Music can be used as a gateway to euphoria and beyond. The energy you feel at a concert is bombastic and cardiac friendly. You never want it to end, therefore the ENCORE! ENCORE! The foot stomping! The Cheers! As a performer, you leave them wanting more and more. We need music in our lives to give us an escape from the mundane and the staleness of 9-5. Most of us are content to listen to it and enjoy it for all it’s worth, but there are those among us that were born to be performers. All you need is musical talent, stamina, dedication, luck and most importantly, you have to LOVE IT.
It was my impression that David Sancious loves it like a family member. I was very fortunate to talk to him recently. David has used his talents as a pianist, synthesist, guitarist, arranger, and producer on recording sessions and concert tours with the best of the best in music legends. After quitting school at 15 he tried to make a living as a music artist and joined Bruce Springsteen’s band when he was 17. David was one of the founding members of Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band and a fierce guitar player in his own right. The name, E Street Band actually came from the street that David’s mom lived on. Without David Sancious, there would be no E Street Band.
David left the E Street Band and formed his own jazz-fusion outfit called Tone with Boom Carter, the drummer who replaced Mr. Lopez. “I felt at the time I wanted to give my songwriting the same kind of focus and attention that Bruce was giving his.” David Sancious is has accumulated 7 gold albums and has toured with the amazing Sting, Peter Gabriel, Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Santana, Seal and an expansive list of legends in music.
He joined a strong line up of musicians at good friend, Sting’s 60th birthday bash at New York’s Beacon Theater. The charity event featured a stacked lineup where David reunited with Bruce Springsteen and accompanied Lady Gaga, Billy Joel, Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock, Rufus Wainwright, Mary J. Blige and will.i.am and others, all covering Sting’s songs.
He just released a new album entitled Eyes Wide Open that has a balanced mix of four vocal and four instrumental compositions, “Eyes Wide Open” is what Sancious describes as “a movie for your ears.” Spoken word is interspersed with political commentary and newsbreaks to create a musical and “visual” landscape addressing today’s volatile racial and political issues head-on through his signature sound. Creating blends and melodic bouquets of rich synthesizer and precise drums on every track will keep engaged. David reached out to 5 outstanding drummers to help in the recording as he accompanied the guitar and keyboards. The album must be heard to be believed. David says it’s his best work yet. I believe it might transport you to Hawaii, but that’s another story. Other most recent recordings include 9 Piano Improvisations, Cinema and Live in The Now.
“Congratulations on your phenomenal career and success doing what you love David. You’ve performed and collaborated with the very best in rock n roll, R n B, Jazz. Is your bucket list complete or is there anyone else that you would love to perform with?”
“The one person I’ve never seen live or performed with was Jimmy Hendrix. I still have dreams sometimes where I’m in a band with him (laughter). I’ve had a great run and a lot of good fortune. Luckily, some very fine musicians have asked me to take part in their projects over the years.”
“Also, much respect and admiration to you for performing with the sensational Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin. Can you share a memory of working with her?”
“It wasn’t really an intimate time working with her, it was more of a session. I think it might’ve been the last album she did. Andy Warhol did the cover art for it. I wrote one of the songs on the album but I didn’t have much chance to interact to deeply with her on that session, but it was a privilege just to be asked to be on the album.”
“I’ve also learned that you have an upcoming album, Eyes Wide Open. Have you invited other musicians and singers in to collaborate on the album?”
“It’s my 10th album and there’s 4 vocal songs and 4 instrumental songs. All the vocal songs are in order in what I call side one and the instrumentals are on side two. It’s the first time in my own compositions where I’m doing all the vocals myself. I also wrote every song on the album. I’ve got some incredible musicians and drummers on the album. Vinnie Colaiuta is on 2 tracks and Will Calhoun from Living Colour is on a track. It’s 5 amazing drummers and me. Another drummer from New York that I’ve worked with a lot, Joe Bonadio was on several tracks; the drummer from Prince’s band, Michael Bland is also on one track as well as great drummer from Italy that I’ve worked with many times some years ago, Adriano Molinari. I play all the guitar and keyboards.”
“How did you come up with the title of the album, Eyes Wide Open?”
“The title came about because of a song that I wrote. It’s in the chorus of the title track to the album. It goes, ‘keep your eyes wide open, keep your heart wide open’. Like everything else, it just flew into my consciousness one day and I thought yeah, this would be a good phrase to summarize what’s going on at the moment in society and in peoples lives, there’s so much happening. The greatest challenge is when people don’t have good information and they don’t seek it out, maybe they become numb to the experience and just believe what they hear without looking into things themselves and using their own critical thinking. You really have to take a good look at it, seeing what’s really happening and being aware of it before you can do something about it.”
“You describe your music as a mixture of harmony and melody from the jazz and classical traditions, combined with rhythms from the rock and R&B tradition. Does that stem from your early influences or has it evolved into that?”
“Yes, I’d have to say so. The thing about my influences is that I was sort of exposed to them simultaneously. I didn’t go through a classical music period where that’s all I was doing or a rock period where that’s all I was doing; they all came about simultaneously and I put my attention on them fairly equally as the music moved me.”
“You started playing piano at the age of 6. Did your parents have to force the piano on you or did you enjoy it from the beginning?”
“No they never forced me at all. They encouraged me very much when they saw that I was serious about it and had some talent. My family is huge supporters, my mom and my dad and two older brothers. You have to want to do this naturally. First of all, it’s not the easiest thing in the world to do and it’s not always going to be a good time, there’s going to be some challenges/difficult times that you’re going to have to live through and work through. If you don’t love what you’re doing it will make it that much harder.”
“Was jazz the first type of music you started playing?”
“When I first started playing at 6 my mom had been playing really beautiful classical piano and my father was a huge jazz fan. I used to listen to records with my father a lot, especially on the weekends when he had time off. One of his biggest enjoyments would be listening to his favourite records. He’d point out different things in the music to me/different highlights and ask me questions about it. At the same time, I was being influenced by the music playing on the radio at that time; Pop radio and on the RnB stations. It was a lot of music being processed at once.”
“Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band was named after the street you lived on in New Jersey. That is quite a legacy in itself. Do you still remember how that idea happened?”
“I just remember that Bruce had decided he wanted to name it something, he didn’t want to just call it after his name. We were in the car coming home from a gig somewhere. It was the last of a long run of shows and it was early in the morning in the summertime, around 6 am. We were coming around the corner to my house and were tossing around band names in the car; Bruce had been literally reading the street signs. In Belmar all the markers are in numerical and alphabetical order. There’s 11th Ave, 12th Ave, A St, B St. and on. We turned the corner and he’d just read it out loud. The next couple days later he said, ‘that’s it, we’re gonna call it Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band. I’ve always considered it a real honour to have the association with the street I grew up on.”
“You’ve mastered both guitar and piano/keyboards. What would you say you play more?”
“It depends on the project I’m in, sometimes it’s 50/50. On Eyes Wide Open for instance there’s quite a bit of guitar on it but on the last record there may be very little acoustic guitar. It really depends on the group of songs I’m dealing with. I never stick to the same exact ensemble from record to record. I consider them all separate projects, they’re more like books.”
“When you get a melody in your head, would you begin playing it on an acoustic or piano?”
“It really depends, it comes in different ways. Sometimes it’s just a melody in your head and you can just hum it. Other times you’re just noodling around on the guitar or the piano and something interesting happens. Sometimes I’ll hear it, write it down and take it somewhere and work on it later. Then there’s times when you’re just sitting at an instrument devoting a certain amount of time to it not going anywhere. You can write the whole song in a matter of minutes, if you’re ready to.”
“Would you say that your process of working through music as an artist is different from other artists?”
“I don’t think it’s different from anyone else’s, no. It’s a natural development and I think there are many people that work the same way. It comes in different ways to different people.”
“Every artist seems to find their inspiration for their work in many facets of life. Do you have one activity/person or place that you draw inspiration from for your music?”
“Well, I don’t need to be anywhere special to be inspired. Everyday common things inspire me; you could just take a walk in the woods and the natural beauty of where you are can be really inspirational. I recently moved to Hawaii and the island that I’m on in Kauai is one of the smallest but it’s the most beautiful naturally and I find everyday here is inspirational in its own way.”
“Where do people that live in Hawaii go on vacation?”
“(Laughter) I’ve heard that question before, that’s funny… I have a friend that runs a car business here and he just came back from two weeks of skiing in Vancouver, Canada. It was a complete change of climate for him. I’m very happy to stay put where I am for a good long time. I don’t think I’ll be relocating anywhere else again, I grew up in the Northeast; New Jersey or somewhere else in New York State and I’ve wanted to do this for many years, so I finally had the chance to do it.”
“Considering you’ve been a professional musician for most of your life (1960’s), how many keyboards do you currently own?”
“Keyboards really come and go like cars, unless you collect every car you’ve ever had, which most people don’t; the keyboards I have now with the current technology are quite different from when I got started. I think I own about 5 ‘88 Moog Controller synthesizers’. They’re state of the art for the most complete things you can do. I used to go on stage with 5 or 6 separate keyboards back in the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s just to make all the different sounds. The advancement in technology and the quality of keyboard instruments these days are unbelievably great, so I can do an entire concert, my entire show, a tour with Peter Gabriel and Sting and just use the one keyboard to generate all the sounds, it’s really incredible.”
“Who do you consider some of your closest allies in music?”
“I think some of the major people I’ve worked with, like Sting is a great ally, so is Peter Gabriel, so is Bruce Springsteen. To this day I’m in touch with all of those guys and they’re fantastically supportive of me. Their real allies if ever there were any.”
“When you’re not playing music, what is your other big passion?”
“I like to spend time with my wife, we like to playing tennis together, we like to garden together and since we live 3 minutes from the ocean we like to spend a lot of time on the beach together. These days I’m spending quite a bit of time on the beach and exploring the islands with her. We’re getting used to the pace of life here; it’s a very different pace of life than it was in Woodstock NY where I’ve been for 30 years. I have one of my brothers living here for almost 30 years and I’ve been coming here a lot. I’ve been to the different islands for concert work going back to the ‘80’s and I’ve always been fascinated by the islands; I always had an idea I’d up here someday.”
Eyes Wide Open, it really reflects today political climate as well as other revelations. Buy the album and thank me later!
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