Mike Zwerin's portrait of Kenny G

[clifford_thornton]

I don't think Stan Getz and the Three Sounds were pandering to the lowest common demoninator no doubt they wanted to sell records and they can't be faulted for that but I think they were more concerned about their art then consciously trying to make a safe,homogenized record and IMO that seperates them from the G man.

Well, yes, of course - but in terms of audiences actually getting a jazz record and thinking they were getting one, I guess that was my point. But then you're right, it is sort of like comparing steak and oranges...

[JSngry]

Grover was a Philly man and though is music was melody based with a beautiful sound it was groovy as hell -- all about rhythm. Kenny doesn't have that part of Grover figured out which is why his music sounds so empty. Grover's recordings would include a Strayhorn number here and there, you know, Passion Flower. Grover had that tradition to play off of whereas, as Zerwin notes, Mr. G. sniffs his nose at the idea of ideas in evolution.

Well there you go. "Smooth jazz" doesn't have to be synoymous with barf, but it's become that in the wake of G's mega-success. He's become the de facto "industry standard" of the genre. But Grover would always give you good slink if he didn't give you anything else, and good slink is the link between this stuff and "regular" jazz, the swing/groove factor kept alive in a format that "everyday people" of the post-JB era can groove on. To use but one example, Ralph MacDonald produced the hell outta Winelight and gave it layers of rhythmic and textural seductions that made it slinky like a mofo. It ain't "meaty", but it's alive, and elegantly so. There's some shit happening there.

G don't give you slink, he gives you stink. Not stank, which would be cool, but just plain Caucasoidial stink, the odious odor of nothing exerting itself past its point of effectiveness in an attempt to assert its supremacy by celebrating its lifelessness as a triumphant alternative to somethingness. There's some shit happening there, some very real evacuation of that which is already dead.

It shouldn't be so.

Edited February 15, 2006 by JSngry

[Jim Alfredson]

G don't give you slink, he gives you stink. Not stank, which would be cool, but just plain Caucasoidial stink, the odious odor of nothing exerting itself past its point of effectiveness in an attempt to assert its supremacy by celebrating its lifelessness as a triumphant alternative to somethingness. There's some shit happening there, some very real evacuation of that which is already dead.

[JSngry]

Damn straight!

[Kalo]

To me, Kenny G is the musical equivalent of those plug-in air fresheners, un-neccessarily using electricity to perfume a place with repellant, artificial aromas.

Give me any kind of honest stank over that.

[JSngry]

Damn straight!