JAZZ REVIEW : DAVID SANBORN: A MAN IN COMMAND OF HIS SAX

David Sanborn practices safe sax. Revolutions are not his style. Men like Charlie Parker and John Coltrane were dangerous; they made music that called for a vital creative drive, and for an audience sensitive to their visionary concepts.

Sanborn knows how to bring out other reactions in his listeners, as was made clear by the teeming masses he drew to the Greek Theatre on Wednesday. How about those screaming high notes? Let’s hear it for that volcanic, voluminous backup band. If Sanborn’s music was wild, his fans were wilder.

His claims that he is not a jazz musician may be based on a fear that he will be compared to some of the artists he says he respects: Wayne Shorter, Phil Woods, Michael Brecker. Here is a man who improvises furiously, uses blues riffs, idolizes Cannonball Adderley--yet he says he is not a jazzman. Sure, and the Pope is not a Catholic.

What kind of jazzman he is, of course, is another matter. His occasionally saccharine sound is at odds with his bravura technical displays, which go straight to the gut rather than to the heart. Still, on such numbers as “Blue Beach,” which he wrote with Marcus Miller, he demonstrated the command of the horn that has firmed up his popularity.

His only attempt to play a standard tune was a version of “God Bless the Child” so over-melodramatized as to become laughable, though Billie Holiday would not have thought it funny.

Sanborn is to his genre of music what Jackie Collins is to literature. Both sell in the millions; both have the common touch. Still, despite his tendency to overblow, there are times when his skill and mastery of the style is impressive; one can well understand why he has become a major influence among alto players.

Don Alias on percussion and Sonny Emery on drums, excellent musicians both, had long individual workouts late in the evening, but the show stealing sideman was Hiram Bullock, the guitarist.

At one point Bullock sat on the stage, picked a few bars of “Bluesette,” jumped up, whirled around, indulged in wild distortions that sounded like an impression of a train wreck, and wound up with “Don’t Get Around Much Any More.” Toward the end of the show he leaped off the stage, ran all the way up to the top of the house with his guitar, dashed back, jumped back on stage and turned a somersault.

Opening for Sanborn were the Nylons, a vocal quartet from Toronto who worked mainly a cappella, though sometimes what sounded like a taped percussion background was heard. They have a fine blend, a powerful bass singer, and entertaining personalities. It was a little odd, though, to watch them, immaculate in their gleaming white suits, singing a song about working on the chain gang.