In The Key Of G -- A Home-Grown Sax Player's Odyssey To Pop Stardom

CUTLINE: REHEARSING FOR A SHOWTIME CABLE TELEVISION SPECIAL IN HOLLYWOOD, KENNY G JOINS, FROM LEFT, DEFF RELCLAVO, NDUGU CHANCELOR (IN REAR), VINX DE'JON PARRETE, MARK E. SMITH AND STING.

CUTLINE: ABOVE - KENNY WAS THE ONLY WHITE MEMBER F COLD, BOLD & TOGETHER, A POPULAR SEATTLE R&B FUNK BANK IN THE LATE 70S.

CUTLINE: RIGHT - TONY GABLE, THE LEADER OF COLD BOLD WHO TODAY OPERATES HIS OWN GRAPHICS-ARTS FIRM IN SEATTLE, STILL TOURS WITH KENNY.

CUTLINE: KENNY G'S MOTHER, EVELYN GORELICK, ISPROUD OF HER SON'S 1987 CARNEGIE HALL PERFORMANCE, WHICH SHE RECALLS AS ``THE THRILL OF A LIFETIME.'' THE ONE-OF-A-KING POSTER WAS GIVEN TO HER AFTER THE SHOW AND IS DISPLAYED IN HIS PARENTS' EASTSIDE HOME

CUTLINE: ABOVE - KENNY G PLAYS A FEW NOTES DURING A ``PHOTO OP'' FOR PRESS PHOTOGRAPHERS BACKSTAGE AT THE GRAMMYS AFTER HIS PERFORMANCE ON STAGE WITH MICHAEL BOLTON. ALTHOUGH KENNY, NOMINATED IN THE POP INSTRUMENTAL CATEGORY, DID NOT WIN, HIS DUET WITH BOSTON ON `HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO LIVE WITHOUT YOU?'' WAS A HIGHLIGHT OF AN OTHERWISE LOW-KEY AWARDS SHOW.

CUTLINE: ABOVE RIGHT - WHILE RUBBING STUDENTS WITH PRESS AND HOLLYWOOD STARS AT SMOKEY ROBINSON'S 50TH BIRTHDAY PARTY (HELD AT SPAGO'S IN HOLLYWOOD), KENNY AND GIRLFRIEND LINDY BENSON RUN INTO GREGORY MCKINNEY, ANOTHER '74 FRANKLIN GRADUATE NOW AN ACTOR LIVING IN L.A.

CUTLINE: KENNY, WEARING A CHICAGO POLICE JACKET GIVEN TO HIM BY LINDY, IS FRIENDLY WITH REPORTERS, HERE FROM ``ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT.``

CUTLINE: KENNY, A VEGETARIAN HEALTH BUFF WHO EATS MOSTLY ORGANIC FOOD, CONSERVES HIS HEARING WHILE SAVORING THE MUSIC ON STAGE AT THE CHINA CLUB

What Kenny G, man, he is bad! That dude can play! They don't get any badder than Kenny G!''

Teddy Fisher, a keyboard player who daylights as a Seattle Times newsroom aide, is bouncing around in his chair like a schoolkid on a carnival ride, first leaning way back back back to the point of gravity overload, then jerking forward, pow! with a catapult spring-motion. The rest of the newsroom is droning along with its usual banklike efficiency, but Teddy is excited. Kenny G, the mellow sax man, the guy he used to hang out with at the Franklin jazz lab and move his body to at smoky dives like the Golden Crown, Heritage House, Shining Star and District Tavern, Kenny G, his main man, has just been nominated for a Grammy.

``He deserves it, man,'' Fisher is saying, nodding his head as though keeping time with Kenny's staccato horn, ``the guy paid his dues. People think he happened all overnight, but no way.''

He was Kenny Gorelick back then, just a shy, kinky-haired Jewish kid from the neighborhood, so stage-scared he refused to take the mike. But pay his dues he did, playing backup for the big names that swung through town - Johnny Mathis, Diahann Carroll, Liberace, even the Ringling Bros. Circus, where he'd blow for three hours straight, take a break, then blow another three hours. His cheeks would throb, his teeth and gums would ache, and what's more, ``the elephants really, really stank,'' he says.

His first big-name gig, while he was still at Franklin High, was with Barry White's Love Unlimited Orchestra. There he was, playing solos at 17 for a whole weekend, and when Monday morning came, tough guys who'd hit him up for money in the hallway after school - you know, hey man, you wouldn't happen to have a buck or two? yeah, sure you do - were all of a sudden coming up and patting him on the back, shaking his hand, saying yeah man, you done good.

After he joined up as the only white member of Cold, Bold and Together, a legendary funk soul revue and '70s fixture on the local music scene before succumbing to - may it

forever rest in peace - d-i-s-c-o, the joke was to have Kenny light up the room with Wild Cherry's ``Play That Funky Music, White Boy!''

Tony Gable, the band's leader who still tours with Kenny G and whose Seattle graphics production outfit does the T-shirts, posters and other Kenny G memorabilia, had a reason for the Wild Cherry song. Kenny was just about the dorkiest guy Gable had ever seen - ``He wore these goofy glasses and terrible clothes, he was a real geek'' - and, in front of predominantly black audiences, needed something to warm the crowd to the white kid. ``After he played that number, he'd established a rapport,'' Gable says.

``That's where I got soul,'' Kenny G recalls. ``Being the only white guy in the band was one of the biggest learning experiences of my life. I not only crossed the color barrier, I found people were as happy to hear my `blue-eyed soul' as they were to hear the `real thing.' I got over my stage fright once and for all.''

There were only a few places in town that permitted black musicians, night clubs in out-of-the-way alleys where Kenny would be the only white face present. There was no question of his parents coming out - his mom recalls staying up till 5 in the morning, waiting for the putt-putt of his car in the driveway. Once Sammy Davis Jr. came to town and hired the G-man for his band at the Paramount. At one point Kenny did a nifty little riff and Sammy cut in, ``Hey, goyim's getting cute!'' To which Kenny shot back, ``Watch your mouth, I'm Jewish!''

After Cold, Bold broke up, Kenny joined Jeff Lorber, the Portland jazz fusion band, for a couple of years, then followed with his first solo album, ``Kenny G,'' the first time he used the abbreviated last name in public. ``It was show business,'' says Kenny Gorelick. ``G just had a nice ring to it, it was something fans could hang on to.'' Then came ``G Force'' and ``Gravity,'' all to increasing critical acclaim, though they didn't really make him money. Seattle friends recall seeing Kenny in those days, '84, '85, figuring he'd be riding high, three albums under his belt, but in fact he had debts from having to buy out his contract with Lorber. Arista, his record company, was basically cash-advancing his career.

Then came ``Songbird.''

Although it was an instrumental, although he'd had a series of also-ran records, the G-man knew he had struck the mother lode with ``Songbird.'' Gig after gig he hyped the breezy, sensuous song, written for his new girlfriend, Lindy Benson, an L.A. acting student and ``a beautiful woman who

changed my life.'' He played it for his

big debut on the Johnny Carson show and was brought back again for a repeat. And then a third time. Oprah wanted him, and David Letterman.

Then it was MTV, a what-in-the-name-of-contemporary-jazz-is-this? video of Kenny on a moonlit balcony, Kenny strolling a sun-dappled beach, soprano sax perched characteristically on the right side of his mouth like a big brass cigarette, the way Humphrey Bogart would have played it, the ultimate in laid-back synthesizer R&B feel-good cool. Suddenly the sky was the limit. He put it on an album, ``Duotones,'' that went platinum (a million sales) three times over, followed it up with ``Silhouette,'' an equally alluring melody with an album of the same name, and got his first Grammy nomination and his own world tour, not to mention the big one: a gig at Carnegie Hall. In a little more than two years he'd gone from a no-name, midlist journeyman to a burning star in the pop-jazz constellation.

``When Kenny was growing up I always told him, like any mother does, that when he got to Carnegie Hall I would come and hear him,'' says Kenny's mother, Evelyn, an irrepressible, endearing stage mom who still picks up Kenny at the airport when he flies into town. ``So when the time came, of course, I had to go.'' When Kenny G took his habitual stroll through the audience, ``I just had to reach up and give him a big kiss,'' Mrs. G says. ``I practically pulled his hand off the horn. I just hope I didn't embarrass him too much. But Carnegie Hall - well, it was quite a thrill, believe me.''

It doesn't get any badder than that. Today the Whitworth Elementary-Sharples Jr. High-Franklin High-UW accounting grad is all-world, riding high off a year only Hollywood could fantasize. Passing the $6 million sales mark, being named ``Contemporary Jazz Artist of the Year'' by Billboard magazine, having the album of the year (``Silhouette''), being one of only two instrumentalists to break the Top Ten during the 1980s (for a noncinematic track), not to mention having his own full-length home concert video, ``Kenny G Live,'' with special introduction by Sugar Ray Leonard and featuring guest star Dudley Moore. All topped by not just one but two more Grammy nominations, this time in the categories of contemporary pop (for ``Breadline Blues,'' off the ``Happy 40th Anniversary Charlie Brown'' CD) and R&B male vocal (for ``Saving the Best for Last,'' with Smokey Robinson, off ``Silhouette'').

It all seems so unlikely: a nerdy Jewish kid from Seattle, a white jazz blower from a white-bread town, surrounded by black musicians who love and defend him, not only making it in a black-dominated genre but taking it mainstream, cracking the Top Ten with jazz instrumentals out of nowhere, and spreading it around with a lot of his old buddies from the district.

``He's sort of like the last person you'd think of to be a famous jazz musician,'' says John Keister, the KING-TV ``Almost Live'' impresario who went to school with Kenny at Sharples and Franklin. ``He was the guy who was always walking down the hall carrying a bunch of books, always doing extra credit, the honors-English type. You kind of suspect that if we'd had computers back then, he would have been in the computer club.''

At 33, Kenny's come a long way from tootling a clarinet in the basement of his Seward Park home. But there it is: The classic hometown boy makes good. Only in Kenny G's case, it's not just good, it's wild, it's crazed, it's fourth-dimensional. With little help from music critics, who call his music slick and superficial, this gentle, positive-thinking pied piper of a sax player may wind up being the biggest musician ever to come out of Seattle - on a plane with Quincy, Jimi, Heart.

``Whatever else you can say about Kenny G,'' says Charles Cross, editor/

publisher of The Rocket, a Seattle music monthly, ``the man is a phenomenon.''

It begins with a darkened but expectant stage, footlamps low, spotlight on hold. The band members are restlessly warming up, strumming, blowing, playing a few random notes. Then everything gets quiet, the room goes black and a bristling silence embraces the auditorium. Then you hear it. The horn. Notes so smooth yet controlled, so soulfully seductive, a staccato spurt here, a long, lilting decrescendo there, and you're under the spell before the stage lights come up.

There he is, corkscrew locks aflame in the spotlight, wearing a steel blue Armani silk suit, knees together and bent, eyes closed, fingers choreographing the keys. There's a little of the snake charmer in the way he sways to the rhythm, and indeed, Kenny G has transformed the little-used soprano sax into a cultural icon: His success has led a host of other record companies to beat the bushes for their own Kenny G, and suddenly the sax is all over the

airways, in pop music, TV commercials, movie soundtracks. ``Kenny's brought the sound to the forefront, it's a real tribute to the man,'' Gable says.

But most saxophones you hear are still the alto or tenor, the jazz mainstays. Kenny was 15 when he bought his soprano sax for $300 after seeing a want ad from a fellow in Lacey. ``I'd wanted one since seeing Grover Washington Jr. play it,'' Kenny says. His dad, Mo (for Morris), drove him down one Saturday and Kenny had to have it. ``I'd never even heard of a soprano saxophone,'' his mother admits. ``But one thing about Kenny, he always knew exactly what he wanted.''

The G-man has been blowing it ever since, night after night, year after year, four to five hours a day, so much so that his teeth have worn a deep scar into the mouthpiece, which he now protects with a rubber bicycle patch. The sax accounts for why he plays out of the right side of his mouth, almost like a flute: The horn just kind of settles there, partly because one of his right teeth is higher than the other, and he could no more change its position than a caribou could move its antlers. Not that he should want to: By now, it's part of his inimitable style, his persona.

``It's the same horn I taught him with,'' says 81-year-old Johnnie Jessen, the legendary (there's that word again) Seattle jazz saxophonist who played the vaudeville circuit and radio in the ``Sweet Georgia Brown'' glory days of the big-jazz-band sound. ``He's had it all these years. That tells you something about Kenny right there.'' As for Kenny, he says the newer instruments have a thinner, more brittle sound: ``You can't get a sax like this one today.''

When the Franklin High band went to London on a Europe an tour in '74, Kenny took the sax with him. A girl from an other band touring with Franklin took a shine to Kenny and he invited her back to his room. Unbeknownst to Kenny, a couple of fellow band members snuck up outside the door to hear him say to the girl, ``I'd like to show you my most prized possession'' - the sax, of course.

The G-man lost his glasses on the tour and came off the plane blinking and apologetic, but his mom greeted him, ``Better the glasses than your soprano sax!''

The sound of the soprano horn,

with its oboe-like reediness tempered by the honied fullness of the sax's bigger barrel and aged metal, is distinctive in its own right, but Mr. G imprints it with a style so clearly individualized that fans will stop in a supermarket, or pause within earshot of a table radio, when his music comes on.

The notes start flowing out over the audience, short, sweet, perfectly coordinated arpeggios, executed with the precision and grace of a ballerina en point. Almost imperceptibly the tempo picks up, the band begins adding its own flourishes, and it's barely moments before the audience is tapping their feet, moving their

shoulders, jouncing in their seats, doing everything but the impossible, which is to sit still, and the spell is complete.

It all happens so effortlessly, so unconsciously, that fans tend to endow Kenny G with superhuman traits. To a degree, they're right. In school Kenny was an outstanding skier and swimmer, recruited by the UW for its diving team, and won the Franklin golf championship. Plus he was a straight-A student, eventually graduating magna cum laude from the U in accounting (``Some things are done for one's mom,'' he says).

Jessen remembers Kenny possessing ``finger speeds that were out of this world. I'd set the metronome to 160 for most students, and that was pushing it. With Kenny I'd get up to 200 or more. So he had that God-given talent. But the thing people forget about Kenny is that he worked his butt off. He practiced like a madman and was always coming back for more.''

It's a habit he still keeps religiously, every day rising for an hour of flute, ``doing patterns and lines I've made up myself. I play them in every key, so I'm actually getting technical practice for my fingers. It's the same with the sax; I try to make up new things myself.'' This insistence on innovation may explain how the G-man is able to come up with all his original songs.

Although he has a downtown apartment for his visits here, Kenny retreats to his parents' home in Somerset on the Eastside to practice. ``He doesn't want to disturb the people in his apartment complex,'' his mother says. ``He walks in and says, `Hi mom, I gotta practice, runs downstairs, and that's the last I see of him for two or three hours. I usually try to have something for him to eat when he's through, though, because he does get hungry.''

Over the holidays the whole family will gather, including Kenny's older brother Brian, a gifted pianist who sang with Franklin's Bel Canto Choir and is choral conductor for Wake Forest University, and Kenny's younger sister Paula, a bluegrass-folk musician who is adept on several string instruments. The jam sessions that ensue would probably sell out the Opera House.

``They have quite a time,'' his mother says.

Toward the end of the number Mr. G launches into one of his patented solos, holding a single note 10, 15, 20 . . . then 30 seconds, a minute, two minutes, on and on while the band ebbs in the background, till only Kenny and the horn are making news. The audience sits in stunned silence, unable to believe someone could hold a note so long, wondering how much longer he can sustain it. The tension builds, something has to give, they're thinking, the note will crack or he'll have to break off and take a long hoarse gasp. There's an admiring whistle or two here, a patter of applause there. You can see the people in the crowd kind of sucking in their own breaths in empathy for the oxygen debt they think the G-man must be feeling.

But when Kenny finally does break off, it's only to go into a silken riff, to absorb his band back into the song while the audience claps and cheers, and finally, woofing at him the way they do on Arsenio Hall, where Kenny's made several appearances of late.

The technique, called circular breathing, consists of blowing out with pressurized air from the cheeks while breathing in through the nostrils. It's difficult to do - Kenny picked it up from watching Grover Washington - harder to master, but Kenny G has taken it to unparalleled heights.

He stands there, smiling that curiously enigmatic, inscrutable smile of his, raising his arms to the cheers of the crowd. Then it's time to introduce the band: Robert Damper on keyboards, John Raymond on guitar, Vail Johnson on bass, Bruce Carter on drums. Except for Johnson, a strapping Swede who Kenny says is the best white bass player he's ever heard, the group members are familiar faces from his past. Raymond and Damper, in fact, are from Seattle, and the latter played with Kenny at Franklin.

Franklin. Talk about the wonder years: The jazz scene is populated with so many Franklin folks that some sort of cosmic convergence must have struck the South End high school in the early- and mid-'70s. In those years Franklin dominated jazz competitions, sweeping the International Jazz Festival in Reno for three years in a row under the direction of Chuck Chinn, who today is assistant principal at Roosevelt High.

``We had soloists the competition just couldn't deal with,'' Chinn says. ``They'd just blow the adjudicators away.'' As for the grads, they credit Chinn with keeping things tight-knit and organized, and for hiring James Gardner, a trombonist and composer who today operates a studio in San Francisco, to arrange and write for the band.

The names of Franklin High grads from those years reads like a local jazz directory: David Yamasaki, a guitarist now playing in the Bay Area; Philip Woo, keyboard player who toured with Grover Washington; Dean Mochizuki, who played tenor sax alongside Kenny's alto; James Rasmussen, leader of the Jazz Police; and Deems Tsutakawa, a fixture of the local jazz scene - just a few names in a pantheon of talented musicians from Franklin.

``There was talent, but there was also dedication,'' Chinn says. ``Those kids would come in for two hours of practice each afternoon, then back again for two hours after dinner.''

It's a diverse, eclectic group, the collection of music lovers who flock to Kenny G's concerts. Look around the audience and you'll see white faces and black, young, hip, designer-skin professionals and old, overweight, polyester-clad retirees. Hardly any two sets of people paired in the seats are alike, except for one thing: They're moving and smiling. They can't resist the melody.

It has been a source of some consternation to critics to try and categorize Kenny G's music. Purists, the Charlie Parker and John Coltrane diehards always in breathless pursuit of jazz's next messiah, accuse him of playing a commercially slick ``yuppie jazz,'' the kind of stuff you hear when the bank puts you on hold. One critic chirped that Kenny's sax ``sounds like it has a major sinus condition.''

Even locally, there is some grumbling of ``selling out'' when his name comes up. Well-intentioned critics place him in the pop category, a sort of Neil Diamond or Phil Collins of jazz, blending elements of soul, R&B and jazz into a pleasant but ultimately half-a-loaf sound. As one put it, ``Kenny's initial stands for Gee.''

``He's a very talented musician, but to me the music is bland as milk toast,'' the Rocket's Cross says. ``I personally wish he'd be a little more creative from a pushing-the-envelope standpoint.'' Paul de Barros, a leading local jazz critic, calls Kenny G ``technically a pretty good player, but he's a pop player, which means he doesn't get around the horn as much. It's a rock rhythm pumped up with jazz color, full of a lot of jumpy R&R figures.''

Kenny G's defenders, however, say critics mistake his music for what they want it to be rather than what it is. ``The type of music he's playing is not as advanced or complicated as mainstream jazz, but who's to say he's doing the wrong thing?'' says Clarence Acox, a drummer who has played with Kenny and now teaches at Seattle's Garfield High School. ``He's happy to play it, and his fans are happy to hear it.''

As hard as they sometimes are on him, even the critics pay Kenny a backhanded compliment by mentioning him in the same breath with the jazz greats rather than just writing him off as another cheap imitator. Roy Cummings, Kenny's band leader at the UW who still runs the jazz band in the same tradition, with an eye toward teaching sight-reading skills in a big band venue, feels critics miss the point: ``What Kenny's trying to do is play something that makes people feel good. He doesn't claim it's jazz - he has his own sound. There's a lot of folks who're just replaying Oscar Peterson and John Coltrane and doing nothing new.''

Perhaps out of self-defense, or perhaps because he knows the pitfalls of artistic pigeonholing, Kenny G himself refuses to categorize his music. ``If I had to put a label on it, I'd call it contemporary R&B pop with a strong instrumental base,'' he says. ``But I don't really think theory and analysis are important. What's important is the music, and if people like it, then I've accomplished my goal.''

Perhaps his mother puts it best: ``Kenny's music has a tune. People remember it, they hum it, it goes through their mind on the way to work or whatever. It's catchy, that's what it is.''

Money, the great basketball player-cum-philosopher Bill Russell once observed, just makes you a bigger whatever than you were before. Throughout the past two or three years the people who Knew Kenny When have been watching, waiting to see if success will spoil Mr. G. It hasn't happened. He still does benefits, e.g., the $25,000 he donated last spring to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation (he also helped raise $325,000 with a Crested Butte, Colo., appearance).

He still shows up unannounced to say hi to old pals, as he did with Nasty-Nes Rodriguez, an ex-DJ for KFOX who was emceeing a local concert.

``I kept noticing this guy in an overcoat and dark glasses off the side of the stage, and pretty soon it hit me, `Wow! It's Kenny G! How ya doin' man?' I'll never forget that, it was like a compliment to me.'' Rodriguez, a producer for Nasty Mix Records who still has a weekly rap show on KCMU, had helped out Kenny by playing an early record of his, ``Hi How Ya Doin'.'' ``He looks after the people who helped him on the way up, I really admire that in him,'' Rodriguez says.

For all his fame, Kenny has retained the humility and sense of perspective about himself that his early funk-soul days embedded in him. Virtually no one who has met Kenny G comes away with a bad word about the guy.

``I used to tell Kenny all the time, `Look man, forget this ego routine,' '' says his old teacher Johnnie Jessen. ``If you're good, I would tell him, people are gonna know it. But if you go around full of yourself, you'll never learn anything from anybody.''

While Kenny has abandoned his one-bedroom apartment in L.A. for a house (``although it's nothing fancy,'' his mom says), while he gets around now in a matching set of Porsches (although he's kept his wheezy old 1971 Datsun 240-Z), while his concerts all sell out and his records go platinum, the G-man retains an air of startled wonderment at it all. As Tony Gable puts it, ``The only thing that's changed about Kenny is his bank account is bigger.

In a way, the irrepressible modesty that has always characterized Kenny G has hurt him. He tends to be self-effacing to a fault in interviews, running off long lists of people he admires or who helped him out on the way up (a Seattle journalist who interviewed him said, ``He's so nice, after a while I wanted to slap him.'') He refuses to be baited by critics' insinuations, saying, ``You have to believe in yourself or all is lost. It can be difficult convincing people that the really heartfelt, sincere piece of music you're playing is a lot harder than doing a Charlie Parker riff over and over.''

A story helps illustrate the G-man's attitude. Playing the Puyallup fair one year, Kenny took his traditional stroll through the audience, a practice he adopted early when cordless microphones first made it possible. It's a lot like what Arsenio does, glad handing with the gallery, only Kenny does it with his sax.

He noticed a young boy in an aisle seat and walked up to him, thinking the kid would get a kick out of it. But the boy, although clapping along and moving to the beat, kept staring ahead, toward the stage, no matter how close Kenny got with his horn.

Finally he realized the boy was blind. Still playing his horn, he reached over and took the boy's hand, then placed his fingers on the keys of the sax, while a mile-wide smile broke out on the kid's face.

``It was one of my favorite moments,'' Kenny recalls.

The ``Arsenio Hall'' show. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday. A welter of celebrities, most of them black, have gathered onstage to celebrate the ``I Have A Dream'' man's legacy.

The final number, everyone gathered together, holding hands, swaying to and fro, is Stevie Wonder's ``Happy Birthday'' tribute to King. And who should show up on stage at the last minute with his horn, but the G-man himself.

``I'd just gotten back to my home in L.A. after fighting rush-hour traffic and was playing my phone messages, when Marla (Arsenio's producer) comes on saying, `Hey, we're celebrating Martin Luther King's birthday, why don't you come on by?' Well, taping starts at five and it was already 10 'til.

``But I had to give it a shot. I got back in my car and raced to the studio. Arsenio was offstage during a guest number and he got this big smile when I walked in. He gave me this big hug and kept saying, `I can't believe you made it!' ''

Whatever the circumstances, it was an impressive, moving tribute. And in a way, it symbolized Kenny G's whole improbable odyssey, from the all-black back-street off-the-beaten-track lagoons he played in his blue-eyed hometown to the international racial-crossover spotlight, bringing jazz/pop/soul/R&B to the masses. If Kenny G's music does nothing else, it affirms the universality of the language of music.

``There's a contagious magic in the air when Kenny plays,'' says Marla Kell Brown, Arsenio's producer. ``He just gets you involved. There aren't a lot of artists with that warmth.''

As it turned out, Kenny never got his Grammy. If he had, he says, it would have been with mixed feelings. The nomination was in the pop, not jazz, instrumental category, for a song that Kenny did not write. `` `Songbird' (which didn't even get nominated) was really the one that turned my world around and broke new ground in a romantic, soothing vein. And even though `Silhouette' got a nomination, I wasn't invited to play it.''

This year, however, he was invited to play and performed a rousing accompaniment to his friend Michael Bolton's award-winning ``How Am I Supposed to Live Without You'' - one of the few live numbers that got much audience response. ``To me, it means more to perform at the Grammys than get an award,'' Kenny says. ``Performing is what I live to do.'' His friend Tony Gable worries that Kenny G ``will become the Steven Spielberg of the Grammys, always being passed up for one reason or another.'' But Kenny himself says, ``I'd rather have what I've got than a Grammy.''

Conventional jazz, like classic Italian opera and the Mississippi Delta blues, has a lot of pain and suffering and just plain ache in it. It gives the music dignity, depth and solidity, but its message ultimately communicates the artist's melancholy journey through life.

It is on this point that Kenny G's music makes its most pointed departure, and contributes to its troubling quandary for the critics. There is no pain or suffering in the G-man's sound. There's feeling, yes, and soul and inspiration. But not angst. In a traditional sense, that leaves it open to charges of suavity, superficiality and ersatz charm.

But the music says no. It has a persuasive, alacritous, ineluctable charisma about it, a steel-trap magic that says, ``It's OK to feel good, to let go, to put your troubles away for a couple of hours. That's not to say everything is strawberries and cream, but some people need a break sometimes. And Kenny G's sound is there for the recovery cycle.''