotta others, often in combinations that would make the most out-there concert promoter scratch their heads -- on prime time TV on Sunday Nights blows my tiny mind even today, 35 years later.

Look, if you can put Bongwater and Bootsy Collins on the same stage opposite Cop Rock or Full House or whatever, you're aces in my encyclopedia no matter what kinda Kenny G those very same corporate suits wanna turn you to.

All that said, I dig David Sanborn -- born this very day in 1945 and who woulda been 80 today -- because he can play. And when he did, it was with a totally identifiable-in-one-note tone, and often than not in the company of some of the finest musicians on Earth.

Grainy-toned honkers are a common sound on alto since a pioneering Big Jay McNeely first slid across the front of a stage on his back wailing upon one, but when you listen to these concerts -- which have nothing to do with Elevator Jazz and a lot to do with Soul Jazz in the vein of, say, Maceo Parker -- it's instantly obvious who has got the horn in their mouth, just from a minimum of sonic information.

One of those players that effortlessly had the entire history of Jazz in his genes and at his fingertips, all you have to do is check how he goes from St. Louis Blues to funkatized Fusion to Tin Tin Deo to Soul Serenade in the span of a single set to understand we're talking about a truly underrated and tasteful character here.

He passed away in May of 2024 from prostate cancer, but like I said he'd have been octo 80 today, so I brewed up a couple of very representative shows to mark the occasion.

David Sanborn Sextet

"JVC Jazz At Newport"

Newport Jazz Festival

Newport, Rhode Island USA

8.16.1998

01 introduction

02 Savanna

03 Benny

04 Spooky

05 Full House

06 Rikke/percussion solo

07 Snakes

08 Chicago Song

09 outro

Total time: 1:14:35

David Sanborn - alto saxophone

Don Alias - percussion 

Ricky Peterson - keyboards & vocals

Dean Brown - guitar

Rocky Bryant - drums

Richard Patterson - bass

320/48k audio streamed from Wolfgang's Vault

spectral analysis is lossless to 20 kHz, making this essentially equivalent to a preFM source

converted to 16/44 CD Audio, retracked, edited and remastered by EN, July 2025
455 MB FLAC/direct link below

David Sanborn Octet

Estival Jazz 2009

Piazza della Riforma

Lugano, Switzerland 

7.3.2009

01 Full House

02 Brother Ray

03 St. Louis Blues

04 Please Send Me Someone to Love

05 Tin Tin Deo

06 Smile

07 Basin Street Blues

08 Soul Serenade

09 I've Got News for You

Total time: 1:13:09

David Sanborn - alto saxophone

Gene Lake - drums

Nicky Moroch - guitar

Ricky Peterson - keyboards & vocals

Mike Pope - bass

Nicolas Gardel - trumpet

Martin Jacobsen - saxophones

Lionel Segui - trombone

448/48k audio from a lossless TS file of a European satellite TV broadcast

extracted, converted to 16/44 CD Audio, tracked, edited & remastered by EN, July 2025
475 MB FLAC/direct link to both shows

That will do it for July from me, hope you enjoyed it. I'm already working on August, because honestly doing this stuff helps take my mind off the idea that the world seems poised to slide into irrevocable, cartoon fascism at any moment. For the time I'm engaged in mixing up the magic, anyways. 

Hopefully a few magic moments with the birthday boy David Sanborn and his high potency alto saxophone will help whoever is reading this with whatever puts them on the edge of the ledge as well. You know I'll always do what little I can to make you crack a Smile!--J.

7.30.1945 - 5.12.2024

Feels So Goodbye

 

Chuck Mangione Quintet - Feels So Good


Hey there! It's me again, your trusty Undertaker.

I know it's only been 48 hours, but did you know 150,000 people die everyday? I can hardly even keep up with the genre-shaping, life-sustaining musicians that are passing away this week faster than the shredders in the White House can pulverize the Epstein Files.

I better write this all down before the next one goes, and I have to sit here for the 12th time this week, remastering some elemental, mind-alteringly awesome concert from their performing heyday or something.

These Wolfgang's Vault of Copyright Assumption shows are something else, too. They're all encoded in disparate, dice-rolling ways that range from lossy sad to the one I have for y'all today, which goes past the range of human hearing with nary a black dot and could pass for a lossless live album to most ears not attached to Rover.

So Chuck Mangione left the coil, mere moments after Ozzy Osbourne. Perhaps Chuck is contributing guest flugelhorn to Ozzy's first afterlife Jazz record, I have no idea. I just wish these beautiful souls would stop departing this plane in such a blasted hurry.

I used to have a shirt like that in 1977 too, Chuck. Unfortunately that's where the similarities end. I can't blow horn like Chuck, or people might today be lamenting my passing after a laudable lifetime, supplying much needed and rare Joy to a rapidly disintegrating anti-culture. And writing florid, deserved tributes to my legendary instrumental, compositional and melodic prowess.

Oh well, when I go they'll just have to marvel at how I spent days of dedicated tedium, muxing the drums from the first 30 seconds of this tape, that the first half of the first tune being missing might feel less disturbing via a more cold, quiet open bubbling up from silence and all.
Do people care about aesthetic stuff like that anymore, or is it just show me the money, the fame and the 12-year-old chicks on the Island of No Accountability these days? It doesn't matter.... when I think of where things in this world are headed, I just put my head down and brew up another slab of Sounds That Time Forgot, lest I lose sight of what I can/can't change.
Anyway, today's unfortunate music death -- ok, yesterday's, but I can't pull two-hour, pristine board tapes from 48 years ago out of my ass in 13 seconds flat, you know -- is/was Chuck Mangione, himself lifelong sultan of the flugelhorn, and author of one of the most beloved instrumental hits that will ever accompany shoppers at The Emporium. You know it, and if not it's nice and audible at the top there, if you just press the handy Play button.
Chuck started as pretty much a straightahead Jazz cat, but as the 1970s progressed he began to shift to what would later dilute into what might be termed the Smoother side of the street.
Not that this concert reflects that tepidity in the slightest; this depicts a far more fiery and dynamic sensibility... before it all stopped feeling so good, and a million less talented players devolved and dumbed it down so it'd fit into a small-capacity elevator.

But once again, no matter. We should be grateful that when iconic players like CM leave us, we have underheard, borderline-earthshaking live documents lurking in corners of the internet to keep their flame burning bright as can be, for as long as can be.

I remember when I was a kid and we moved from Queens to Long Island in April of 1978, when Feels So Good was everywhere. My mom would drive me to school, where I was completing the 6th grade in the one last term in elementary school before graduating and moving away. That song would always be on the radio as we'd drive the miles back into the city in the mornings that Spring, and as I think of it now it's kind of melancholy, that songs without vocals, and with Jazz instrumentation such as that, can't really be popular or on the radio anymore for parents and children to share.
So thanks Chuck, and farewell to you and your flugelhorn, which will live forever. I hope you're up there, showing Ozzy a few of the less obvious intervals, and maybe a couple of the trickier modes.

Chuck Mangione Quintet
The Bottom Line
New York City, New York USA
11.2.1977

01 Hill Where the Lord Hides pt. 2/band introductions
02 Chase the Clouds Away
03 The Day After (Our First Night Together)
04 Legend of the One-Eyed Sailor
05 Soft
06 Hide and Seek (Ready or Not, Here I Come)
07 Feels So Good
08 Maui-Waui
09 The XIth Commandment
10 Bellavia
11 Land of Make Believe
12 Main Squeeze

Total time: 1:57:28
disc break goes after Track 07
Tracks 01-06 are from the early set
Tracks 07-12 are from the late set

Chuck Mangione - flugelhorn & keyboards
James Bradley, Jr. - drums
Chris Vadala - reeds, flute, percussion & keyboards
Grant Geissmann - guitar
Charles Meeks - bass

320/48k audio streamed from Wolfgang's Vault
spectral analysis is somehow lossless past 20 kHz, making this essentially equivalent to a preFM source
converted to 16/44 CD Audio, edited, denoised, tracked & remastered by EN, July 2025
697 MB FLAC/direct link

I hope this is a fitting Fusion Eulogy for our fallen hero, who floated away yesterday at 84. I think it sounds tremendous, with all the hallmarks of what makes the music of Chuck Mangione stand out in a somewhat maligned area of the Jazz universe.

I'll be back during the week with one more milestone birthday for July, but I couldn't wait on a tribute to this incredible player, who took us to a pretty sweet Land of Make Believe during his time in sound, down here on the ground.--J.

11.29.1940 - 7.22.2025

Osbourne Free

Ozzy Osbourne - Revelation (Mother Earth)

Well, that's the thing about mortality. Eventually, the ones folks wished could live forever, don't.

It's gonna get shittier too. A day is fast approaching when all of everyone's favorite music icons from the sunsetting Golden Age of 1965-1985 -- I dunno there will ever be a period of a more prolific or sincere outpouring of human creativity in the rapidly-disintegrating future, but we can hope -- will head to bed for a nap and not come back.

There was a time when "Ozzy Osbourne will live to be 76 years old" would have been a statement on par with "people will travel to the stars and meet banana-shaped ETs with raisins for eyes," but luckily he got off the hard stuff and stayed off it long enough to make it to that (for rock stars, sometimes septo-rarified) territory.

I can remember times growing up when you'd hear about him chewing the heads off animals in Big Record Industry offices, or snorting ants off Holiday Inn floors, and you'd have bet the farm he would buy it well before the ripe old age of 40.

He was probably that hard to manage from birth in 1948, but he met his match -- the daughter of Black Sabbath's manager, as it happened -- and I guess that as irritating as she is, she kept him from total self-destruction until he mostly quit the diet of drugs-n-alcohol decades back.

Speaking of Sabbath and self-destruction, there were times in my teens and twenties -- as I'm sure is true for tens of millions of guys, especially -- when those genre-defining cats in my Walkman headphones was all that was keeping me from a swan dive off the Williamsburg Bridge, or whatever high enough suicide solution happened to be available.

I was never big on his solo stuff after a few records in, but I especially liked the first three he did in the early Eighties, fresh outta Black Sabbath and trying to forge a career of his own.

Which he soon did, outshining and -selling his old mates with room to spare.

Not that it matters more than a Baby Boomer's britches anyway, but I think there are only a handful of people inducted into the R&RHoF in Cleveland twice, and he is one. What does matter is that big, globally-streamed finale last week -- where the original Sabbath reunited alongside an all-star cast for one last hurrah -- which seemed to valedictorize the man, and give him his Victory Lap flowers in full abundance before leaving the stage for good.

And, of course, we are all well aware that, 20+ years ago he, inadvertently, helped to create modern Reality TV.

Although, given how things are de-evolving faster than freedom of choice can keep pace with, perhaps that idea -- that he contributed unintentionally to setting the template for television as we know it -- might piss him off.

With all that said, it's obvious that with someone like this there are a ton of ROIOs of both him in Black Sabbath and then on his own, but as is often the case they sound, almost universally, like crap. Even the good ones, which are almost all legitimately issued anyhow as the Holy Barrel of Potential Revenue is scraped to the quick.

There's this guy that posts Ozzy-related shows on YouTube, however -- he's livestreaming a premiere of one right now, as I type this -- and I was somehow able to get one of his most fabulous creations off Soulseek in full, tastily remastered form.

I don't think this version of this performance widely circulates as lossless files outside of the usual bootleg BT trackers -- there's other, sludgy-sounding iterations of it, but this is done up from a sweet master cassette of the original, live broadcast he made himself back 43 years ago -- so let's try to begin to change that in honor of the dearly departed darkness prince.

Ozzy Osbourne

Mid-South Coliseum

Memphis, Tennessee USA

4.28.1982

01 FM intro/"Diary of a Madman" tape intro

02 Over the Mountain

03 Mr. Crowley

04 Crazy Train

05 Revelation (Mother Earth)

06 Steal Away (The Night)

07 Suicide Solution/The Man On the Flying Trapeze jam

08 Goodbye to Romance

09 I Don't Know

10 Believer

11 Flying High Again

12 Iron Man

13 Children of the Grave/FM announcement

14 Paranoid/FM outro

Total time: 1:19:11

Ozzy Osbourne - vocals

Brad Gillis - guitar

Rudy Sarzo - bass

Tommy Aldridge - drums

Don Airey - keyboards

Dario Romero's excellent remaster of his master FM cassette 

recorded from "The Source" live broadcast in 1982 over "Rock 103" FM in Memphis

retracked -- with volume boosted +2.3 dB throughout -- by EN, July 2025
588 MB FLAC/direct link

I apologize for slacking somewhat on this page, but there's been construction and crises abundant here at home lately. I shall return in a few days with something completely different, but I wasn't gonna let the passing of Ozzy Osbourne -- as beloved a music personality as any of our lifetimes, and deservedly so -- go without chronicling such unfortunate Changes appropriately.--J.

12.3.1948 - 7.22.2025