This is the reason why despite his phenomenal success, Kenny G still gets asked about his supposed betrayal of the unwritten code of jazz musicians. "I’m not doing it so I can get a good review," says the slim and dapper looking Kenny G during an interview at the Formosa Regent last Saturday, April 9. "That should be the farthest thing from my mind. So when somebody says, ‘I hate this music. It is not real jazz. It stinks.’ that should be meaningless to me. And if somebody says, ‘That’s not true. This is the greatest musician of all time.’ I also have to look at that as meaningless. My music is not presented so it can go in a category. That is meaningless."
The young Kenneth Gorelick took this on when he realized how good he had become and decided to make the sax and music his career. "I was about 17," he relates. "I keep hearing people say how good I was so I thought this could be it." He was taking up Accounting at the University of Washington when he went professional by accepting gigs with visiting artists at night and later joining Barry White’s Love Unlimited Orchestra and later the Jeff Lorber jazz fusion band.
His days as an anonymous jazz musician were not fated to last though. He soon became Kenny G, solo artist who instead of involving his audience in his personal expression as jazz musicians do, played up to what the romantic public wants the way pop stars do. And so began the great Kenny G jazz controversy.
David Sandborn, another great sax player whose artistic reputation is closer to Metheny than Kenny G does not share the guitarist’s point of view. If he did, then he would never have agreed to join Kenny G in a duet of the Average White Band’s Pick up the Pieces in At Last….The Duets Album. Also in total agreement with him were the more than 300 people who turned up at the 90-year-old Red Theater in downtown Taipei to listen to Kenny G perform his big sellers and some selected cuts from At Last, in an intimate showcase.
The promo tour, which took Kenny G to Seoul and Tokyo after Taipei, was put together by BMG Music in connection with the Asian release of At Last, his first album after eight years. Aside from Sanborn, he is joined by Barbra Streisand in The Music That Makes Me Dance, Burt Bacharach on the piano in Alfie, Richard Marx in Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word, Earth, Wind & Fire in The Way You Move, David Benoit in Don’t Know Why, Gladys Knight in Misty, Daryl Hall in Baby Come to Me, Chaka Khan in Beautiful, Brian McKnight and Earl Klugh in Careless Whisper, Yolanda Sandoval in I Believe I Can Fly, LeAnn Rimes in (Everything I Do) I Do It for You and Latin vocalist Rosario with De Mil Colores. The title comes from one of the cuts, the Etta James standard that Kenny G performs with trumpeter Arturo Sandoval.
Getting all those names together took some years of planning and lots of paper work. "The list was long. We started out with 50 names and this got pared down as we went along. There were two lists. One of the stars and another of the songs we wanted to do. There were a lot of factors involved like some I really wanted like Elton John but who couldn’t make it because of their schedule. This is hard. Even in my case if somebody asks me to play on their record and I want to but I can’t because of the schedule. Maybe it will be easier the next time because they know that Barbra Streisand was in the first one."
The recording itself though, was mostly a breeze with Kenny G graciously allowing his guests to record first and later adding his sax in his famous Studio G. He describes the process. "It was really quite fast. We would record the song and leave spaces for their parts. We send these to them and they record wherever they are. Then it goes back to me and I go to work on it in my laboratory to put in the sax. But we are always in communication. We talked about what to do. Like Barbra was on the phone while I was recording The Music That Makes Me Dance. Thanks to technology, the result sounds like we were doing it together in the studio. "
The difficult ones were I Believe I Can Fly and Beautiful. In fact he almost wanted to give up. "It was so hard for me to play my sax on those songs because they were so good. There was just no room. So I say to myself, this is terrible, I quit. I slammed the door and I walked out." He returned to work after three days. "I get that way when I think I am not getting it right. But it is really just an artist thing. So I said I have to do this. It was my responsibility to finish the album. I was responsible to a lot of people and to the record company. And I got it right."
He got everything right in At Last including Pick Up the Pieces, which was a track wherein he recorded first. "It was to be with David Sanborn who has always been one of my heroes. So I played both sax parts, the alto and the tenor and I told him to erase the alto and put in his stuff. Then he called me and said, ‘You’re too good. Don’t do the alto.’" He looks pleased as punch over the recollection, the same way he does when discussing his success with his other passion, golf.
Kenny G, who has a zero handicap, plays golf with very famous people. Tiger Woods is one of them. "He also has zero handicap but I asked him to give me five strokes. I still lost and had to pay him a hundred dollars." Another one is president Bill Clinton who also plays the sax and with whom he also jams occasionally. "I won against him once and he had to pay me twenty dollars."
So it was no surprise that his excitement over At Last is matched only by his excitement over the news that he will be playing with other celebrities for charity in one of golf’s biggest tournaments, the Ryder Cup in London this summer. "I will be with Samuel L. Jackson in the US team and Robbie Williams will be in the UK team. We intend to win that one."
Kenny G admits that he will be hard put to choose between music and golf but he says that he credits this life around the world’s greatest to the music. "It was the music that made all these possible. It’s a great thing but I try not to think about it. The motivation that I have is always the music and because I am a musician. I try not to think about what has been accomplished because maybe it’s gonna affect my heart and what I do. I’m very lucky but when you have a lot of success, you have to remember two obligations.
"One is you can’t lose the reason you did it in the first place. No matter what you do, you’re an athlete or a musician, you do it in the beginning because of the love of it. Then you attain success and now maybe you want to do it because you want to have a career. That’s not right. You have to do it for love. Secondly, you have to be grateful. I’m grateful I get to do it because I love it."
Kenny G is now married with two sons, Mark 11 who plays the piano and Noah who plays the drums. Why not the sax? "I tried to interest them in the sax but I think they got intimidated by my playing. Someday perhaps." Then Kenny G might finally allow someone else to touch his beloved sax collection. "I have a safe back home where they stay when not in use. It is fireproof, dustproof, airproof and only one person has the combination. Me."
Kenny G’s hairstyle has not changed over the years, "I really do not have much of a say in this because this is my natural hairstyle. The problem with it is that it is hard to wear this kind of hair short. So this is not by choice." But he is now credited in the Guinness Book of Records with being able to hold the longest note in history. "I’ll let you in on the secret. All I do is breath through my nose and blow through my mouth at the same time. It is really just, breathe and blow, breathe and blow throughout." He is now a big recording star who can be playing his sax to Streisand over the phone one moment and listening to Bill Clinton play his in one of their get-togethers the next. He is now a long way off from the time he picked up the saxophone as a 10-year-old kid in Seattle and he intends to be always grateful.