Creativity Quote by David Sanborn

Sanborn’s little stutter-step of a sentence is doing two jobs at once: it’s a musician’s dodge and a musician’s indictment. He starts with a hedge ("Well, I guess") and then repeats himself ("unease... always a little uneasy") the way players circle a chord before landing on the sharp note. The sharp note is the punchline: "smooth jazz, as opposed to what?" It’s not just a quip; it’s a refusal to accept a marketing category that pretends to be descriptive while acting like a value judgment.

The subtext is that "smooth" isn’t a neutral adjective in jazz discourse. It’s a polite label that can mean "watered down", "safe", "for elevators", a genre defined less by what it is than by what it supposedly isn’t: challenging, noisy, improvisational, Black, risky. Sanborn’s question forces the listener to complete the sentence and confront the snobbery embedded in it. Smooth versus rough? Versus real? Versus jazz that makes you work? If the opposite of smooth is jagged, then maybe smooth jazz is being accused of sanding off the very edges that made jazz a living art.

Context matters: Sanborn was a crossover figure, a saxophonist who could move between R&B, pop sessions, and jazz stages while getting tagged with a term that often functions like a dismissal. His unease reads as self-protection, sure, but also as a broader critique of how the industry sells mood as music and then shames the musicians for being too listenable.