3/24
brad efford
on
(14) kenny g, “songbird”
(march badness)
For 2025’s March Second Chanceness, each day in march we are bringing back an essay that previously lost in the first round of previous March Xness tournaments for your consideration.
March Xness is a fun tournament, but also at times a cruel one! Each year 32 essays and essayists lose in the first round (and 63 of 64 will bow out before a winner is crowned). Because of the pace of the first round, many of our readers probably don’t get a chance to closely read all of the essays each year! So for 2025 we wanted to dig some of these out of the archive and give them another read, this time on their own, no competitor. Just a moment of attention and even of glory. The Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee picked these based on reader nominations as particularly worthy of getting a second look. There are many brilliant essays that lose each year. Which are your favorites? This year we’re not voting: we’re only reading and celebrating and remembering. The tournament proper will come back in 2026 with March Sadness (lottery entry link in the menu above). We hope these great essays will again earn your love. Signed, the Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee
This Kenny G essay went live on March 7, 2020. The energy of those days just before lockdown is both painfully alive and totally memory-holed, depending on how the light strikes me at any given time. Just a week later we would all live on screens, increasingly haunted not by the past but by a future where we knew we’d be haunted—for how long and to what degree were the only pertinent questions. Five years later, the answers are still unclear. In New York, where I live now, everyone is looking at their phones at every waking hour, on the subway, on the sidewalk, in cars, in movie theaters, at school, at work, at home. Were we always doing this, or are we publicly self-isolating now as a balm for shared unspoken trauma? Would life have looked like this in 2025 either way? I can’t imagine that’s the case; if it’s true, I’ll get too depressed. So I’m blaming the pandemic. Just before it changed everything forever, I wrote an essay about how boring it is to write an essay about Kenny G. I think it’s one of the better things I’ve written in the past five years—I think it lost because the Starship song is more famously a “bad” song, though Melissa’s incredible essay is also miles beyond mine (honored to have been pitted against her, and proud, the hobbyist losing to the career writer by less than 30 votes). But “Songbird” is bad in a way no one was ready for or wanted to admit: bad not in a funny or catchy way, not in the way you’ll hear coworkers or friends in a bar talking giddily about behind laughter, but bad in a serious way. “Songbird” is so bad it’s nearly academic. It’s asinine. Completely without merit. Soulless and dull. So bad that people couldn’t see, in 2020, just how bad it truly was. Maybe now, with hindsight, on a screen again in front of faces tired of and addicted to screens, it will sink in. But I don’t think my essay, though I like it, will convince anyone; I don’t think it needs to. “Songbird” convinces itself. —Brad Efford
brad efford on “songbird”
1986.
Kenny G is on The Oprah Winfrey Show at thirty years old telling stories about laying down sax for Whitney and Aretha. Those kinds of things are fun, he says. A producer calls you up, asks for a day of your time. Those are really fun. New white tee under a deep navy blazer with the sleeves rolled up, mullet bewitched, already iconic. This is mid-eighties Oprah, too, small scale, year one of syndication. Kenny’s come by to play with a couple bandmates under bad stage lighting. She asks if playing sax feels like making love, or she implies it. He doesn’t know how to answer, lets her answer for him, and she is gracious enough to do it.
Kenny G just dropped Duotones five weeks ago. It’s perfect for 1986; between the late-September release and this early-November daytime TV appearance, President Reagan and Gorbachev met in Iceland to discuss nuclear de-escalation, the Iran-Contra Affair began, Murdoch launched the Fox Broadcasting Company, and Bill Buckner watched his entire life roll through his legs. No one knows what’s going on and everyone’s into lasers and cocaine. Duotones rolls in with nothing to say, no reason to exist, and what absolutely feels like a complete lack of self awareness. Within a year it will reach number six on the Billboard 200 having spawned two fangless, airless singles that both cracked the top 15 on the Hot 100. “Songbird” is the one with legs; it reaches number four. Makes Kenny G a fucking star.
Interlude.
I thought I could craft an argument for Kenny G, for “Songbird” in particular but for Kenny as an artist really, G-Team all the way. I told the committee: give me “Songbird,” I want the bullet, knowing well my own proclivity for dusting off garbage to reveal the shining crusts of hidden gems beneath. I think now this was foolishness. What good is irony masked as genuine emotion? Who stands to benefit from false adoration at the mercy of the cool? I thought because I love Sade and Enya that I was wrong about Kenny, could fake it at least. But I am not cool, and these artists are not the same. I should have thought more about this. “Songbird” means nothing. It is an aural metaphor for the confidence of straight white men, rewarded thusly. Was Kenny G hot? I’ve been thinking about that a lot. Trying to understand 1986 somehow.
2002.
Ted Panken speaks with Kenny G for bn.com:
Do you think of yourself as a jazz musician? Do you think of yourself as something other than a jazz musician?
KENNY G: Well, personally, I do think of myself as a jazz musician. But I grew up with the word “jazz”…to me, it meant instrumental and it meant improvisation. It really doesn’t matter the style. I don’t play the traditional Charlie Parker songs. But I do improvise and I do create with my instrument, and that to me is jazz. But there are people who use the word “jazz” only in a traditional sense, and they would be offended by that, and that’s fine. They should be, if that’s what they feel. But that’s just my opinion. I think everybody has to kind of decide what the word “jazz” means to them, and that’s fine. Just figure out what you think jazz is, and then if it fits into that category, it’s jazz, and if it doesn’t, it isn’t. It’s no big deal.
What sort of things are in your personal listening rotation at this point? Do you listen to a lot of music?
KENNY G: No, I don’t listen to a lot of music at all. I’m actually more into…I don’t know. I’m just more into playing golf. It’s a great thing. I work on my music and I play my albums, and when I’m done, I’m done.
1966.
When he was ten years old, Kenny G began golfing and playing the saxophone. Monumental year for Kenny G. He loves to tell the story of the latter: watching “someone” rip a sax solo on The Ed Sullivan Show and immediately thinking, “Wow, if I could do that, it would be so cool.” In 2018, he tells the story in just this way. Before he graduates high school, 1973, he’s got his first gig playing in Barry White’s Love Unlimited Orchestra. He starts playing in funk bands in college while majoring in accounting, graduates magna cum laude. He’ll spend a lot of the rest of his life connecting dots between his love for numbers and his love for jazz. The details of his story begin to explain the music from every angle—there is no counter-narrative to work against. Kenny G is a nerd who thought the saxophone looked cool on TV.
In 1966 his older brother teaches him how to golf, and Kenny takes to it immediately. He plays on the Franklin High School golf team, splitting his time between sax lessons and the green. Eventually he chose one over the other, but the clubs never really leave his side. In 2001, he wins the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am with Phil Mickelson after working with Tiger Woods’s coach. “Fortunately, when you have a name that people know, you can make a phone call to people that wouldn’t normally take your call.” In 2010, he tells the story in just this way. If this paragraph is boring, understand that it’s serving its purpose. This is Kenny G, rounded out.
Interlude.
The “Songbird” music video is incredible. We’ve got Kenny G on a portico at night, in a public park picnic area with the band, on a bench, on the beach, in the exit stairwell of an abandoned apartment building. His outfit keeps changing but his kicks are consistent: un-tied white Adidas high tops, clean and slick. A sneakerhead would have some insights about whether or not they underscore or score against Kenny G’s dweebness. I know nothing, but I do support a man playing saxophone on the beach in white Adidas high tops, light jeans, and a tucked white tank top. This is all there is to say about the “Songbird” music video, and really I said nothing at all. When you write about Kenny G, everything that is nothing is truly a metaphor for everything. The music speaks for itself by having nothing to say. You could say this is Kenny G’s intention, this devotion to nothingness, this romantic ideal of the void. You could say this, but I’m not sure why you would.
2014.
I’m kind of proud of the fact that it’s just kind of self taught and comes from my heart, and so you know that when I’m writing my music I’m not following a guideline, it’s just...whatever feels right to me, then that’s how I do it.
Kenny G is speaking with the Oprah Winfrey Network to promote his new Christmas record. He says he’s had the same saxophone his entire life, says that every album he’s ever recorded he recorded with this saxophone, locks eyes with the camera in a thrilling show of braggadocio. It reads more like a dad who refuses to throw anything away or buy a new shirt because this one’s still perfectly good, what’s wrong with this one?
It’s been almost 30 years since he first went on Oprah and proclaimed to have never had a single music lesson, to rapturous in-studio audience applause. It takes about twenty seconds of googling to discover that this is bullshit, but Kenny G was just clear of his twenties, suddenly famous for seemingly nothing at all. It’s hard to fault an eager smile.
For the record, Kenny G is a practicing Jew. He is making a Christmas record in 2014 because he regularly plays “White Christmas” on stage (regardless of the season? A great question with no answer) and the fan response is overwhelming. He tells the Oprah Winfrey Network that he’s careful not to call his Christmas records “Christmas records,” opting instead for “Holiday” to preserve his complete lack of vested interest in the subject. The Oprah Winfrey Network titles this interview “Where Are They Now: Kenny G on His Best-Selling Christmas Album.” It’s almost cute the way “Holiday” was a four-letter word in 2014. Kenny G lays down backing sax in studio, on camera; it’s difficult to tell if he’s even trying. It’s undeniable, the muscles he’s built from nearly forty years of daily practice—even he admits this, is humbled by it.
Do you think Kenny G listens to smooth jazz? Do you think he listens to anything at all? I’ve been thinking about that a lot. Trying to understand Kenny G somehow.
Epilogue: 2002.
Kenny G tells Ted Panken that Coltrane, Bird, and Grover Washington Jr. are three of his biggest influences, and Panken asks him to talk about some of his favorite songs of theirs. I haven’t stopped thinking about Kenny G’s answer to this question for weeks now; I feel eternally haunted by it. There is a good possibility that it does more work explaining Kenny G than my 1,600 words were ever truly able to:
The Grover Washington one that I listened to a lot when I was a kid was called ‘Inner City Blues.’ As for Coltrane, of course, ‘Giant Steps’ is the main one that he did, and he also did a rendition of ‘My Favorite Things.’ To me, those are the famous John Coltrane songs.
With Charlie Parker, there are just so many different records. I don’t say this to be disrespectful, but when you listen to Charlie Parker, on pretty much any record he’s going to sound the same.
