The world-famous explorer is chronicled in a film that’s made up entirely of archival footage-always a choice that I admire. We could use more men like Jacques Cousteau. There are men out there fighting to keep this world from falling apart, and “Becoming Cousteau” is a reminder of how people can use passion to make change. After all, there needs to be some musical furniture out there.Ī very different portrait of a man emerges in Liz Garbus’ National Geographic doc “ Becoming Cousteau,” a film that sometimes feels less ambitious than her best work but that I found remarkably soothing and even comforting. I like that even Lane seems a bit skeptical of Kenny at times by the end, but she still captures how much he means to people. A cool piece of trivia or proof that Kenny G is the tool of crushing regimes? You decide.Īs Kenny G gets deeper into the kind of mash-ups that created his controversial collaboration with Louis Armstrong, and allows his ego to emerge more fully (such as in a bit about how he could easily win an Oscar for Best Original Song if a filmmaker would just hire him), he started to lose me a bit. And yet even some of these people come around to recognizing the role that Kenny G has played in the world-one of the crazier bits involves how the artist’s “ Going Home” has basically become the theme song of the end of the workday in China. One calls Kenny G, “Part of the musical furniture of American culture,” and that’s on the nicer side. with jazz experts and critics who have spent a great deal of time detailing their reactions to the superstar. It also makes Kenny G’s music feel more like a natural product of its creator instead of the carefully crafted money machine that some have accused it of being.
It’s almost an “Easy Listening Interview,” which I don’t think is accidental on Lane’s part. He’s regularly repeating his mantras of constant practice-he reports to still do so three hours a day-and there’s a funny feeling watching his interviews that reflects his music in that "comfortable" way. He’s likable, humorous, and revealing, but also feels like he’s very much in control of his image. Lane spends most of her film interviewing Kenny G himself, detailing his remarkable rise in the ‘80s and ‘90s to become one of the highest-selling musicians of all time. At its best, Lane’s film directly asks why we put so much into our favorite (and least favorite) music, while also serving as something of image rehabilitation for Kenny himself, revealing him as someone incredibly dedicated to his craft, even if he is also radically unconcerned with some of the stronger criticisms lobbed at him. We get defensive when someone doesn’t like a musician who has changed our lives and we get aggressive when we feel someone like Kenny G is dismantling an art form we love (just ask Pat Metheny). Whether you're into pop or jazz, Breathless is unlistenable.Penny Lane introduced her surprising “Listening to Kenny G” by asking, “Why should we care about other people’s taste in music?” More than a mere biography of one of the most famous and divisive jazz musicians of all time, the great Lane uses Kenny G to unpack how passionate we can get about musical taste. Even the presence of the great R&B crooner Aaron Neville on "Even If My Heart Would Break" can't save this one-dimensional release. Always sounding like he's on automatic pilot, Kenny takes no risks whatsoever and sees to it that one song is as shamelessly contrived as the next. There's nothing even remotely tasteful about interchangeable tunes like "Sentimental," "Forever In Love" and "End of the Night," all of which are about as bloodless and schlocky as it gets. And Breathless isn't bad because it's a pop album or because it's commercial it's bad because of its complete lack of soul, substance or creativity. True, it was silly for jazz artists to judge Kenny by hard bop standards when hard bop (or even soul-jazz or fusion) was a long way from what he was going for. Kenny G's huge following responded that the attacks were silly and misguided because the saxman was the first to admit that he was primarily a pop instrumentalist and wasn't pretending to be anything else. Throughout the 1990s, Kenny G was the whipping boy of the jazz world - the instrumentalist who hardcore jazz improvisers loved to bash when the subject of smooth jazz came up.