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David Sanborn, a musical chameleon whose wailing alto saxophone helped shape the sound of jazz fusion in the 1970s and ’80s, as he sold millions of albums while adding his touch to the performances of dozens of musical stars from Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins to the Rolling Stones, David Bowie and Linda Ronstadt, died May 12 at his home in Tarrytown, N.Y. He was 78.

Statements on his website and social media platforms said he had complications from prostate cancer, which he had battled since 2018.

Mr. Sanborn, who won six Grammy Awards throughout a six-decade career, began as a sideman working in St. Louis blues and jazz clubs before appearing at the 1969 Woodstock music festival in Upstate New York as a member of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.

By the early 1970s, he was a mainstay at recording sessions with high-profile musicians, playing memorable improvised saxophone solos on Bowie’s “Young Americans,” Paul Simon’s “Still Crazy After All These Years,” James Taylor’s “How Sweet It Is (to Be Loved by You)” (all from 1975) and Ronstadt’s 1978 recording of Smokey Robinson’s “Ooo Baby Baby” (spelled “Ooh Baby Baby” on Ronstadt’s album “Living in the USA.”) He toured with Taylor, the Stones and Stevie Wonder.

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Effortlessly sliding from pop to rhythm-and-blues to jazz, Mr. Sanborn was simultaneously performing in a group led by Gil Evans, who had been an influential jazz arranger and bandleader since the 1940s.

“I don't think I’m particularly innovative, and I’m not sure I’m even a jazz player as such,” Mr. Sanborn told the Chicago Tribune in 1989. “I just have a sound and a style that seem to connect with a lot of people.”

That sound was bright, strong and piercing, often pitched in the upper register of the alto saxophone. (He also occasionally played the smaller soprano saxophone.)

“When you’re playing with four other horns and an electric guitar, you’ve got to cut through it and just play loud,” he told Newsday.

In 1975, he released the first of his 25 solo albums, “Taking Off,” which appeared during the emergence of jazz fusion, an electrified hybrid form of jazz and rhythm and blues perfectly suited to Mr. Sanborn’s style. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, his distinctive tone became a mainstay on so-called “smooth jazz” radio stations, predating other alto and soprano saxophonists, including Kenny G, Dave Koz and Najee.

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Mr. Sanborn’s breakthrough 1980 album, “Hideaway,” sold more than 500,000 copies and was on the R&B charts for more than a year. His follow-up album, “Voyeur,” released in 1981, earned Mr. Sanborn his first Grammy, for best instrumental R&B performance.

His 1986 recording with keyboard player Bob James, “The Other Side,” went platinum, with sales topping 1 million, and won the Grammy for best jazz fusion performance.

Later recordings included the romantic “Pearls” (1995), in which he played ballads over lush string arrangements by Johnny Mandel. Mr. Sanborn explored elements of hip-hop on 1992’s “Upfront,” which Entertainment Weekly reviewer Josef Woodard called a “funkified, ear-twisting musical mix in which hip-hop manners meet Booker T. and James Brown … In his own deceptively modest way, David Sanborn is doing his part in expanding vocabularies by weaving together the disparate threads of great American night music.”

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Critics were not always so appreciative of his work. For years, purists complained that Mr. Sanborn’s style was not worthy of the label “jazz.”

“I don’t have any control over what people call my music,” he told the Christian Science Monitor in 1991. “I don't call it jazz; I never have and I never will. Because I don't come from that tradition of the music that traces from Louis Armstrong up to the present day. I study it, and I can affect certain elements of jazz in my playing, but the rhythmic basis of my music is primarily funk music.”

While recording albums and appearing in concert in the 1980s, Mr. Sanborn broadened his appeal with appearances on television, first as a member of the “Saturday Night Live” band and later in regular appearances with Paul Shaffer’s band on David Letterman’s late-night talk show. Mr. Sanborn wrote for and performed on the soundtracks of the “Lethal Weapon” films.

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Beginning in 1986, Mr. Sanborn hosted a syndicated radio program, “The Jazz Show,” which introduced classic and modern jazz to audiences raised on rock music.

From 1988 to 1990, he had a late-night television show, originally called “Sunday Night” and later “Night Music,” which became a niche favorite among music lovers. On the show, Mr. Sanborn shared the stage with an eclectic mix of musicians, including Eric Clapton, Dizzy Gillespie, Lou Reed, Sonic Youth and Curtis Mayfield. One night, jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins, disco-funk band Was (Not Was) and singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen were all performing together with Mr. Sanborn.

“Would you label it jazz? Folk?” Mr. Sanborn said. “I don’t know — it’s music!”

‘That music had everything’

David William Sanborn was born on July 30, 1945, in Tampa, where his father was stationed while serving in the military. He grew up in Kirkwood, Mo., outside St. Louis. His father was an advertising executive, and his mother was a homemaker.

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At 3, young David was stricken with polio and spent a year in an iron lung. He had to relearn how to walk and had other long-term effects from the disease. A doctor suggested that playing the saxophone might help strengthen his lungs. (Because of the effects of polio, Mr. Sanborn had to hold his horn in a certain way, with his head tilted slightly to the left. Younger musicians sometimes imitated his stance without knowing its origins.)

He was 11 when his father took him to hear Ray Charles. One of Charles’s band members, alto saxophonist Hank Crawford, had a formative influence on Mr. Sanborn’s musical approach.

“That music had everything to me,” Mr. Sanborn said in the Monitor interview. “It had elements of bebop, gospel, rhythm-and-blues; it was earthy, popular, soulful.”

By 14, Mr. Sanborn was sitting in with blues greats Little Milton and Albert King.

Later, he played with musicians including jazz trumpeter Lester Bowie and saxophonists and Julius Hemphill and Oliver Lake, who became key figures in the jazz avant-garde. In countless midnight-to-5 a.m. gigs, they taught him a lasting lesson about music.

“My life would be different if all those people hadn’t been so nonjudgmental about music,” Mr. Sanborn told the Los Angeles Times in 1996. “Lester could do an outside jazz gig, then play with the Four Tops, then do circus-band music, then do gospel music. … Good music was good music. Why not do it all?”

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After attending Northwestern University and the University of Iowa, Mr. Sanborn moved to California in the mid-1960s and joined the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, an important blues revival group of the era. At the Woodstock festival, the Butterfield band went onstage just before Jimi Hendrix.

In his highflying years in the 1970s with the Stones, David Bowie and other rock stars, Mr. Sanborn said he developed a dependence on drugs and alcohol.

“Looking back, it was like one long party, with the drugs and booze flowing freely all the time,” he told the Tribune in 1989. Finally, he asked himself, “Do I get high, or concentrate on my music?” In 1982, Mr. Sanborn gave up drugs, alcohol and even coffee.

Survivors include his third wife, Alice Soyer, and a son from his first marriage.

During the pandemic, Mr. Sanborn gave master lessons on Zoom and began an interview show for WBGO-FM radio in New Jersey. He resumed touring and had dates booked well into 2025.

“To be able to play live in front of an audience,” Mr. Sanborn told the Tucson Weekly in 2020, “where you’re giving something to them and they’re giving something to you, there’s nothing like it. … It’s the way you feel alive.”

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