The Guy Fieri of Smooth Jazz

On Listening to Kenny G

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Penny Lane’s wonderful new documentary Listening to Kenny G is filled with plenty of earnest rich guy moments, but the one sticks out in my mind is when Kenny (I’m going to throw out journalistic standards and not use his last name, Gorelick, through this. I’m also not going to call him G or the G Man. I’ll call him Kenny) talks about how people accuse him of making the music he makes because he knew it would sell 75 million records. “If only I was that smart,” he says in a way that makes me think Kenny G is a very sweet smart-ass all the time, the sort that loves to get a way with a little zinger and think about how funny it was. The thing that stuck out about Kenny’s whole career and that part in particular, is that it reminded me of my 2016 Esquire profile of Guy Fieri, when the Mayor of Flavortown and I talked about his beginnings, about how he didn’t set out to be the next Thomas Keller or some guy who made art that you ate; he went to culinary school because, as he told me, "I wanted to work in corporate restaurants.” It’s not about the art, dummy; it’s about doing what he wants to do on his terms, and there’s something really incredible about that to me.

Kenny G is similar. He didn’t grow up some jazz head obsessed with telling people early John Coltrane was garbage and his good stuff really starts after he put out A Love Supreme and started trying to find God through certain notes (Note: I don’t have this opinion, but I have been fed it before), and I’m willing to bet he’ll never pull out his own version of Albert Ayler’s “Ghosts” during a live performance. But, like Fieri, Kenny G had talent honed from practice and he had the gumption to say “Hey, I like my music more than the music Clive Davis wants me to push,” so he went for it, using his one shot on Carson to play “Songbird” instead of the pop hit the record label made him make.

After I finished Listening to Kenny G, I found myself reflecting on one of the critics explaining the various stages pop product has to go through before it reaches you and me. The testing and honing until you get something that is basically Mike Myers as the Scottish dad ranting about how KFC puts an addictive chemical in their chicken that makes you crave it, which, honestly, I don’t think it really that far off from being true. I hate to ask this of you, since it is a topic people love to keep punching, but think of Marvel movies and how they basically never fail. Then go ahead and just think about how much data and thought and testing must go into making sure every single second of those movies keeps our lizard brains going “I need more of Captain America being nice and Robert Downey Jr. making snappy jokes.” There is plenty of research to be found on this, that things like Marvel movies are created to be bigger than big because when you’re a behemoth, it’s really, almost impossible hard to fail. There likely won’t be a Marvel version of Heaven’s Gate anytime soon. It takes something like a miracle to bring a monster down. That is why I understand the argument against Marvel movies, but I still enjoy them.

But then there’s the other, overlooked section of pop culture that I think we tend to take for granted. A singular vision. You’ve know that you’ve got lightning even though everybody tells you otherwise, so you put it in a bottle and you go to work selling it and people buy it. A lot of mass culture of the last 50 or so years has been from “the majors” or big corporations looking at what’s hot in the underground, and figuring out how to repackage it and sell it to the masses. See: everything is called “indie rock” these days. But there are always going to be these moments when Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper go “This movie about a couple of desperado hippies on motorcycles will work even though the movie studios are still being run by old men with old ideas” or Sean Combs getting fired from Uptown and taking a 300+ pound mostly unknown rapper from Brooklyn with him because, why? He had a feeling that in 1993 that was going to work? In 1993? Does anybody remember 1993? It was all “Whoomp! ( There It Is)” and UB40 covering old songs. Thinking Biggie Smalls was your meal ticket back then seems like sort of a gamble, I’d say. But it worked. It seems so easy in hindsight, but we really take the cultural entrepreneur for granted, I believe.

Once upon a time I feel like any of the things I’ve mentioned, Kenny G, Guy Fieri or Diddy (or whatever he’s calling himself these days) would have been lumped under Dwight Macdonald’s idea of masscult, something that looks like art, but is really a manipulation of it created to move product. And, yes, I have to imagine there is some of that mixed in there. But when it’s one person and a vision, when it maybe feels just south of masscult, there’s something fascinating about some weirdo believing what they’re doing is so good that even a few people—forget millions—will not only like it, but they’ll pay money for it. Forget what you or I might assign the arbitrary designations of “good” and “bad” for a second, and just consider the idea that, even if his music drives you nuts, that Kenny G figured out something the rest of us can’t do. He made music that was so surprisingly popular (to his record label, at least) that the only response was to create an entire genre dedicated to it (smooth jazz), and while the “jazz community” and critics sneered at it, people wanted more. Deep down, I assume Kenny G knew that all along it would work out that way, even if nobody else did.