Jazz

I’ve talked at length about Kenny G’s “Sade” in my weekly newsletter Enjoy Music, but I had to bring it back, because there’s jazz, there’s smooth jazz, and then there’s Smooth Jazz, Baby™. Lots of people are gonna clown you if you say you’re into this kind of thing but I’m telling you, it’s just like any other type of music: a lot of bullshit up front, and some Very Choice Cuts in the back. For the most part, I am fully against Ken G (as his friends call him) being some sort of Smooth Jazz Poster Boy, mostly because he’s a complete dink. But my god, this song is very very good. And it really is smooth. Now, I wouldn’t personally call it <Pat Metheny voice> Jazz, but that’s another conversation. Right now we’re talking about KG and this smooth tune that he named after Sade (who, by the way, is The Queen Of Smooth Music … Also, there are rumors that the two dated? The sources are so sketchy that they’re not even worth linking to, but still … wild). Anyway, there’s a million reasons why Smooth Jazz received the backlash it did, and one of the big ones has to do with the casual nature in which Ken G was like, “Jazz? Oh I don’t know, I just kind of do my own interpretation of it,” in a way that implicitly steamrolled over the foundational contributions that Black artists have made (and continue to make) to the genre. So let’s also shout out some “Smooth Jazz” artists who didn’t do all those things: George Benson, Grover Washington Jr, George Duke, and many more people, some of whose names do not start with a G! Do your homework folks! Also, this tune always reminded me of this Jolley & Swain song, which means that if you don’t want to hang with Ken G, there’s other options folks!

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