While standing in line at the grocery store the other day, I heard The Cure blasting through an overhead speaker. For those of us a certain age, it’s odd to confront the fact that the edgy “alternative” music of our youth is now considered aural wallpaper, but tastes have changed quite a bit. Twenty-five years ago, there was really only one kind of music played in public spaces. Whether it was called “elevator music,” “easy listening,” or “Muzak,” after the Seattle-based corporation that distributed it, some form of sonic mush was almost inescapable. And during the late ’80s on through the ’90s, one man in particular tormented grocery shoppers everywhere: Kenny G.
If you’re under 30, “Kenny G” might not even ring a bell. (His real name is Gorelick, for what that’s worth.) But after nearly 20 years out of the pop culture limelight, his once-renowned smooth jazz soprano saxophone stylings are returning to the radio and perhaps even to an elevator or grocery store near you. Improbable as it may seem, the musical world is buzzing about his surprising and prominent appearance on superstar Kanye West’s new gospel album, Jesus Is King.
Starting with his breakout smooth jazz hit Songbird in 1986, Kenny G would go on to dominate the charts well into the ’90s. He’s sold an astounding 75 million records to date, about the same number as Nirvana. (Ironically, both acts hailed from Seattle.)
Yet Kenny G’s wild popularity, at a time when grunge was capturing the nation’s attention, led to an inevitable cultural backlash. In fact, you can almost trace Kenny G’s decline to a single Saturday Night Live joke in 1994. During his short-lived but legendary stint as Weekend Update anchor, Norm Macdonald gleefully announced: “Kenny G has a Christmas album out this year. Hey, happy birthday, Jesus! Hope you like crap.” The joke didn’t just land — the audience roared and squealed with laughter.
Still, superstars don’t disappear overnight. Kenny G enjoyed success for the rest of the decade before suffering another reputational blow. In 1999, he had a minor hit in which he noodled all over Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World. It was not a favorable juxtaposition, to put it mildly. The song prompted a legendary rant from the very esteemed and very opinionated jazz guitarist Pat Metheny, who wrote:
The broader context of Metheny’s tirade was that Kenny G had become too successful for his own good — even he was probably uneasy about the fact that he was coming to define jazz for an entire generation. On that score, Metheny’s specific musical criticisms were on point. Once you notice Kenny G plays everything about a quarter-tone sharp, you can’t unhear it. And Kenny G’s limited harmonic vocabulary leans heavily on the pentatonic scales commonly found in rock and blues, not jazz.
Then again, there’s a reason why Kenny G sold 75 million records and John Coltrane did not. Even Metheny admitted, albeit with a soupçon of disdain, that Kenny G is a crowd pleaser. But he never claimed to be anything else. And for the last two decades, he has continued to put out records that sound like, well, Kenny G.
It’s only fitting, then, that after famously being accused of ruining Christmas, Kenny G has found his career somewhat resurrected by an appearance on perhaps the most unlikely musical tribute to the Lord ever recorded, Jesus Is King, released in October.
Kenny G’s appearance comes on Use this Gospel, the album’s penultimate track. The song has a subdued, almost haunting beat, and it features verses from the rap duo Clipse alongside West’s auto-tune vocals for the hook. At 2:30 into the song, the instrumentation drops out, and out of nowhere comes Kenny G with an unadorned, 30-second saxophone solo. The performance is unmistakably him, yet the very things that make him a bad jazz musician work perfectly: His simple but memorable phrasing and exciting flourishes take an intriguing track and elevate it into something remarkable and genuinely surprising.
Also surprising is the story of how the collaboration came to be. It seems West asked Kenny G to show up at his house and play a few of his romantic tunes for his wife on Valentine’s Day. The two men hit it off. West liked him so much he decided to bring him on an impromptu visit to the studio. Like all the best musical choices, Kenny G’s guest appearance worked so well because nothing about his performance or the circumstances that brought it about was calculated.
But Kenny G was a good fit for another reason. Jesus Is King is not about being cool — it’s about West’s devotion to his faith. In that sense, Kenny G’s musical sincerity is an asset, not a liability. Kenny G fell out of favor in large part because his music was considered earnest to a fault, but in the last few decades, pop music has been buried under layers of crass materialism and irony. When you turn on the radio in 2019, it’s worth considering whether being earnest is still a problem.
Revitalizing Kenny G’s career is a tall order, even for a star as big as West. But at the very least, Kenny G’s stellar appearance on Jesus Is King has invited everyone to reassess his complicated and impressive legacy. The best way to do that might be to ask ourselves, appropriately enough, what Jesus would do. He would almost certainly tell the musical pharisees among us to stop being so judgmental and forgive Kenny G.
Mark Hemingway is a writer in Alexandria, Virginia.
