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.
And now the artist formerly known as Kenneth Gorelick is the subject of a brilliant new HBO documentary, Listening to Kenny G, which The New Yorker called “an ironic masterpiece” that perfectly defines “the elusive and contested concept of a guilty pleasure: enjoying art that one finds composed of misguided ideas and dubious processes.”
Director Penny Lane explores why critics hate Kenny G and the masses love him, creating a funny, poignant, and entrancing film about mass commercial appeal, elite tastes, the ever-changing music world, and, incredibly, epistemological humility. In a long conversation with me (available as a Reason Interview podcast), she also talks about the themes in her body of work (her previous film was Hail Satan?, about a group of Baphomet devotees pushing for religious freedom), her aesthetic and life philosophy, and why she’s been reading Reason since her college days.