Unlike revenge, irony is finest served heat, and the genuine heat of the director Penny Lane’s documentary “Listening to Kenny G” (streaming on HBO Max) makes its ironies all of the extra revelatory. In the guise of the banal fan-service style of the pop-musician portrait, Lane delivers one thing grand and sly: a cinematic work of music criticism, a far-reaching hypothesis on the philosophy of style and the sociology of aesthetics. Her movie’s ironies begin with the title, as a result of most of the film’s viewers, like lots of its interview topics from the world of music, would slightly not pay attention to Kenny G’s music in any respect—and their aversion is the mainspring of the movie. Lane’s deft and delicate portraiture is devoted to the profound proposition that such aversion will be defined, even justified, by the very portrait of the artist that emerges. “Listening to Kenny G” subtly and certainly teases out the mighty and overarching thought of the inseparability of the artist and the artwork, the notion of artwork because the embodiment of the artist’s persona—for higher or for worse.
As Lane notes within the movie, the saxophonist and composer referred to as Kenny G is the best-selling instrumental artist ever. He’s recognized with a single type of music, clean jazz; what’s extra, that time period was coined expressly to describe his music. (The story’s within the movie.) In the mid-nineteen-eighties, Kenny G’s music rose to practically on the spot reputation and rapidly turned a mainstay of purchasing malls, dentists’ ready rooms, and places of work, in addition to radio stations; whether or not or not one needed to pay attention to his recordings, they have been seemingly inconceivable to keep away from listening to. In “Listening to Kenny G,” Lane tells the story of his rise from obscurity to fame to ubiquity, and he or she does so with a digital symphony of voices. She interviews music writers and students (each detractors and defenders of Kenny G’s music) and members of his adoring public.
But, above all, Lane listens to Kenny G himself, in particular person, at nice size, and his trenchant and granular dialogue of his music’s sound and his ideas and actions when creating it’s the coronary heart of the film. He’s an enthusiastic and beneficiant interview topic and host to the filmmaker and her crew, in his dwelling and his studio, as he speaks, and speaks and speaks—for causes that join fascinatingly along with his music—and he turns the film right into a feast of quotes and a treasure chest of moments. By listening attentively to Kenny G, Lane delivers, in a buoyant, amiable means, a ferocious denunciation, one by which she herself doesn’t voice a detrimental phrase—as a result of he does a lot of the inadvertent, unconscious damning.
Kenneth Gorelick, born in Seattle, in 1956, grew up there, in a middle-class Jewish household, and, in highschool, was acknowledged as a saxophone virtuoso. His college band had a resident composer, James Gardiner, who, in an interview with Lane, describes the younger Kenny as an extraordinary sight reader. Chosen to ship a short solo in a 1974 live performance on the Seattle Center Opera House with Gardiner’s skilled ensemble, Kenny—as an alternative of improvising a short cadenza, as Gardiner had supposed—held a single be aware for ten minutes, with a way referred to as round respiration (in impact, inhaling by means of the nostril whereas blowing the sax), and acquired a standing ovation. According to Gardiner, “That was the moment little Kenny Gorelick became the G-Man.”
After school, Gorelick joined the Jeff Lorber Fusion, a Portland-based band that recorded for Arista Records. He was observed by the label’s founder and C.E.O., Clive Davis, who ultimately gave him a solo contract. (That’s when he took the stage identify Kenny G.) But, to get round pop radio’s resistance to instrumentals, Davis paired Kenny G with singers, to the saxophonist’s dismay. In 1986, Kenny G was booked on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” to play his R.-&-B.-styled single “What Does It Take (to Win Your Love)” (a canopy of a 1969 report by Junior Walker & the All Stars). In a show of chutzpah akin to that of his 1974 Opera House solo, he as an alternative performed his personal composition “Songbird,” a mellow, melodic instrumental. In doing so, he earned the ire of Carson’s producers however gained a runaway hit report (abetted by Davis’s strain on radio stations to play it, as Davis himself tells Lane) and have become a serious superstar with a plethora of distinguished TV appearances, adopted by a sequence of albums that bought hundreds of thousands of copies.
The radio host Pat Prescott explains that workplace staff appreciated Kenny G’s music as nice, bouncy, inoffensive atmosphere. With its solo sax, it resembled jazz, however, because the radio govt Allen Kepler says, individuals who didn’t like jazz nonetheless appreciated Kenny G’s recordings, and, in a spotlight group the place his data have been performed, one girl, attempting to describe his model, known as it “smooth jazz,” and the time period caught on (and was rapidly adopted by a Chicago station, the primary of many to use it); as Kenny G himself says, “They decided to call it ‘smooth jazz’ because if they called it jazz it was gonna turn people away.” Yet Kenny G himself turned away from jazz, as he admits in a 1993 clip from a Charlie Rose interview that Lane contains. Asked by Rose whether or not he’s influenced by the nice jazz saxophonists, Kenny G says, of his music, “It’s real jazz sound, but it’s the technique of it. The John Coltrane and the Charlie Parker, I mean, their technique was phenomenal. . . . but that music was never heartfelt for me, so, when I went out and gigged, it wasn’t anything that I wanted to emulate.” What this says of Kenny G’s musical coronary heart is damning sufficient; it additionally factors to the overriding, even counterproductive significance for him of approach.
Returning, for Lane’s digicam, to his highschool in Seattle, Kenny G is requested by the principal to signal the wall of fame, and he writes, “Go For What You Love and Practice, Practice, Practice.” Even now, he practices three hours a day; when he went to school, he averted taking music principle, preferring to use the time for practising. To at the present time, he doesn’t know concord however claims to have a “sixth sense of melody” and employs an assistant to pitch him chords to go along with his melodies till he finds one which he likes. What emerges from such remarks in the middle of the movie isn’t any formal drawback along with his focus on melody or approach however, slightly, a suggestion that he’s incurious about music itself. Lane features a clip of a youthful Kenny G saying that he hardly listens to music, follows information, or is aware of “what’s happening.” For that matter, Lane asks him what he loves about music, and his cheerful response comes as a kind of smack within the face to individuals, whether or not musicians or mere listeners, who’re keen about it: “I don’t know if I love music that much. . . . I guess, for me, when I listen to music, I think about the musicians and I just think about what it takes to make that music and how much they had to practice.”
In speaking with Lane, Kenny G blithely shows an absurd, practically comedic contempt for artwork—as a result of he likes “old jazz standards,” he resolves to do an album for which he’s composing “new standards”; deciding that he needs to play classical music, he says, “Like new standards, I’m gonna have to write new classical music.” Instead of performing with main musicians of the time, he does a duet with a video clip of the late Louis Armstrong on “What a Wonderful World” and discloses, within the film, his plan to do an analogous “virtual duet” with the late saxophonist Stan Getz, however with an extra twist—as an alternative of merely enjoying together with a recording by Getz, he’ll have the sound engineer “adjust” Getz’s enjoying to slot in along with his personal tune. In the studio, Kenny G shows his personal relentless changes of his personal enjoying; he performs his soprano sax, after which has the recording engineer display the best way it’s going to sound on the report, after a number of “reverbs” are added to it—and this, the saxophonist says, is “what it really sounds like.” And, he provides, “When I give it my stamp of approval, I sit back and go, ‘That’s fuckin’ beautiful.’ I just say it.”
Kenny G pursues one thing like perfection each out and in of music, and boasts of it to Lane. He practices golf, aviation, cooking, investing, doing laundry, and even parenting with the identical devotion and conspicuous labor, the identical sense of satisfaction in feeling that he’s “really good” at them. He has two sons, and says that, after they have been younger, he puzzled, “How am I going to become the best father the world has ever seen? I’m going to start studying it.” He’s pleased with the best way they “turned out”—and provides, “Both of them grew up watching their father, who’s already super famous, every day, practicing, practicing.” He has a relentless drive to be “the best” at no matter he does; he even eagerly expresses to Lane his need to be “the best interview” she’s ever had, and provides that he’d willingly sit twelve hours straight together with her if that’s what it takes.
