Earlier this month, Nigerian bandleader Femi Kuti held a saxophone note (A, if you must know) for 46 minutes, 38 seconds — which was big news to Kenny G. According to reports, Kuti’s accomplishment broke the Guinness World Record previously owned by the floppy-haired ’90s star who has sold 75 million albums.
“Oh, yeah, of course it matters to me. I’m very competitive,” said the sax player born Kenneth Gorelick. “If it’s true the record’s broken, just know I’m coming for you, and I’m going to win.”
But footnotes and asterisks may apply to this one-note rivalry. NPR reported that yet another saxophonist, Vann Burchfield, of Birmingham, Alabama, broke Kenny G’s record 17 years ago, rendering moot any Kenny-Kuti rivalry. And Gorelick questions whether either of them is official, since he set his 1997 record beside Guinness reps with timers.
“If Guinness isn’t there, I’m not sure it counts. When I did my thing, Guinness was very specific about what the volume was. I couldn’t change the notes,” he said of his E-flat held for 45 minutes, 47 seconds. “But my plan is, I’m going to break every record.”
Gorelick, 60, may play some of the most lighthearted smooth jazz ever created, and he’s amiable and funny in a 20-minute phone interview, but he is intense when it comes to his career and achievements.
Throughout the conversation, from an Atlanta movie set that he is forbidden from talking about, he casually reels off box-office numbers for tours he did early in his solo career (like eight sold-out nights in 1990 at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles, co-headlining with fellow ’90s over-the-top megastar Michael Bolton).
Asked about his latest release, 2015’s “Brazilian Nights,” he is borderline cocky.
The bossa nova album is characteristically inoffensive, dragging Antonio Carlos Jobim’s 1964 classic “Girl from Ipanema” back into elevators. Gorelick made it after listening to “Getz for Lovers,” by Stan Getz, whom he first heard as a student in the University of Washington jazz band. That led to Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley.
“I never really thought about doing anything of theirs until recently,” he said.
“Part of my motivation was sharing this love of these great saxophonists with people who wouldn’t necessarily reach that far back into the jazz world.
“It’s very tricky, technically, especially if you’re going to do it (in) the old style. You’re not playing bossa nova, you’re playing traditional jazz music,” he added. “I worked really hard to learn the licks and study the vibe and the nuances — I felt like, let’s say you play my song called ‘Corcovado (Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars),’ and you still don’t like my sax-playing, or you say you don’t like me — it’s basically a preconceived notion, because a lot of those notes are so on-the-money, and basically the same notes Cannonball Adderley played. That was one of the fringe benefits of doing it that well, I felt.”
Gorelick’s popularity peaked in the era of grunge and gangsta rap, and his super sweet sax tone and speedy solos led to ferocious critical reviews despite his undeniable super popularity. The vitriol lingered into the 21st century, as the New Yorker’s Evan Osnos traveled to China and heard Kenny G on a transistor radio held by a Great Wall guard who “smiled so graciously that I couldn’t bear to ask him to throw it over the edge.”
“It really never bugged me at all. Not at all,” he said. “Some people are very protective of traditional jazz, and anything that’s not sounding traditional-jazz, they just don’t like. They have the right to feel that way. I just didn’t take it personally. I didn’t think they were correct.”
Born in Seattle, Gorelick picked up the sax when he was 10, then bought his first soprano saxophone (for $300, from a guy he found through the classifieds) at age 17. When R&B star Barry White toured the Northwest, he lacked a saxophonist who could play soulfully and sight-read music; Gorelick’s Franklin High School band director pushed him for the gig, and he performed to a standing ovation.
Gorelick played more shows with White’s Love Unlimited Orchestra, and that led to a string of guest-sax appearances on albums by Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston and others. Kenny G went solo in 1982 and toured relentlessly, slowly growing into the absurdly big-haired star who sold millions of copies of 1992’s “Breathless” and 1994’s inescapable “Miracles: The Holiday Album.”
It wouldn’t be quite accurate to say Kenny G has had a career renaissance, a la Tony Bennett in the ’90s, but his good-natured social media presence and ability to laugh at himself has made him a target of gentle pop-culture mockery. (“I’d rather be dragged down the aisle,” somebody on Twitter wrote after Gorelick entertained airline customers on a recent flight.) On his website, he posts a 2016 “Saturday Night Live” clip of comics Danny McBride and James Corden lampooning him and Michael Bolton:
“His tone was horrible,” Gorelick wrote of McBride’s evil-grinning, off-key skronk merchant, “but his hair was magnificent.” He and Bolton remain friends, although they don’t sell like they used to. “We were selling 6-7-8-9 million records and playing before 6-7-8-9 thousand people,” he said. “Now it’s super hard. That was nothing, to us, back in those days.”
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