Illustration by Matthew Billington

After playing a concert in the Netherlands in the summer of 1988, Seattle-born saxophonist Kenneth Gorelick, more widely known as Kenny G, woke to his hotel phone ringing at two in the morning. The voice on the other end was a fellow musician, Grammy-winning saxophonist David Sanborn—famous for solos on David Bowie’s “Young Americans” and James Taylor’s “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You)”—saying, “Come down to the bar. I’ve got to talk to you.”

“What do you want to talk about?” Gorelick remembers saying.

“Just get down here, please.”

Gorelick and Sanborn had performed earlier that evening at the North Sea Jazz Festival, taking the stage with their own respective bands not long after Miles Davis. When Gorelick arrived downstairs, Sanborn, whose recording credits already included everyone from B. B. King to Stevie Wonder, “proceeded to spend half an hour telling me about how awful he played, and how depressed he was about it.”

Gorelick listened patiently. “And then I said to him, ‘David, you’re insane. I watched you play. You know what you sounded like? You sounded like David Sanborn. Hey, bro. You sounded like you. And you were awesome!’”

Gorelick eventually returned to bed, leaving Sanborn at the bar. “I felt really sorry for him,” Gorelick says. “That he couldn’t feel good about his playing that night.”

If Kenny G has a superpower, it’s this: he has tremendous trust in his own art, a self-confidence that propels his new memoir, Life in the Key of G, just as it propelled him to become the best-selling instrumental artist of all time. Gorelick works hard and knows it. He’s reaped unprecedented financial bounty from the woodwind family of instruments, and he knows that, too. The ’80s music videos, the hair, the meteoric sales numbers, the widely corroborated pheromonal aspects of his songs—in Gorelick’s view, these are things that he vied for and won. Deservedly. He would no sooner give into self-doubt than he would skip his daily practice. But more on the daily practice in a moment.

There were plenty of musicians that Sanborn might’ve called down to that hotel bar. He chose a skinny kid from Seattle who’d just turned 32. In phoning Gorelick, Sanborn surely knew that he’d find a sympathetic ear and an accommodating, unpretentious audience. But beyond that, he knew he’d be talking to someone who suffered no doubt whatsoever about his own playing, regardless of what the critics said.

This was the summer of 1988. With Kenny G’s “Songbird” already a hit, and “Silhouette” on deck, the critics were having a field day.

Kenneth Gorelick grew up on what he calls “a quiet street” a mile inland from Seward Park. In Life in the Key of G—written with coauthor Philip Lerman—he plays up his juvenile persona as a shy kid, “the classic skinny, white, nerdy guy.” His father ran a plumbing supply business that he’d begun with his brother. Gorelick assumed that when he grew old enough, this would be his mantle as well.

In late elementary school, he saw someone playing saxophone on The Ed Sullivan Show and asked his parents for one. They opted for a rental, thinking Kenny would drop it like he’d already dropped piano lessons. Gorelick did the opposite. In what he calls “one of the most important decisions I’ve made in my career,” he scoured the house for a practice nook and landed on a “little downstairs bathroom” where the acoustics reverberated right back into his ears. Beyond that, Gorelick writes, “That’s where the mirror was. I was absolutely, 100 percent determined to figure out how to look like a normal person when I played.”

Picture it: the Summer of Love fades into the Nixon era, and here’s adolescent Kenny checking himself out in a bathroom mirror, everyone around him utterly unaware these squeaky, tonally conspicuous noises will one day move 75 million record units. An incomprehensible sum in the neighborhood of Oasis and Bob Marley.

Again: 75 million records!

The 2021 HBO documentary Listening to Kenny G features talking head music critics discussing this phenomenon for the most part in a denigrating fashion. “Like he’s pouring a sidewalk,” they say of Gorelick’s music. “Like wallpaper.” “A corporate attempt to soothe my nerves.” But Life in the Key of G isn’t as concerned with public reaction, Gorelick merely noting that, “as I became more and more successful, plenty of people had plenty of opinions about how I play and how I should play." With lines like these, Gorelick positions himself above the fray. He lets his success speak for itself. In a similar vein, his memoir doesn’t dig into why his music was so popular. Instead, he explains how he put himself in the position to make said music in the first place.

That question hinges not on the downstairs bathroom but on Seattle’s Franklin High School. And it’s best understood in reference to a different jazz story, frequently overstated as a tall tale, about the root of saxophonist Charlie Parker’s motivation. Parker, father of bebop and a near-mythological jazz figure, attended a jam in hometown Kansas City as a teenager in 1936 and lost his way during a solo section. When he did, drummer Jo Jones took a cymbal off his drum kit and tossed it in Parker’s general direction. This frazzled young Parker to such a degree that he resolved to practice obsessively—in jazz, this is called “woodshedding”—for multiple years, performing in public only minimally. Parker returned to the scene a changed musician.

Gorelick’s cymbal arrived courtesy of the Franklin High School Jazz Band, which refused him a spot after his freshman audition. “In my memory,” Gorelick writes, “I wasn’t upset at all. I had only one thought about the saxophone: I need to get better.”

His response to the Franklin rejection was Parker-like in its severity. Gorelick swore then and there, as a high school freshman, that he would practice his saxophone for three hours every day. Today, aged 68, that practice schedule hasn’t wavered for even an instant.

So, was Gorelick “upset” about not making the Franklin band? You decide. These days he says he’s motivated not by failure but by joy. “The joy of trying your hardest, the joy of doing something really well.”

“Joy works better.”

During our nearly two-hour discussion about his memoir, Gorelick really does seem joyful. He’s on vacation, taking some time off from performing—but not from practicing!—to refresh himself for the demands of another touring season, this time for his book as well as his music. He’s an attentive listener and a thoughtful talker, and he’s not afraid to go off the cuff. Nothing feels pre-rehearsed or necessarily off-limits, so I feel comfortable bringing up Gorelick’s most infamous critical takedown, when guitarist Pat Metheny issued a series of scathing diatribes about Kenny G’s interpretation of a Louis Armstrong tune.

“I haven’t seen him since then,” says Gorelick of Metheny. “And by the way, I think he’s a phenomenal player. I would never say anything about his playing.” Toward the end of 2023, when Gorelick and Metheny both held residencies at Dimitriou’s Jazz Alley in Seattle, Metheny apparently asked owner John Dimitriou to “give Kenny my regards.”

“So I don’t think he holds any animosity toward me,” says Gorelick of the notorious spat. “I think it was a momentary thing. He got territorial about Louis’s music and let it all out. It’s not the end of the world.”

In Life in the Key of G, Gorelick speaks openly about his tendency toward forgiveness. He also reveals his attitude toward fame. Gorelick isn’t shy anymore. But he doesn’t act like a guy who’s sold 75 million records, either. He chalks this up to Seattle “not being the entertainment capital of the world.” Thanks to his prowess onstage, and especially on the links—he’s been named Golf Digest’s “top musician golfer”—Gorelick is a friend of Bill Clinton, Clint Eastwood, and assorted A-listers. “I saw Jamie Foxx on the airplane once,” he says. “He goes, Kenny, what’s going on? I’m like, the fact you know my name without me saying my name to you, that still blows me away.”

Regardless of company, Gorelick says he tries to “treat everybody normal.” This golden rule long dictated Gorelick’s time in the Northwest, but ran short when he sold his house in Hunts Point. “I specifically said to the real estate people, ‘I don’t want any numbers in the paper.’ Of course, there’s a number in the paper. Then I started getting treated differently because friends think, how can I possibly relate, how can I be a regular friend if I’m worth this much money? I don’t want anybody to think of me that way.”

Gorelick now lives in sunny Malibu, in a climate that matches his disposition. But his memoir gives ample thanks to the people back home responsible for his staggering success—for instance, Franklin High School composer-in-residence Jim Gardiner, who lent Gorelick a Grover Washington Jr. album that changed his life, and University of Washington band director Roy Cummings, who referred Gorelick to touring acts looking to fill their ranks with local players.

Gorelick saves some of his most inspired recognition for Tony Gable, a Black bandleader who hired that “skinny, white, nerdy” teenage saxophonist into his funk group and shepherded him through a Central District rhythm and blues scene (highlighted in the Jennifer Maas documentary Wheedle’s Groove) that typically barred white musicians.

Gorelick quotes a terrific description of that period from Seattle DJ Robert Nesbitt: “There was a minimum of twenty live-music clubs specializing in funk and soul, and all those joints jammed. There must have been twenty-five hard-giggin’, Superfly-like, wide-leg-polyester-pant-and-platform-shoes-wearing, wide-brim-hat-and-maxi-coat-sportin’, big-ass, highly-“sheened”-afro-stylin’, Kool & the Gang song-covering live bands playing four sets a night from 8pm ’til 0-dark-thirty in the morning.”

Gable’s band, Cold, Bold & Together, had already added Gorelick’s high school friend Philip Woo on keyboards when they put out the call for a saxophonist in 1973. “The other guys didn’t want to bring a white kid into the band,” writes Gorelick. “Philip was okay, they’d decided, because he was Asian.” An undeterred Gorelick showed up and showed out at the audition, after which Gable convinced the rest of the band that “a good player is a good player.”

“In retrospect,” Gorelick writes, “I can see that I was being given entry to a milieu and a culture that very few other white kids were privileged to take part in. At the time, though, I didn’t think much of it. I thought, Hey, I’m playing with the coolest band in town. And we are blowing the roof off these joints, night after night.”

Gorelick might have mastered scales on his own, just as he brought his facial expressions up to muster in the downstairs bathroom mirror. But he honed his onstage persona and theatrical instincts at late-night Central District gigs that frequently rocked until 4am, terminating in sunrise food runs to 13 Coins.

Gorelick ultimately pursued the saxophone not because of any pedagogical breakthrough—he studied accounting, not music, at the University of Washington—but because of the organic foothold he gained in Seattle’s scene. “I took a different path,” he says. “But I’m just wired like that. People tell me, ‘Don’t play that, don’t play this.’ Well, it’s subjective. Thank God I went my own way.”

Editor's note: An earlier caption misidentified Roger Rose. Seattle Met regrets the error.