He came up doing session work in the late 1960s and 1970s, playing on records by David Bowie, James Brown, Stevie Wonder, and a long list of others. That's where a lot of people first heard him without knowing it — that wailing alto on David Bowie's Young Americans (1975) is Sanborn, and it's a good thirty seconds of pure personality dropped into the middle of a pop record. He had a gift for making himself essential to someone else's song without hijacking it.

His own solo career, which took off in the mid-1970s on Warner Bros., leaned hard into the smooth, funk-inflected side of things. Albums like Voyeur (1981) and Straight to the Heart (1984) sold well and earned him Grammy awards, which also made certain corners of the jazz world suspicious of him. The criticism was never entirely fair. Yes, the production was polished and radio-ready. But Sanborn's actual playing within those settings was never soft — he attacked phrases, bent notes hard, and brought a soulfulness that a lot of his smooth jazz contemporaries genuinely couldn't match.

He also hosted a late-night TV music program called Night Music in the late 1980s, which ran for two seasons and was genuinely strange and great — booking combinations of artists that nobody else would have put together. It wasn't a huge hit but it had a devoted following and said something real about Sanborn's actual musical curiosity, which ran wider than his commercial profile suggested.

He kept recording into the 2000s and occasionally pushed back toward a harder jazz sound, notably on Closer (2005), which he made with Bob Belden arranging and a more straightforwardly jazz-oriented approach. It showed he could do it when he wanted to. Whether he should have done it more is the kind of argument that's fun to have, but honestly, the crying alto on a well-played ballad was its own valid thing. Not every musician needs to prove themselves to the jazz academy. Sanborn knew what he sounded like and mostly seemed fine with it.