Sanborn Starts Slowly Before Getting Into Swing of Things

The first couple of tunes in David Sanborn’s set at the Greek Theatre on Friday night had the distinct feeling of a performer doing an imitation of himself.

The veteran alto saxophonist, one of the most original and influential voices of the post-bop era, started with a series of choruses filled with his trademark woofs, honks and fast-paced liftoffs into the upper stratosphere of the blues. But his sound was furry, and there was a retread quality to the many riff fragments that he uses to construct his solos.

It sounded, in other words, like a potentially long night. But Sanborn didn’t come by his sterling musical reputation without reason. And, by the time he hit Marcus Miller’s tune “Brother Ray,” from the new Sanborn album, “Inside,” his playing began to come alive. The vitalization was aided, to a considerable extent, by the surging, consistently hard-swinging work of keyboardist Ricky Peterson, the driving bass of Richard Patterson and the wildly idiosyncratic percussion of Don Alias.

Sanborn does not like to be described as a “jazz musician” and, when he gets locked into a pop-blues mode, his perception is probably right. But when he reverts to the kind of blues-tinged, improvisationally imaginative playing he was doing with the Paul Butterfield Band, Stevie Wonder and Gil Evans, among others, in the ‘60s and ‘70s, he is an impressive musical artist, regardless of label.

For the second half of his set, that’s precisely what Sanborn did, enlivening his familiar licks by inserting them into a solo stream that was virtuosic and rhythmically energetic. In one particular, especially rapid passage, he stepped completely beyond his pop-blues persona, generating an improvisation that could only be defined as first-rate, post-bop contemporary jazz. Too bad he doesn’t do this sort of work on a more consistent basis.

Pianist Joe Sample’s trio opened the evening with a collection of his foot-tapping, soul-stirring tunes. Joined by singer Lalah Hathaway, they combined for a crowd-pleasing set highlighted by a sensual rendering of “Fever” and a rhapsodically lyrical “For All We Know.”