With his key role in last year’s vibrant Enjoy the View, the often heart-wrenching soul-saxist David Sanborn seemed to fuse the most moving qualities of his voicelike sound and the deep jazz roots that have rarely been explicitly required in his 40-year pop-session career. Time and the River is a different story; hopefully Sanborn’s live show will fire this album’s programme of soul blues, smooth jazz and distantly 80s Miles Davis grooves into much more vibrant life than Marcus Miller’s studio production does. There are some classic Sanborn glimpses, such as his plaintively wriggling insinuations on Oublie Moi; a quiet dialogue with Roy Assaf’s Fender Rhodes after Randy Crawford’s restrained account of Windmills of Your Mind; and a loping, long-lined break on D’Angelo’s Spanish Joint. But there are too many places where this fine artist’s contributions sound parachuted into formulaic studio-band grooves for this set to appeal to Sanborn’s many jazz admirers. On stage, it’s bound to be quite different.
