Illustration by Matthew Billington
After taking part in a live performance within the Netherlands in the summertime of 1988, Seattle-born saxophonist Kenneth Gorelick, extra extensively often known as Kenny G, woke to his lodge telephone ringing at two within the morning. The voice on the opposite finish was a fellow musician, Grammy-winning saxophonist David Sanborn—well-known for solos on David Bowie’s “Younger Individuals” and James Taylor’s “How Candy It Is (To Be Cherished by You)”—saying, “Come all the way down to the bar. I’ve bought to speak to you.”
“What do you wish to discuss?” Gorelick remembers saying.
“Simply get down right here, please.”
Gorelick and Sanborn had carried out earlier that night on the North Sea Jazz Pageant, taking the stage with their very own respective bands not lengthy after Miles Davis. When Gorelick arrived downstairs, Sanborn, whose recording credit already included everybody from B. B. King to Stevie Marvel, “proceeded to spend half an hour telling me about how terrible he performed, and the way depressed he was about it.”
Gorelick listened patiently. “After which I mentioned to him, ‘David, you’re insane. I watched you play. You recognize what you seemed like? You seemed like David Sanborn. Hey, bro. You sounded such as you. And also you have been superior!’”
Gorelick ultimately returned to mattress, leaving Sanborn on the bar. “I felt actually sorry for him,” Gorelick says. “That he couldn’t be ok with his taking part in that evening.”
Kenny with Rick Rose.
If Kenny G has a superpower, it’s this: he has large belief in his personal artwork, a self-confidence that propels his new memoir, Life within the Key of G, simply because it propelled him to grow to be the best-selling instrumental artist of all time. Gorelick works onerous and is aware of it. He’s reaped unprecedented monetary bounty from the woodwind household of devices, and he is aware of that, too. The ’80s music movies, the hair, the meteoric gross sales numbers, the extensively corroborated pheromonal facets of his songs—in Gorelick’s view, these are issues that he vied for and gained. Deservedly. He would no sooner give into self-doubt than he would skip his day by day apply. However extra on the day by day apply in a second.
There have been loads of musicians that Sanborn would possibly’ve referred to as all the way down to that lodge bar. He selected a thin child from Seattle who’d simply turned 32. In phoning Gorelick, Sanborn certainly knew that he’d discover a sympathetic ear and an accommodating, unpretentious viewers. However past that, he knew he’d be speaking to somebody who suffered little doubt in anyway about his personal taking part in, no matter what the critics mentioned.
This was the summer time of 1988. With Kenny G’s “Songbird” already successful, and “Silhouette” on deck, the critics have been having a area day.
Kenny G dropped Duotones, which featured “Songbird” in 1986, and Silhouette in 1988.
Kenneth Gorelick grew up on what he calls “a quiet road” a mile inland from Seward Park. In Life within the Key of G—written with coauthor Philip Lerman—he performs up his juvenile persona as a shy child, “the basic skinny, white, nerdy man.” His father ran a plumbing provide enterprise that he’d begun along with his brother. Gorelick assumed that when he grew sufficiently old, this could be his mantle as effectively.
In late elementary college, he noticed somebody taking part in saxophone on The Ed Sullivan Present and requested his dad and mom for one. They opted for a rental, pondering Kenny would drop it like he’d already dropped piano classes. Gorelick did the alternative. In what he calls “one of the necessary selections I’ve made in my profession,” he scoured the home for a apply nook and landed on a “little downstairs toilet” the place the acoustics reverberated proper again into his ears. Past that, Gorelick writes, “That’s the place the mirror was. I used to be completely, 100% decided to determine methods to appear to be a traditional particular person after I performed.”
Image it: the Summer time of Love fades into the Nixon period, and right here’s adolescent Kenny checking himself out in a toilet mirror, everybody round him completely unaware these squeaky, tonally conspicuous noises will sooner or later transfer 75 million report models. An incomprehensible sum within the neighborhood of Oasis and Bob Marley.
Once more: 75 million data!
Gorelick remembers his childhood at a live performance on the Rhythm on the Vine charity dinner to learn Shriners Kids’s hospital in 2009.
The 2021 HBO documentary Listening to Kenny G options speaking head music critics discussing this phenomenon for probably the most half in a denigrating trend. “Like he’s pouring a sidewalk,” they are saying of Gorelick’s music. “Like wallpaper.” “A company try to appease my nerves.” However Life within the Key of G isn’t as involved with public response, Gorelick merely noting that, “as I turned increasingly more profitable, loads of individuals had loads of opinions about how I play and the way I ought to play.” With strains like these, Gorelick positions himself above the fray. He lets his success converse for itself. In an analogous vein, his memoir doesn’t dig into why his music was so common. As a substitute, he explains how he put himself within the place to make mentioned music within the first place.
That query hinges not on the downstairs toilet however on Seattle’s Franklin Excessive College. And it’s finest understood in reference to a completely different jazz story, regularly overstated as a tall story, in regards to the root of saxophonist Charlie Parker’s motivation. Parker, father of bebop and a near-mythological jazz determine, attended a jam in hometown Kansas Metropolis as a teen in 1936 and misplaced his method throughout a solo part. When he did, drummer Jo Jones took a cymbal off his drum equipment and tossed it in Parker’s common course. This frazzled younger Parker to such a level that he resolved to apply obsessively—in jazz, that is referred to as “woodshedding”—for a number of years, performing in public solely minimally. Parker returned to the scene a modified musician.
Gorelick’s cymbal arrived courtesy of the Franklin Excessive College Jazz Band, which refused him a spot after his freshman audition. “In my reminiscence,” Gorelick writes, “I wasn’t upset in any respect. I had just one thought in regards to the saxophone: I must get higher.”
His response to the Franklin rejection was Parker-like in its severity. Gorelick swore then and there, as a highschool freshman, that he would apply his saxophone for 3 hours daily. In the present day, aged 68, that apply schedule hasn’t wavered for even an instantaneous.
So, was Gorelick “upset” about not making the Franklin band? You resolve. Today he says he’s motivated not by failure however by pleasure. “The enjoyment of attempting your hardest, the enjoyment of doing one thing rather well.”
“Pleasure works higher.”
Gorelick nonetheless practices three hours daily.
Throughout our practically two-hour dialogue about his memoir, Gorelick actually does appear joyful. He’s on trip, taking a while off from performing—however not from working towards!—to refresh himself for the calls for of one other touring season, this time for his e-book in addition to his music. He’s an attentive listener and a considerate talker, and he’s not afraid to go off the cuff. Nothing feels pre-rehearsed or essentially off-limits, so I really feel comfy citing Gorelick’s most notorious vital takedown, when guitarist Pat Metheny issued a collection of scathing diatribes about Kenny G’s interpretation of a Louis Armstrong tune.
“I haven’t seen him since then,” says Gorelick of Metheny. “And by the way in which, I feel he’s an outstanding participant. I’d by no means say something about his taking part in.” Towards the tip of 2023, when Gorelick and Metheny each held residencies at Dimitriou’s Jazz Alley in Seattle, Metheny apparently requested proprietor John Dimitriou to “give Kenny my regards.”
“So I don’t suppose he holds any animosity towards me,” says Gorelick of the infamous spat. “I feel it was a momentary factor. He bought territorial about Louis’s music and let all of it out. It’s not the tip of the world.”
In Life within the Key of G, Gorelick speaks brazenly about his tendency towards forgiveness. He additionally reveals his perspective towards fame. Gorelick isn’t shy anymore. However he doesn’t act like a man who’s offered 75 million data, both. He chalks this as much as Seattle “not being the leisure capital of the world.” Due to his prowess onstage, and particularly on the hyperlinks—he’s been named Golf Digest’s “high musician golfer”—Gorelick is a good friend of Invoice Clinton, Clint Eastwood, and diverse A-listers. “I noticed Jamie Foxx on the airplane as soon as,” he says. “He goes, Kenny, what’s happening? I’m like, the actual fact you realize my title with out me saying my title to you, that also blows me away.”
Gorelick in a uncommon second when he would not have a sax in his arms.
No matter firm, Gorelick says he tries to “deal with all people regular.” This golden rule lengthy dictated Gorelick’s time within the Northwest, however ran quick when he offered his home in Hunts Level. “I particularly mentioned to the actual property individuals, ‘I don’t need any numbers within the paper.’ In fact, there’s a quantity within the paper. Then I began getting handled in a different way as a result of mates suppose, how can I presumably relate, how can I be an everyday good friend if I’m price this a lot cash? I don’t need anyone to think about me that method.”
Gorelick now lives in sunny Malibu, in a local weather that matches his disposition. However his memoir provides ample due to the individuals again house accountable for his staggering success—as an illustration, Franklin Excessive College composer-in-residence Jim Gardiner, who lent Gorelick a Grover Washington Jr. album that modified his life, and College of Washington band director Roy Cummings, who referred Gorelick to touring acts seeking to fill their ranks with native gamers.
Gorelick saves a few of his most impressed recognition for Tony Gable, a Black bandleader who employed that “skinny, white, nerdy” teenage saxophonist into his funk group and shepherded him via a Central District rhythm and blues scene (highlighted within the Jennifer Maas documentary Wheedle’s Groove) that sometimes barred white musicians.
Gorelick is a severe golfer. Right here he’s with Invoice Clinton within the Nineteen Nineties and Catherine Zeta-Jones in 2007.
Gorelick quotes a terrific description of that interval from Seattle DJ Robert Nesbitt: “There was a minimal of twenty live-music golf equipment specializing in funk and soul, and all these joints jammed. There should have been twenty-five hard-giggin’, Superfly-like, wide-leg-polyester-pant-and-platform-shoes-wearing, wide-brim-hat-and-maxi-coat-sportin’, big-ass, highly-“sheened”-afro-stylin’, Kool & the Gang song-covering stay bands taking part in 4 units an evening from 8pm ’til 0-dark-thirty within the morning.”
Gable’s band, Chilly, Daring & Collectively, had already added Gorelick’s highschool good friend Philip Woo on keyboards after they put out the decision for a saxophonist in 1973. “The opposite guys didn’t wish to deliver a white child into the band,” writes Gorelick. “Philip was okay, they’d determined, as a result of he was Asian.” An undeterred Gorelick confirmed up and confirmed out on the audition, after which Gable satisfied the remainder of the band that “ participant is an efficient participant.”
“Looking back,” Gorelick writes, “I can see that I used to be being given entry to a milieu and a tradition that only a few different white children have been privileged to participate in. On the time, although, I didn’t suppose a lot of it. I believed, Hey, I’m taking part in with the good band on the town. And we’re blowing the roof off these joints, evening after evening.”
Gorelick may need mastered scales on his personal, simply as he introduced his facial expressions as much as muster within the downstairs toilet mirror. However he honed his onstage persona and theatrical instincts at late-night Central District gigs that regularly rocked till 4am, terminating in dawn meals runs to 13 Cash.
Gorelick finally pursued the saxophone not due to any pedagogical breakthrough—he studied accounting, not music, on the College of Washington—however due to the natural foothold he gained in Seattle’s scene. “I took a unique path,” he says. “However I’m simply wired like that. Folks inform me, ‘Don’t play that, don’t play this.’ Nicely, it’s subjective. Thank God I went my very own method.”
