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Hi,
This is about the Kenny G controversy.
Wow, is all I can say. I heard so many great things about Pat Metheny
and now my view has totally changed.
What an inconsiderate thing to say about an accomplished musician such
as Kenny. You know us musicians, no matter how good or how bad people
think they are, have respect towards each other.
Going on a publicly broadcasted television or radio station and saying
something like that is just totally wrong. I am a saxophone player, and by
the way, Gary, you made me a mouthpiece too that is unbelievable (the KW
I). I know Kenny's playing is not always what I like to hear bc he does
tend to have a similar feel to a lot of his songs, but by any rate he is a
successful musician. If you go out and ask fifty people on the street who
Kenny G was and then asked the same people who Pat Metheny was I am sure
there would be more who would know Kenny G.
I think Pat is jealous or something like that because there is no need
to do or say something like that. Pat needs to grow up for all I can say.
He's a professional and he needs to act that way. Well, this is all I have
to say.
Gary, if you wouldn't mind and had a chance could you email me if you
agree with me on this issue or not? Thanks a lot!
Sincerely,
Justin W
Sugal's Reply:
Justin I've met thousands of saxophonist over the
years, most who have had a hard time making a living doing what they love
the most and that is playing "there" music.
Kenny G is one of the very few saxophonist I've
seen not only able to make a living but bring the instrument to the
attention of the American people.
In the early sixties I had a wonderful saxophone
teacher by the name of Bill Sheiner who said if you have a pretty sound
you'll get people to listen .and that is what is important.--it's not how
fast you can play those sixteenth notes but how "pretty" you can make
each one of them
sound--. Bill Sheiner was Stan Getz's only teacher .
Kenny G is not my idea of a great jazz musician and
I don't think he really ever promoted himself as one.
However, Kenny G has single handedly been
able to get people, no the masses to not only listen to a soprano saxophone
but to fall in love with it's sound.
Most of the general population in the United States
and probably over seas before Kenny G came around didn't even know what a
soprano sax was.
Thousands of new students influenced by Kenny G
for generations to come will pick up the saxophone because of him.
Some may become a harmonically creative Pat Metheny
on saxophone -others a technical Michael Brecker or develop a pretty
sounding style of a Stan Getz -- all due to the fact that at some point in
there life they were attracted to the saxophone by Kenny G.
Regarding: Louis Armstrong.
Most junior high school even college students have
no idea who Louis Armstrong was let alone how great he was and the influence
he had on jazz and music...
Drawing attention to one of many Armstrong's great
works is to be applauded. Just stop and ask yourself how many grade
school children knew of Louis Armstrong. Kenny G did not stomp on his grave
but brought Armstrong to life again for new generations of listeners to
inquire about and of course enjoy.
Finally, over the past twenty years I've met
some of the greatest saxophonist on the planet. What is so interesting from
my perspective is that they all had one great thing in common, they were all
un-believably humble. The greater the player the more humble he or she
was. (is)
Artist like Jerry Bergonzi, Dave Liebman Nick
Brignolla, would make you feel that they were your equal. Not one
great player that I could remember ever made you feel inferior as a musician nor
would he say you sucked as player. Why, because they also had to start
somewhere and probably at some point in there life they also played at your
level.
Kenny G is not a harmonic genius nor a technical
wiz but simply a musician that developed his own style of music and
indirectly has helped musicians to realize you can be success in the "music
business" --simply by being original and getting people to listen to a
pretty sound.
It is so un-professional and un-fair,
for a musician like Pat Metheny to trash Kenny G from every stand point he
can think of. The Kenny G style of music we hear has brought so
much joy and influenced so many people to want to learn not only the
saxophone but music in general. Isn't that what music is all about?
Personally I think Pat needs to humble himself both
in the "real" world as well as in the jazz world. It is not cool what he
writes nor is it appropriate of a musician of his caliber to chastise a
Kenny G..
We see and hear every day of so much hate and ugliness in the
world please don't let music whatever it's origins are fuel that
fire.!
Gary
Hey GARY
Pat is
SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO jealous of Kenny G.
I am a
pro sax player and I do find that KG plays some songs that are not jazz.
BUT, I
bet PAT has never been to a KG concert and heard him cut loose. He can
play….and well. As far as playing sharp. Hey Pat you moron…EVERY recording
out there is sharp because the 95% NON-musicians seem to like it that way.
Have
Pat play with any recording / CD and he will find that everything is
sharp. PAT… get over it , Kenny G has sold more Christmas recordings than
ANYONE. SINGER OR PLAYER.
He is
the richest instrumentalist in the world. Cry your way to the bank to
deposit your check that is 1% of his. I DID respect Pat as musician but he
blew it.
Thanks ,
Brook
It ought to be considered that its not just Pat
M that finds Kenny Gs music repulsive, Scott Henderson dislikes it
too. Then theres me, and I suspect millions of others for whom music
is so much more than the banal wallpaper, written as the lowest common
denominator (ie the least offensive to everyone) that pumps out of the
LA studios and into our elevators, shopping malls and toilets. To
measure a musicians ability by the size of his bank balance is like
measuring a mountains beauty by its height.
Wynton Marsalis was once told that "if you play
for applause, thats all you will ever get." I suspect that the reason
the above have leapt to Kennys defence is that they are unable to hear
how much better Pats playing is.
Lets face it, Kenny (and a great deal of poop
(sorry pop)) is to music what McDonalds is to food. Banal, flaccid
and uninspiring. Thank you Pat for speaking your mind, but I fear
people will continue to eat junk food and buy Kennys records.
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Jazz guitarist Pat Metheny has slammed soccer
moms' favorite Kenny G by saying he "plays the dumbest music on the
planet" and threatening to wrap a guitar around his head. Metheny had
been explaining comments he made during a Polish TV
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Metheny asked an audience of children to prize legends
like John Coltrane over the shopping-mall-friendly, shaggy-haired saxman
G.
Metheny said on his
Web site
that he told the kids "not to get confused by the sometimes overwhelming
volume of music that falls under the jazz umbrella ... I went on to say
that I think, for instance, 'Kenny G plays the dumbest music on the
planet' - something that all 8- to 11-year [old] kids on the planet
already intrinsically know."
After this posting on his Web site, Metheny was asked by users to
explain himself further. He didn't hold back. Particular ire was
reserved for 1999's "What a Wonderful World," an electronically
engineered duet between G and the long-dead jazz giant Louis Armstrong.
Metheny dismissed the track as "musical necrophilia." But he was just
getting started. What comes next is not for the fainthearted.
Kenny G
Most of you have probably seen this before. But in case you
haven't, you should.
PLEASE EMAIL ME WHAT YOU THINK
(schwartz@gis.net)
Pat Metheny on Kenny G
Question: Pat, could you tell us your opinion about Kenny G -
it appears you were quoted as being less than enthusiastic about him
and his music. I would say that most of the serious music listeners
in the world would not find your opinion surprising or unlikely -
but you were vocal about it for the first time. You are generally
supportive of other musicians it seems.
Pat's Answer:
Kenny G is not a musician I really had much of an opinion about at
all until recently. There was not much about the way he played that
interested me one way or the other either live or on records.
I first heard him a number of years ago playing as a sideman with
Jeff Lorber when they opened a concert for my band. My impression
was that he was someone who had spent a fair amount of time
listening to the more pop oriented ,sax players of that time, like
Grover Washington or David Sanborn, but was not really an advanced
player, even in that style. He had major rhythmic problems and his
harmonic and melodic vocabulary was extremely limited, mostly to
pentatonic based and blues-lick derived patterns, and he basically
exhibited only a rudimentary understanding of how to function as a
professional soloist in an ensemble - Lorber was basically playing
him off the bandstand in terms of actual music.
But he did show a knack for connecting to the basest impulses of the
large crowd by deploying his two or three most effective licks
(holding long notes and playing fast runs - never mind that there
were lots of harmonic clams in them) at the key moments to elicit a
powerful crowd reaction (over and over again). The other main thing
I noticed was that he also, as he does to this day, played horribly
out of tune-consistently sharp.
Of course, I am aware of what he has played since, the success it
has had, and the controversy that has surrounded him among musicians
and serious listeners. This controversy seems to be largely fueled
by the fact that he sells an enormous amount of records while not
being anywhere near a really great player in relation to the
standards that have been set on his instrument over the past sixty
or seventy years. And honestly, there is no small amount of envy
involved from musicians who see one of their fellow players doing so
well financially, especially when so many of them who are far
superior as improvisers and musicians in general have trouble just
making a living. There must be hundreds, if not thousands of sax
players around the world who are
simply better improvising musicians than Kenny G on his chosen
instruments. It would really surprise me if even he disagreed with
that statement.
Having said that, it has gotten me to thinking lately why so many
jazz musicians (myself included, given the right "bait" of a
question, as I will explain later) and audiences have gone so far as
to say that what he is
playing is not even jazz at all. Stepping back for a minute, if we
examine the way he plays, especially if one can remove the actual
improvising from the often mundane background environment that it is
delivered in, we see that his saxophone style is in fact clearly in
the tradition of the kind of playing that most reasonably objective
listeners WOULD normally quantify as being jazz. It's just that as
jazz or even as music in a general sense, with these standards in
mind, it is simply not up to the level of playing that we
historically associate with professional improvising musicians. So,
lately I have been advocating that we go ahead and just include it
under the word jazz - since pretty much of the rest of the world
OUTSIDE of the jazz community does anyway - and let the chips fall
where they may.
And after all, why he should be judged by any other standard, why he
should be exempt from that that all other serious musicians on his
instrument are judged by if they attempt to use their abilities in
an improvisational context playing with a rhythm section as he does?
He SHOULD be compared to John Coltrane or Wayne Shorter, for
instance, on his abilities (or lack thereof) to play the soprano
saxophone and his success (or lack thereof) at finding a way to
deploy that instrument in an ensemble in order to accurately gauge
his abilities and put them in the context of his instrument's legacy
and potential.
As a composer of even eighth note based music, he SHOULD be compared
to Herbie Hancock, Horace Silver or even Grover Washington. Suffice
it to say, on all above counts, at this point in his development, he
wouldn't fare well.
But, like I said at the top, this relatively benign view was all
"until recently".
Not long ago, Kenny G put out a recording where he overdubbed
himself on top of a 30+ year old Louis Armstrong record, the track
"What a Wonderful World". With this single move, Kenny G became one
of the few people on earth I can say that I really can't use at all
- as a man, for his incredible arrogance to even consider such a
thing, and as a musician, for presuming to share the stage with the
single most important figure in our music.
This type of musical necrophilia - the technique of overdubbing on
the preexisting tracks of already dead performers - was weird when
Natalie Cole did it with her dad on "Unforgettable" a few years
ago, but it was her dad. When Tony Bennett did it with Billie
Holiday it was bizarre, but we are talking about two of the
greatest singers of the 20th century who were on roughly the same
level of artistic accomplishment. When Larry Coryell presumed to
overdub himself on top of a Wes Montgomery track,
I lost a lot of the respect that I ever had for him - and I have to
seriously question the fact that I did have respect for someone who
could turn out to have such unbelievably bad taste and be that
disrespectful to one of my personal heroes.
But when Kenny G decided that it was appropriate for him to defile
the music of the man who is probably the greatest jazz musician
that has ever lived by spewing his lame-ass, jive, pseudo bluesy,
out-of-tune, noodling, whimped out, fucked up playing all over one
of the great Louis's tracks (even one of his lesser ones), he did
something that I would not have imagined possible. He, in one move,
through his unbelievably pretentious and calloused musical decision
to embark on this most cynical of musical paths, shit all over the
graves of all the
musicians past and present who have risked their lives by going out
there on the road for years and years developing their own music
inspired by the standards of grace that Louis Armstrong brought to
every single note he played over an amazing lifetime as a musician.
By disrespecting Louis, his legacy and by default, everyone who has
ever tried to do something positive with improvised music and what
it
can be, Kenny G has created a new low point in modern culture -
something that we all should be totally embarrassed about - and
afraid of. We ignore this, "let it slide", at our own peril.
His callous disregard for the larger issues of what this crass
gesture implies is exacerbated by the fact that the only reason he
possibly have for doing something this inherently wrong (on both
human and musical terms) was for the record sales and the money it
would bring.
Since that record came out - in protest, as insignificant as it may
be, I encourage everyone to boycott Kenny G recordings, concerts and
anything he is associated with. If asked about Kenny G, I will diss
him and his music with the same passion that is in evidence in this
little essay.
Normally, I feel that musicians all have a hard enough time,
regardless of their level, just trying to play good and don't
really benefit from public criticism, particularly from their
fellow players. but, this is
different.
There ARE some things that are sacred - and amongst any musician
that has ever attempted to address jazz at even the most basic of
levels, Louis Armstrong and his music is hallowed ground. To ignore
this trespass is to agree that NOTHING any musician has attempted to
do with their life in music has any intrinsic value - and I refuse
to do that. (I am also amazed that there HASN'T already been an
outcry against this among music critics - where ARE they on
this?????!?!?!?!, magazines, etc.). Everything I said here is
exactly the same as what I would say to Gorelick if I ever saw him
in person. and if I ever DO see him anywhere, at any function - he
WILL get a piece of my mind and (maybe a guitar wrapped around his
head.)
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