Editor’s Note: Nick Johnston is here at home remotely covering the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival. Click here for our continuing coverage of TIFF, and click here for our complete archives of this year and past festivals.
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Ever since Penny Lane gained mainstream attention as a popular and eccentric documentarian when Our Nixon hit theaters (and, later, CNN) back in 2013, it’s been amazing fun to see her develop and hone the shared ethos behind each of her various documentaries. One can practically hear Jagger say “Please allow me to introduce myself,” each time they come across a synopsis for one of her films in a festival program or on a streaming service: she specializes in a certain kind of understanding — if not sympathy — for the devil, literally doing so in her last release, Hail Satan?, which documented the activist struggles of the Satanic Temple as they kicked against the pricks of modern polite society and the bigotry that often remains within it (I will never forget when the entire post-BUFF premiere party for that film was abrupt canceled because the owners of the venue didn’t realize that a whole bunch of fucking Satanists were going to do a black mass in their club, which ensured its relevance to everyone lucky enough to be in attendance). So it makes a certain amount of sense that Lane would choose the artistic equivalent of Nixon or Satanists or doctors who sold goat testicle implants to unsuspecting people at the turn of the 20th century for her next project, not in temperament or due to any harm caused by her subject, but rather the similar amount of genuine revulsion that a whole generation of well-dressed and articulate music nerds have held against the pioneer of Smooth Jazz, Kenny G.
A certain subset of our readership (hell, maybe even the majority of it) probably felt a brief adrenaline surge just at the mention of Kenneth Gorelick, the best-selling instrumentalist in the history of recorded music, whose work conjures up goofy images of boomer dads laying their spouses down on a bed covered in rose petals, presumably to create the sort of dissatisfied modern listener who is currently reading this review of Lane’s Listening to Kenny G, which is part of Bill Simmons’ new line-up of music docs for HBO. Plucked from relative obscurity (if you consider the Jeff Lorber Fusion to be obscure) by Arista Records’ Clive Davis back in the ’80s, G’s success is a really, really odd story, which is explained well by Lane, who has a ton of access to G, Davis, and plenty of other members responsible for your average smooth-jazz station’s ascendance and quick fall in the early ’90s. It delves into G’s surprising success as a businessman (dude was an early investor in Starbucks, which, whoa) as well as a golfer, and tries to understand his musical process as well as ponder his place in jazz history — or whether or not he should even be included in a history of jazz, given how hated he is by those in the field. There’s a lot of speculation about the why of Kenny G, and the dude does not supply any easy answers: he seems almost supernaturally focused on the things that interest him, with little regard for traditional markers of authenticity, given the way that he edits together his songs, or for what some would be considered fealty to history, like when he recorded a song with the long-dead Louis Armstrong for charity in the ’90s and deeply, deeply irritated jazz heads who were forced to take day jobs to fund their art while he was making millions and millions. Many would say his rise to the top was as obvious and inevitable as the old aphorism shit floats, but there’s clearly something more there: 50 Million Elvis Fans Can, in fact, Be Wrong, but the battle lines were drawn long ago, and no one really wants to analyze why.
In practice, Listening to Kenny G‘s combination of straight biography and entry-level musical analysis is in service of a general attempt to understand the phenomenon of “taste” itself, a lot like how writer Carl Wilson did in his tome about Celine Dion, Let’s Talk About Love. While Kenny G himself is an interesting and strange figure (the dude’s hyper-fixation on remaining relevant and lovable in the eyes of the public and those around him is almost sociopathic, which explains his presence as a meme), what’s most interesting to watch is how the music critics interviewed shift and change in their positions over time: one minute someone will be ranting about how the use of smooth jazz in China assures the consent and compliance of the populace, and the next that same critic will be going off on how G’s collaborations with, say, Kanye West, may ultimately lead to the reclamation and development of his style in popular media and, ultimately, a lengthy critical reevaluation. Part of what makes this so compelling is because they’re the only characters with an emotional journey in the film itself, as G’s image is so consciously well-managed limits his growth — we can laugh at his old music videos and whatnot, but the guy’s not going to change much. It’s much more fascinating to see these cultural gatekeepers be forced to reckon with the impact of an artist they don’t like on a visceral level and ultimately have to leave the self-imposed myopia of their own opinion at the door, as if, to paraphrase an old Vonnegut quote, they suddenly came to realize that they’d dressed up in a suit of armor to attack a hot fudge sundae. Ultimately you can only taste-make so much, and perhaps placing someone in front of a camera, framed alone against a black background, is the best way to ensure some sort of good faith acknowledgment of the humanity of others. Or, perhaps, you could just listen to Kenny G.