Some years ago The New York Times, surprised at the popularity of Kenny G’s music in China, asked the saxophonist how he felt about not getting royalties for all of that airplay. “Do I wish I could get paid for everything? Of course,” he responded, “but I surrender to the fact that that’s the way things go there.”
Hopefully, he would feel the same way to know that in the nineties, around the time a little cinema culture called Nollywood was finding its way commercially, his music was the main soundtrack for one of its most popular films. His detractors, as seen in the Penny Lane documentary Listening to Kenny G, which was screened at IDFA, would be aghast to know that in the Nigerian film Glamour Girls his music is used to convey some sophistication. You can just picture the former New York Times critic Ben Ratliff rolling his eyes.
Several American artists have found themselves in the interesting space that guarantees their work critical scorn and incredible popularity—there is Celine Dion, there is Christopher Cross—but few have belonged, in some way, to a form as critically beloved as jazz. One of the revelations in Lane’s documentary is that as soon as Kenny Gorelick was discovered, it was already clear he could belong to pop. At least it was clear to Clive Davis, the man behind the young musician’s rise from band member, to instrumentalist accompanying a vocalist, to solo star. Nonetheless the pivotal event in the Kenny G transformation was partly engineered by the man himself when he switched the music he was to play for a promo spot on a TV show. He played “Songbird” and the rest is history.
One of the things that doesn’t get focused on in the documentary is the matter of his getting accepted first of all by Black radio which, one imagines, was a bit outside America’s mainstream critical apparatus.
Unfortunately, Kenny G himself doesn’t quite understand how much he owes his success to the Black jazz artists that came before him, although he does say he wanted to be the white Grover Washington, the Black maestro behind the popular tune “Just the Two Of Us”, which received a hip-hop remix by Will Smith in the 1990s. Lane has to ask pointedly before he admits that he did indeed benefit from being a white man playing something, that to some ears, is jazz.
The issue is a little more complex than the case of all of those white acts who merely remixed a song by a Black act and then sold more and charted higher, because Kenny G is not particularly a student of the greats before him. As he puts it, he admired the technique, but the music didn’t “feel heartfelt” to him. His trick has always been to practice–or to “practice, practice, practice” as he put sit–when he’s invited to his high school.
This, of course, means that Kenny G has provided more ammo for his detractors by saying some of the things he says in the documentary: his reluctance to consider the debt his success owes to his skin color before Lane showed up is particularly damning. But he has also given his fans a reason to love him more because throughout the documentary the man himself is incredibly upbeat, happy, and about as sprightly as the hair on his head. He is the avatar of good-natured success and looks like he has never had a bad day in his life. For anyone who has listened to his music and loved it—which, one must admit, is a lot of us—he is the terrific picture of health and wealth and whiteness. He may be unappreciated, as he says, and frankly, his critics, especially in today’s climate, have a point, but there is a lot that success, even the unexamined kind, can compensate for. Lane’s deftly structured documentary, which is now showing on HBO, is a hoot and will satisfy the millions of people who have grown up listening to Kenny G, for better or for worse.
