Your Top 5 Sax Players?

Frogman, I like your second list better than your first one, I guess they make more sense to me. And I almost completely forgot about Joe Farrell, I had a couple of his lp's from the 70's, can't remember their names, but they weren't bad.

While Desmond has been described here as a proponent of 'smooth' (more aptly known as 'cool') jazz, he was really much more than that. He employed adventurous time signatures and Brubeck acknowledges this in an intro during the 1963 Carnegie Hall performance. He had superb control and was a wonderful balladeer. His recordings with Gerry Mulligan and Jim Hall better demonstrate his talent than those he made with Brubeck, IMHO. Was he influential? Was he one of the best? I always find these questions troubling, just as I find it nearly impossible to limit my 'favorites list' to only five performers or performances. I really enjoy Desmond, as I do Konitz, and Benny Carter even though they each have a much different voice than Trane, or Ornette or Von Freeman...

My vote Goes to:
Tenor:
1) Ben Webster
2) Lester Young
3) John Coltrane
4) Sonny Rollins
5) Stan Getz
6) Charlie Parker
7) Johnny Hodges
8) Paul Desmond
9) Joe Henderson
10) Wayne Shorter

From The New York times

Jazz Review | David Sanborn
A Coolly Lyrical Sound, but Not Exactly Smooth

By NATE CHINEN
Published: November 10, 2005

When the alto saxophonist David Sanborn released his first album as a leader 30 years ago, there was no way of auguring the genre that would bubble up in his wake. Smooth jazz is unimaginable without Mr. Sanborn; his coolly imploring brand of lyricism runs through all its iterations, including the latest, urban jazz and chill.

This is a source of some ambivalence for Mr. Sanborn, whose playing has always suggested the grit of rhythm-and-blues. At the Blue Note on Tuesday night, he made a point of starting strong, with explosive and rhythmically complex strands of Latin jazz.

Mr. Sanborn has the right musicians for the task. The keyboardist Geoffrey Keezer, the bassist Mike Pope and the drummer Terreon Gully are a well-calibrated rhythm section, and the percussionist Don Alias brings a welcome layer of texture. On Horace Silver's "Señor Blues," the group backed Mr. Sanborn's chirping phrases with a satisfying heavy churn. The second song, Gil Fuller and Chano Pozo's classic "Tin Tin Deo," was even more doggedly propulsive, peaking with a blistering exchange between Mr. Alias, on timbales, and Mr. Gully, on snare drum and toms.

The remainder of the set was so much more temperate that it almost felt like a different show - the one, of course, that the audience had paid handsomely to see. There were scattered cheers when Mr. Sanborn introduced "Maputo," a polished track from his 1990 album with the keyboardist Bob James. A similar response greeted "The Dream," a treacly pop ballad by Michael Sembello that he inflated to grand dimensions, like a float in a parade.

Still, "smooth" is not the best characterization of Mr. Sanborn's style. His tone is tart, not velvety, and he often phrases in staccato bursts. He spends a lot of time straining for cathartic high notes and then holding them aloft - a gesture not so much of intimacy as of triumph. What distinguished his strongest playing of the set, on "Lotus Blossom" - not the Billy Strayhorn standard but a Don Grolnick ballad with a vaguely Brazilian lilt - was that he worked quietly and patiently, drawing the audience in before leaping into flight.

Yes, I saw Mr. Sanborn about a month and a half ago at Jazz Alley in Seattle and he did a good set, more uptempo than I would have imagined. And while his style and sound has grown on me over the years, I will still never put him in the same boat with Coltrane, Getz or Rollins.