Art & Creativity Quote by David Sanborn

Sanborn isn’t nostalgically pining for a lost jazz Eden; he’s diagnosing an ecosystem failure. The phrasing is blunt and structural: “increasingly marginalized” suggests an active process, not a natural fade-out, and “there’s just no outlet” lands like a musician staring at a locked door, not an artist chasing a trend. He’s talking about infrastructure - the pipelines that turn music into culture: radio formats, TV bookings, playlist placement, press attention, touring circuits. When those channels narrow, instrumental music doesn’t merely sell less; it becomes harder to even encounter casually, which is how most people learn to love it.

The subtext is also a critique of how media equates “relevance” with narrative. Vocal music arrives pre-packaged with language, persona, and quotable feeling; it gives editors and programmers something to summarize, market, and argue about. Instrumentals ask for a different kind of listening time: less lyric-driven identification, more texture, mood, and musicianship. That’s a tougher pitch inside media systems optimized for immediacy, hooks, and human interest angles.

Sanborn’s own career sharpens the context. As a saxophonist who crossed jazz, pop, and TV-era mass exposure, he came up when instrumental virtuosity could be mainstream-adjacent. His lament points to a cultural shift: fragmentation, algorithmic gatekeeping, and branding-first music coverage have turned “no venue” into a self-fulfilling prophecy. When the outlets disappear, the audience’s curiosity atrophies - then the disappearance looks like “demand,” not design.