The American smooth jazz saxophonist Kenneth Bruce Gorelick has become one of the most commercially successful musicians to date under the stage name Kenny G within forty years. He was discovered by the notorious jazz despiser and star producer Clive Davis, the Gorelicks instrumental version of Abbas “Dancing Queen” impressed. One of those finance voyeuristic websites now estimates his net worth at around one hundred million dollars, which would also make him the richest jazz musician to date.
So he can do whatever he wants.
He does too. For example, he fed an artificial intelligence system with sounds from the late tenor saxophonist Stan Getz. With the help of machine learning, he then recorded a duet with this AI, which has just been released as the second single on his upcoming album “New Standards”. Now Stan Getz recorded a lot of kitsch himself during his lifetime. On the other hand, with his velvety tone he was also a pioneer of cool jazz. And because he had the gift of playing around even the most complicated rhythm with a feather-lightness, he brought bossa nova and samba to the north in the sixties, where his recording of the song “Girl from Ipanema” with the singer Astrud Gilberto became one of the most played Has been hits of the past few decades.
Pat Metheny on Kenny G: “He showed a knack for serving the lowest instincts of the large audience”
Kenny G plays the soprano saxophone, one of the most difficult instruments in jazz, because the tone strength often breaks down across the registers and because the intonation is almost as difficult as with the violin. Only the very great masters were able to master this instrument, Sidney Bechet, John Coltrane, Jan Garbarek, Coltrane’s son Ravi, the list of virtuosos on the soprano is not much longer. With Kenny G, the soprano saxophone sounds more like a shawm. On spoiled ears, its melody lines act a little like the depth drill in a root canal treatment. Before one goes into the duet with Stan Getz, one could transform this text into “100 lines of hatred” in the tradition of the writer Maxim Biller.
But Kenny G is not just a stair joke in music history. He is also one of the most hated appearances among jazz musicians. In the animated film “Trolls World Tour”, the figure of Smooth Jazz Chaz, who puts the trolls in a state of comfort with his soprano saxophone, is very openly referred to Kenny G. So you can easily outsource the polemics by quoting the guitarist Pat Metheny, for example.
Metheny remembers in an interview Kenny G’s beginnings in keyboardist Jeff Lorber’s band: “He had major rhythmic problems and his harmonic and melodic vocabulary was extremely limited, mostly to pentatonic and blues-lick-derived patterns, and he basically only showed a rudimentary understanding of them how to function as a professional soloist in an ensemble, but he showed a knack for serving the lowest instincts of the large audience by using his two or three most effective licks (holding long notes and playing fast runs – whether it’s harmonic feints there or not) started in the crucial moments to get a strong reaction from the audience. What I also noticed was that he – to this day – played terribly out of tune, namely consistently too high. “
He also admits that the hatred of so many musicians is driven by envy. But not only.
Metheny again: “He shit on the graves of all musicians of the past and the present.”
Because Kenny G’s duet with Stan Getz is not the first time that he has played with the deceased. In 1999 he mounted himself in “What a Wonderful World” by Louis Armstrong, who was then long dead. Says Metheny: “This kind of musical necrophilia – the technique of overdubbing existing tracks by deceased artists – was strange when Natalie Cole did this with her father on Unforgettable a few years ago, but it was her father. As Tony Bennett did this with Billie Holiday, it was bizarre, but we’re talking about two of the greatest singers of the 20th century who were on roughly the same artistic level, but when Kenny G decided to desecrate the music of the man who probably the greatest jazz musician who ever lived by playing his lame, goofy, pseudo-bluesy, out of tune, noodle, effeminate, shitty play on one of the great Louis’ pieces, he was doing something I didn’t think was possible. With his incredibly presumptuous and callous musical decision to take this most cynical of all musical paths, he has with one blow to the grave Shit about all musicians of the past and the present. “
And then he said something that is an example of all these attempts to replace musicians with artificial intelligences, holograms or other digital resurrections, because the pop industry has largely given up creating new things and therefore prefers to do the last the old man, even if it’s the tone of the dead: “Kenny G has created a new low point in modern culture – something that we should all be totally embarrassed about – and that we should be afraid of. If we let that get away with, then on own risk.”
And how does the track “Legacy featuring, The Sound ‘of Stan Getz” sound? It starts with one of those shawm screams, whereupon Stan Getz’s AI tones from a pearly piano and one of these castrated string movements without cellos and basses are embedded in a lullaby melody, before Kenny G then imposes himself again with his dental drill tone. In romantic comedies, the play would come towards the end of the second act, when the main characters were moping apart from fate. In real life, disturbing the peace of the dead is subject to a prison sentence of up to three years under Section 168 of the Criminal Code.