You Want Me to Watch Listening to Kenny G!!?: An Interview with Penny Lane (Web Exclusive)
by Scott MacDonald

Penny Lane’s decision to make a feature documentary on the controversial instrumentalist, saxophonist Kenny G (Kenneth Gorelick), is of a piece with the series of documentaries she has made since she moved from doing experimental/avant-garde short films (many of them, including the short, lovely text-film autobiography, She Used to See Him Most Weekends [2007], available here) to producing more commercial work. The topics that Lane has addressed have typically provided twinges of politically correct concern: is this really something I should be devoting attention to; is it worthy of a serious feature documentary?  

In 2013, Lane and her then-partner Brian Frye released their feature, Our Nixon, an archival film using the home movies of H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and Dwight Chapin as a lens through which to explore the Nixon presidency from the inside. Then came Nuts! (2016), Lane’s solo riff on con-artist Joseph R. Brinkley, who claimed he could cure impotence in men by implanting goat testicle material in their scrota. The Pain of Others (2018) was constructed entirely from the YouTube postings of four women who believe they have “Morgellon’s Disease” (a skin condition that creates sores that exude strange fibers)—postings that have attracted extensive online audiences, despite the lack of scientific evidence that Morgellon’s exists anywhere but in the posters’ imaginations. And in 2019 she released her most commercially successful feature, Hail Satan?, focusing on Lucien Greaves and The Satanic Temple. [See “That’s Her Real Name: An Interview with Penny Lane” by Scott MacDonald, in Cineaste, Vol. XLIV, No. 4, Fall 2019.]

Despite whatever resistance each of these subjects might have created in potential viewers, and the strangeness of the experiences these documentaries offer (including in some cases the suspicion, then recognition, that we’ve been conned by the films), the irony is that learning that Lane has devoted serious attention and apparently expects us to devote serious attention to Kenny G probably inspires more resistance and aggravation than any of her earlier work. Enough resistance and annoyance, indeed, to lure some of us into the film.

Lane tends to be more interested in asking questions than in arguing answers. Listening to Kenny G focuses on the wide range of impacts, both positive and negative, Kenny G has had as a musician. In some areas of China his “Going Home” is the anthem for the end of the working day, and in the United States his music is beloved by many, although it is also regarded as saccharine and abrasive by many listeners and anathema to many serious jazz artists, critics, and scholars. As Lane says in a brief introduction to the film, “Kenny G is the best-selling instrumentalist of all time. He’s probably the most famous living jazz musician, and I made this film to find out why that makes certain people really angry.”

Despite my initial reservations about Listening to Kenny G, I’ve found the film engaging, even fascinating—and on a certain level, a confrontation of some of my long-held assumptions as a teacher/scholar. I interviewed Lane in November 2021, in part to find out what challenges making the film posed and what making it has taught her. I wondered too if she feels that her own increasingly popular career (Listening to Kenny G was produced for HBO) echoes Kenny Gorelick’s career, and, if so, how she feels about that.—Scott MacDonald 

Cineaste: When I first saw that you’d made a film on Kenny G, I thought, “Yuk! Of all people!”—but then immediately laughed, “Of course! This is exactly what Penny would do; it’s just her kind of fascination and rebellion.” It’s difficult for me to imagine that you were/are a fan of Kenny G’s music. So, my first question is obvious: how did you come to choose Kenny Gorelick as a topic for a feature film? Did you come to this by yourself, or was it offered to you as a possibility? 

Penny Lane: I came to it myself, but as the result of a kind of assignment. I was asked to pitch ideas for a new series of music documentaries for HBO, and although I had never imagined I’d want to make a music documentary—because I would hardly ever even watch a music documentary—I really liked all the people involved and I wanted to work with HBO. 

When I think about music, what comes to mind first is how deeply tied to our sense of personal and social identity music so often is. It’s more so than with movies or books or paintings or whatever—music is present in so many more aspects of our lives, both social—if you like Insane Clown Posse, you’re a Juggalo and you dress and act like a Juggalo and make friends with other Juggalos—and deeply personal. You have songs you listen to when you’re heartsick and want to cry, and maybe you wouldn’t even tell anyone what they are. Anyway, so “music as constitutive of identity” was an idea I had, and from there the idea of taste comes up pretty quickly.

As you know, I taught art for many years and the concept of taste—do I like it?—and the criteria by which we judge art—is it good?—or even the definition of art in the first place—is it art?—were central in my teaching. I tried to confront these questions directly and let students in on the secret that even your professors know this is all subjective and a matter of opinion, even if it matters, and even though I will be grading you! So, issues of identity and taste, and my ongoing search for controversies and conflict and a feeling of the problematic, all led me to Kenny G.

I was not and am not a fan of Kenny G’s music, but it was omnipresent in my life as a teenager in the 1990s, and a lot of my friends get very mad about Kenny G. I always found it funny that people would get so angry about something so inoffensive. I started with that question, why? It’s one thing to not like an artist, but why does it sometimes make us angry when someone else does? That was my research question.

Cineaste: G is very forthcoming with you and seems to want to be sure you get what you need for the film—and yet, in the end, other than that he has two sons, we know virtually nothing about his personal life. Is he, was he, married? Does he have a “personal life”?

Lane: He’s been married a couple times; he has two kids. This kind of information is easily available on the Internet. I was determined to avoid the trap of the complete biographical documentary, which is just a Wikipedia page with pictures. I wasn’t making a portrait. I have no interest in his personal life, beyond what would speak to the questions raised in the film. To the extent that Kenny G’s personal life would help to illuminate something about his art, and why the art is what it is and isn’t what it isn’t, I would include it. Otherwise, who cares? I have no interest in his hair-care regimen, either, which is something else audiences seem to be puzzled that I didn’t include!

Cineaste: G does seem remarkably alone. Practicing for him is clearly a solo activity, never a collaboration, at least judging from the film. My consciousness of his music is entirely the sound of solo soprano saxophone—it’s distinctive, but not really part of any larger interaction with other artists. His one real “collaboration” in the film is with a recording of Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful Life.” Is Kenny G more collaborative than he seems in the film?

Lane: I don’t think so. It seems accurate to say that he works mostly solo. In the 1990s, Arista would pair him with vocalists—Whitney Houston, Peabo Bryson—for duets. Those were big hits, but that was clearly a record company decision, not necessarily Kenny’s desire. That said, he’s been playing with the same live band for twenty or thirty years at this point. To work with the same band and the same sound engineers for that long? Unusual and pretty remarkable, I think. 

Cineaste: My nephew, Ryan Jones, is a music historian, and he confirmed that the jazz spokespeople you included are important figures in the field. Was it difficult to convince them to be part of the film? Did you approach Pat Metheny, who seems particularly furious about G, about being in the film?

Lane: I did approach Metheny and he politely declined, which is probably for the best anyway. I spent months—many, many months—thinking about who to cast as my music critics. I wanted to spend time with each of them and go deep, get to know them, and invest in them as characters to the extent possible. I personally hate when I see a documentary with fifty different interviewees and each one says one thing. I hate it. This is what gives interviewing a bad name, why people call interviewees “talking heads.” For me, an interview is a way to elicit a performance and to get inside someone, to watch them think, to witness their stream of consciousness in action. So, more and more I try to cast my interviews very deliberately, and to the keep the total number of interviewees to a minimum so we can get to know at least some of them and invest in their journey. I want the “experts” to be characters, with their own conflicts and character arcs.  

Anyway, three out of the five of my critics had written something about Kenny G at some point in their careers. Ben Ratliff wrote thoughtfully about the Metheny controversy and a funny and incisive review of a Kenny G concert for The New York Times; John Halle had written a terrific, provocative piece for Jacobin magazine called “In Defense of Kenny G,” in which he argued the hatred was really about class conflict; and Chris Washburne had written an academic journal article called “Does Kenny G Play Bad Jazz?” in which he tried to disentangle the ideas of “bad” and “jazz.”

The other two hadn’t written anything about G, but they provided helpful perspectives that I was lacking. Jason King, in addition to being a popular music scholar and critic, was a protégé of Clive Davis and a music producer himself, with a huge amount of knowledge about R&B music in particular; and Will Layman is one of the only jazz critics I could find who had written more than a few words about “smooth jazz.” I sensed that both King and Will had wide-ranging, open-minded interests and nuanced points of view. All five were enthusiastic to participate from the jump, as far as I can tell. It’s a fun topic!

Cineaste: Listening to Kenny G isn’t exactly a biopic of Kenny G; it’s a questioning of the racial assumptions about jazz and its integrity. On an even more expansive level, the film is about popular culture and expertise, and about ethnicity—who within an ethnic group speaks for that group? As the film evolves, we see more and more African American folks in the audiences for G’s music and this culminates near the end with events relating to Kanye West, including West’s “Jesus Is King” record release party, where G is playing, surrounded by a cheering crowd. You seem to be arguing, at least implicitly, that jazz as it has traditionally been understood, represents only one element of African American culture and that for another major, artistically inclined part of that culture, Kenny G is not a jazz traitor but a cultural contributor.  

Lane: Agreed on all points, but I don’t think I’m arguing anything in particular beyond acknowledging the myriad ways one might want to contend with the interlocking issues of race and jazz, and how confusing it is, and how layered, and in my opinion, how impoverished and overly simplified this discourse can be. Just saying “cultural appropriation” is wildly insufficient, it seems to me, as much as it also needs to be said. Mostly it’s white elites that hate Kenny G, but then those white elites claim they hate the music because it’s music for…white elites? Kenny’s audience is so huge that it’s ridiculous to claim any one thing about who they are, demographically; his audiences are like those at Disneyland—basically everyone, all over the world. Most people love or at least tolerate this music. 

Did his whiteness—literally, but also in the squishy sense of “whiteness as blandness” help him? Of course, it helped him, once he got to the point of his career where 1980s pop radio might or might not play his music. Radio and the music industry at large were segregated in ways that seem shocking even just a few decades later. Remember, at that time MTV did not play black artists! But do we really think it helped him for the first decade, when he was a scrawny Jewish kid playing in mostly black jazz and R&B clubs? The fact that he was from an upper-middle-class Jewish family certainly helped him in the sense that he had financial support from his parents early in his career.

It’s all knotty and fascinating, but I’m left with no conclusion whatsoever on any of this. I tried to represent as much and as many of those conflicting and contradictory points of view and modes of analysis as possible.

Cineaste: One of the more surprising elements you include is how G’s “Going Home” has become part of Chinese life. How did you get the footage of the Chinese man and the young woman with the soprano sax, and the Chinese street scenes?

Lane: I would have loved to have gone to China, as we had originally planned, but we were making this film during the COVID-19 pandemic, so instead we hired a local Chinese producer and camera crew. They were incredible! Our producer dug around for me to find an appropriate “music expert” and she got me Mr. Yin Zhi Yuan, the head of the Chinese State Music Association’s saxophone committee, which could not have been more perfect. He teaches saxophone, and his daughter played “Going Home” for us.

We asked the crew to find us places where “Going Home” was playing at the end of the workday, and they found us so many examples, in only two days of shooting! Incredible. I knew this was a real phenomenon, but on some level, I assumed that it was exaggerated, like maybe a couple places do this? But no, it really is ubiquitous, at least in Beijing, where the filming took place.

Cineaste: How long was the process of assembling this film? What were the primary challenges in getting what you felt you needed?

Lane: The edit was twelve months. Long, but not unusually long for a documentary with this budget. We certainly used every minute of the editing time we had, because while most of the production was just fun, joyful, and kind of easy, the edit was challenging. Trying to balance the examination of G as an artist and businessman with the essayistic elements about taste and jazz and quality, along with a historical narrative of how the music industry has changed over fifty years, plus managing and coaxing audience reactions to G himself so that the film worked whether you hated him or liked him, was tricky. We didn’t have many access challenges, other than the fact that we’d planned to film more of his shows but then the pandemic happened, so we got to film only one show before everything shut down.

Cineaste: Kenny G seems unfazed by the hostility directed at him. You’ve known him for a while. Do you believe that he’s “never angry at anybody”? How fully do you trust his presentation of himself?

Lane: I’m sure he gets angry, but, as he says in the film, it doesn’t tend to last very long. I don’t claim to know Kenny in the way that his family does. Again, it wasn’t my goal at all to “peel back the layers” of his self-presentation. I’ve spent a lot of time with him and I find his self-presentation fascinating, and felt satisfied to represent that accurately and let people make their own guesses at to what’s underneath. Certainly, his obsession with perfection is something I tried to bring out, and there are lots of other hints about more troublesome aspects to his personality, but I wasn’t going for a penetrative dive into his psychology. I had a totally different mission. That said, he’s fascinating and perplexing and weird, and I do understand that audiences feel the desire to understand him, to figure him out. People tend to find him repellent and charming, praiseworthy and horrifying.

When I started the film, I was more interested in G as a cultural object or text we could project onto, but then I realized, wow, he’s actually an interesting character! This took up more and more space in the film, more than I expected initially, but I tried very hard to be disciplined and only include the aspects of his character that seemed necessary for understanding the music and its reception in the world.

Cineaste: Has Kenny G seen the film? How does he feel about it? How do you feel about him now? How do you feel about his music?

Lane: Kenny saw it before anyone else, of course, and he says he loves it. I don’t know if I believe him fully, but whatever his real feelings are, he’s been nothing but supportive and generous when it comes to getting me what I needed to make the film and now to release it. He’s fun to do press and Q&As with. He’s also smart enough so that, even if, let’s say, he really hates the film, he gets that it’s good for his career that the film exists, and that if the film is successful and good, that’s even better.

I do believe the criticism doesn’t bother him. If anything, he seems determined to make sure it doesn’t bother him and to make sure everyone knows it doesn’t bother him. I believe if Kenny puts his mind to being good at something, he works his ass off to be good at that thing!  

As far as I go, I love the guy. He’s been nothing but lovely and helpful to me. I think he’s genuine. He’s very consistent in his personality, the same off camera as on. I think he’s so fully himself that he almost lives in another universe, where it’s just him over there. I think he’s a fascinating weirdo, and it’s hard to believe he’s somehow a force for bad in the world, whatever you think of the music. Is it really harming anyone? I guess I can’t take that argument very seriously, even if I appreciate and respect the feelings that bring someone else to make it.

I feel the same way about his music as I did before, on a personal taste level. It’s hard to change your taste, isn’t it? In some ways, I hear it differently; I hear a lot more than I did at the beginning. When I do listen to it now, it may not be my cup of tea, but I can recall the shining faces of those brides walking down the aisle at their weddings to “Forever in Love,” or I see the Chinese shopkeepers gently pushing people to go home when I hear “Going Home,” or I see the wildly diverse, multigenerational crowd outside the Blue Note.  

All these fans, all these people for whom this music is woven into the fabric of their lives, and questions like “Is this good?” or “Is this jazz?” feel extremely beside the point. Not that those questions don’t matter; I believe they do and I really tried with my film to deal with those questions by looking at the music itself—its musical form and style, its mode of production, its compositional and technical aspects—and letting the viewer weigh the strengths and weaknesses of this music. The film is not a free for all; it doesn’t come to an, “Oh well, taste is subjective; I guess Britney Spears and Tolstoy really are the same” conclusion. I do think it’s possible, and essential, to argue about these things with all the passionate intensity arguments about art should have, but without denying the humanity of those who disagree with you.  

I get it, this stuff really matters to me, too, but don’t be an asshole. I think it’s possible to say that if you have one person who loves a piece of art and another who doesn’t love it, maybe even hates it—what if we approached that conflict with the assumption that the person who loves it is just right? More correct in some way? I’m not saying this is literally true, because everyone’s point of view matters, but it seems to me now that somehow the love is more…real. It feels weightier and more significant than the hate.  

Cineaste: To what extent do you identify with G? While you began as an “experimental” or “avant-garde” filmmaker, you’re now moving more fully within the commercial filmmaking/television world. Have folks questioned your move in this direction, and is G’s way of dealing with his career something you personally relate to, something that’s helpful for you?

Lane: Yeah, I talked about this with Kenny a few times, that I related to him as a working artist, someone who has to intelligently balance some sense of authenticity or personal taste with the demands of a marketplace. I never was really that great of an avant-garde artist; I think I was always leaning too middlebrow in most cases. Over time I realized I was better off in “pop,” let’s say, because I lean just weird enough to stand out in more mainstream settings and I want big audiences, not just because I want to make a living but because I genuinely want to communicate with lots of people, and I feel successful when I am getting to do that, and it seems to be working!  

It really matters to me that audiences enjoy and get something out of my films, not just that critics like them and that I get paid for making them. Unlike Kenny, I do care about critics and care deeply about a serious level of discourse and analysis. But this all sounds too calculated. I mainly make films that I personally would want to watch, and as Kenny says in my film, I’m lucky that what appeals to me also appeals to other people. Not the biggest audiences in the world, not even close—but if it’s a big enough number where I can continue to pay my rent, I’ll continue to feel lucky.

Anyway, as a thinking person and artist, no, I did not relate to Kenny at all when I began the project. But as a person who lives in the real world and not in some fantasyland of “purity” in arts funding or whatever, I did and do relate to him.  

Listening to Kenny G is an HBO Original documentary streaming on HBO Max.

Copyright © 2022 by Cineaste Magazine 

Cineaste, Vol. XLVII, No. 2