Time and the river

"Randy Crawford adds her lustrous vocal to a sexy, slow-burning read of "Windmills of Your Mind." "Spanish Groove" is exactly what it says, but the weave between Afro-Latin funk and gritty soul-jazz is infectious and pushes the margins of both. Miller roils and pops just under Sanborn's taut, tough cry, and the two punctuate an exceptionally creative horn chart. "Overture" is from David Amram's original score for The Manchurian Candidate, a melancholy 14-note theme, where Sanborn reclaims the source's trumpet line, and is joined by Assaf on electric piano. This curious closer offers a gentle yet canny and strategic closure to an album whose musical terrains and textures are as focused as they are varied, all of them in the cut. Magnificent".

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"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".

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"It is easy to underrate David Sanborn, a crossover saxophone master the jazz police will never endorse. He's so damn accessible, delivering effortless improvisations with a unique blend of smoothness and bite, and he programs his albums to maximize outreach, peppering instrumental originals with choice covers. He's so impure he must be suspect. Tim And The River is impure, indeed, and satisfyingly so ... His key foil on this addicting album is dramatic bassist Marcus Miller, who also produces".