Personnel: David Sanborn (alto saxophone); Oleta Adams (vocals, keyboards); Jimmy Scott (vocals); Don Grolnick, Kenny Barron (keyboards); Christian McBride (acoustic bass); Mark Egan (fretless bass); Marcus Miller (bass); Steve Gadd (drums); Don Alias (percussion).

Recorded in New York.

Alto saxophonist David Sanborn has been among the most recognizable solo voices in American popular music since his '70s breakthroughs with Stevie Wonder and David Bowie. Sanborn's big, garrulous tone and acidic attack recall some of the greatest players to walk the line between R&B and jazz, people like David "Fathead" Newman, Hank Crawford and Louis Jordan. But for all his considerable commercial success as a top session man and contemporary jazz star, Sanborn has never been content to simply tarry with the tried and true. In that spirit, his resume also includes such adventurous fare as his sideman work on Tim Berne's 1993 session, DIMINUTIVE MYSTERIES (MOSTLY HEMPHILL).

With PEARLS, Sanborn has stepped up in class to make the kind of elegant, lyrical saxophone recital his talent always promised he had in him. And as Christian McBride's huge acoustic bass and Steve Gadd's whispering drums emerge from the dark landscape of Johnny Mandel's sweeping romantic charts on "Willow Weep For Me," it's clear that Sanborn is at the top of his game. Each note is burnished in amber, as his expressive trademark vibrato shades his alto lines with taut vocal urgency, even as his piping tone ascends to places few vocalists dare to tread (as in the concluding passages to "Everything Must Change").

And on those tracks where Sanborn teams up with vocalists, the expressive timbre of his horn is set off in sharp relief. Jimmy Scott's halting, teardrop vibrato adds a note of lonely desperation to "For All We Know," as Sanborn answers with Bird-like phrases; and Oleta Adams teams up with the saxophonist to transform Carole Bayer Sager/Marvin Hamlisch's "Nobody Does It Better" into a fervent gospel testimony.