Pueblo Waltz: How To Measure A Saxophonist: Kenny + Katy?

As the media lovingly remembers one saxophone player, another has managed to sneak quietly under the pop culture radar. The death of Clarence Clemons (coupled with his recent guest solo on Lady Gaga’s single “The Edge of Glory”) has more or less created a media frenzy about both his life and the role of the saxophone in popular music. Given the latter subject, it seems inescapably odd to me that Kenny G’s appearance in Katy Perry’s “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)” went largely without comment in the mainstream media.

[I should point out that I watched both music videos more as a manner of cultural knowledge—keeping up with the times, if you will—rather than sheer enjoyment. I judge Perry, at best, to be ineffectual; Gaga, at least, has her own distinct pop sensibility…also, the “Composition” section in the “T.G.I.F.” Wikipedia article is frightening:

“‘Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)’ is a dance-pop and pop rock song with a length of three minutes and fifty seconds. It is set in common time and has a moderate tempo of 126 beats per minute. It is written in the key of D♯ minor and Perry's vocals span one octave, from C♯4 to D♯5. It follows the chord progression B–G♯m7–D♯m7-C♯.”

Does this strike anyone else as painfully-over-the-top analysis?]

But going back to saxophones, Kenny G’s appearance, given the arc of his extraordinarily popular career, isn’t all that surprising. As far as the jazz world (i.e. the world with the largest saxophone population) is concerned, Kenny G is a cause for laughter…and maybe not a little jealousy. Despite the critical clobberings that have been handed to him over his five-decade career, Kenny G is still one of the best-selling solo artists of all time, with more than 75 million in record sales to his name. He is certainly the best-selling saxophonist of all time.

So maybe the pairing of Kenny and Perry makes sense from a sales perspective. The truth is that I wouldn’t have given the solo a second thought if it hadn’t been the for the music video—showcasing that wild-haired man (sort of like Howard Stern without glasses?) standing on the roof of a house playing for a giant house party. In a now infamous blog rant, Pat Metheny, a noted jazz guitarist, supports my immediate feelings of indifference:

“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 keys 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, play horribly out of tune - consistently sharp.” [original typesetting is in this emailese…sorry…but it sort of makes the unedited tone a little clearer]

So obviously the critics and jazz musicians have some problems with Kenny. That much is obvious from Metheny’s rant. (Reading other writers’ comments on Metheny’s rant makes it seem as if he said what everyone else was pretty much aching to say.) The crux of the argument for Metheny centers on the desire to not judge Kenny G’s music on a playing field without the likes of John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter.

But something must be said for Kenny’s ability to “elicit a powerful crowd reaction” by “connecting to the basest impulses of the…crowd.” Metheny, of course, contextualizes everything through the strong superlative “basest.” So suddenly Kenny’s performance is negligible because he connected to supposedly “base” impulses? As far as I’m aware, literal hordes of musicians and filmmakers and novelists and artists have made their livelihoods connecting to these “base” impulses. Would we deign to insult Hitchcock on the basis of “baseness”? “Oh that Psycho…you know, sort of…base? Why would you watch that crapola?” Of course not…

I don’t mean, however, for that brief rebuttal to serve as an end to this argument. Metheny’s arguments, I think, are not entirely wrong and certainly lead us down a path of interesting inquiry. Taking these new ideas about Kenny, we should approach the Katy Perry collaboration again. Critically, what can we do about it? Can we judge his ten-second (was it less?) solo in Perry’s song with the jazz greats? This kind of question is mere warm-up when compared to the meatier issue of pop/rock versus jazz or even blues versus jazz. Can you make a fair comparison between two (usually somewhat) distinct musical styles?

One detail that keeps popping up in these Clarence Clemons’s obituaries and remembrances is the struggle of how to classify his role in the saxophone world. As many have pointed out, Clemons emerged into mainstream music not through the jazz track but through rock ’n’ roll and the blues. So like Kenny G, Clemons operated essentially outside of the jazz world (I choose not to count smooth jazz as jazz). Would it be fair to hold up Clemons to Coltrane? Is it even possible? (The same issues as before!)

In a neat post on the arts blog of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Rich Kienzle touches on another looming issue, broaching the importance of distinguishing between soloists and accompanists. Clemons, despite his solos with the E Street Band, was always Springsteen’s trusty sideman, never a true soloist. Kienzle jumps off of Scott Mervis’s obit write-up; Mervis notes, “He may not have been a Coltrane or a Rollins, but in the genre in which he played, you won't find a better sax solo or a better sax sound than the one that closes ‘Jungleland.’”

This distinction, in my mind, is a fair one. In his role as rock ’n’ roll sideman, Clemons was without peer. That does not mean he was a better player than the jazz greats or that we cannot compare them for disparity of genre—we cannot compare because their intrinsic roles were different. As for Kenny G? I think I’ll leave that one to Mr. Metheny.