Kenny G, the 65-year-old, curly-maned saxophonist, has sold 75 million records and inspired the entire genre of "smooth jazz." He isn't just the best-selling instrumentalist of all time, he's also one of the most critically reviled musicians in history.
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Director Penny Lane explores why critics hate Kenny G and the masses love him, in the new HBO documentary, Listening to Kenny G. In a long conversation with me (available as a Reason Interview podcast), she also talks about the themes in her body of work, her aesthetic and life philosophy, and why she's been reading Reason since her college days.
"When I think about music," the 43-year-old Lane tells me, "the first thing that comes to mind is the idea of taste and how deeply intimate that is with our sense of selves and our sense of social identity. I basically sold it to [HBO] as an exploration of why Kenny G is the most popular and successful and best-selling instrumentalist of all time and why that success makes a certain subset of people really mad."
That "certain subset" includes jazz critics who write for places ranging from The New York Times to Jacobin and every outlet in between. "I spent a lot of time with Kenny and it kind of didn't matter how many different ways I asked him what he was up to when he was creating these songs," Lane explains. "He was just like, 'I don't know. It's pretty, I like it.' Most artists have a whole set of things they're thinking about. Kenny just isn't engaged in that. I think it's his utter lack of interest in jazz [that drives critics nuts.] Kenny G does not know anything about jazz."
One of Lane's hallmarks is that she doesn't tip her hand as a director, so viewers aren't quite sure where she's coming from. The result is a delightful tension as a viewer; you're never sure who you should be rooting for or against. While she gives critics their due, she does the same for the Kenny G fans with whom she talks.
A documentary about a smooth jazz saxophonist seems pretty far afield from Lane's 2019 film, Hail Satan?, but she says there's a strong thematic continuity in her work. "The joke way of putting it would be to say that after I made a movie defending Satanists, I thought to myself, who do people hate more than Satanists?" she says. "But that's not really true. What I'm trying to do with my films is to find really entertaining, funny ways to talk about really serious issues that I don't think a po-faced delivery would get a big audience for. I want people to be able to change their minds. I want people to be willing to change their minds. I love that. I love the feeling of finding out that I'm wrong. Not everyone does. I love it. I'm trying to engineer moments where it's destabilizing for people."
Lane's films (full list here) all proceed from the assumption that she doesn't have all the answers, that she doesn't know the best way for other people to live, much less the best music for them to listen to. So it may not be a coincidence that she's a longtime reader of Reason who dismisses conventional political or ideological tribes.
The sense of being an outsider with a distinct point of view runs deep in Lane. "Society needs people who are annoying, who stand outside and say, 'But what about this?' I've always identified with that kind of personality. And I do think that is somewhat of a kind of libertarian personality type."
If Lane's films have a consistent message, she says it's "very much about humility. I think I'm a genius and I should run the world, but I would never want to do that because I actually don't think that my ideas are better than other people's ideas. I have ideas about how I want to live, but I'm not interested in imposing them on other people."
Rather, she strives to make people consider issues from different points of view and to confront and work through their biases. With Listening To Kenny G, you might come away thinking that the critics are smug assholes (that was my initial reaction) or that the artist formerly known as Kenneth Gorelick is music's greatest monster.
Edited by Regan Taylor, Camera by Kevin Alexander
Music: Saint Charles by Mark Yencheske, via Artlist