The Immortal Kenny G

The lasting, polarizing legacy of smooth jazz’s foremost purveyor.

(OffTop Illustration)

I. The Baker

The James Beard Award for Outstanding Baker is reserved for the .01% of bakers. It recognizes the baker who has so comprehensively mastered the intricacies of baking that they operate not in the realm of recipe execution or recipe alteration, but in the realm of true creation, discovering baked dishes like theoretical physicists discover subatomic particles. For five years running, the James Beard Award for Outstanding Baker has gone to Kenny G.

The path that Kenny G took to the cutting edge of baking is a long one, but not a winding one. It involved practice, and lots of it. “Five or more hours per day,” Kenny told me during a recent visit to his Seattle home, a modest three-bed Victorian overlooking the Puget Sound — modest for culinary royalty, anyway. It was an overcast day. Outside the panoramic kitchen windows, low-lying clouds politely offered a view of Seattle’s famous saltwater bay. Inside, the kitchen was clean, immaculately so. And large. It felt industrial. The off-white granite countertops were mostly bare save for a flour-smudged iPad and a few browning bananas in a brass wire basket. Spice racks could be seen through a glass-faced cupboard. Hidden inside the other cupboards lay every conceivable form of flour, sugar, sifter, and mixer. Pans lined the walls and a barrage of pots hung above the granite island where Kenny G and I sat opposite one another on leather barstools. The kitchen looked, to the casual home chef, like a nice, big kitchen. To Kenny G, though, it looked like the cockpit of a spaceship — a constellation of uniquely important switches and buttons, which, if orchestrated properly, promised to reveal heretofore undiscovered truths about the universe.

“I started baking in my high school home economics class. Mrs. Noteboom.” Kenny said.

He’d been a high-achiever throughout his young academic career, striving for A’s and basking in any perfect scores, like a junkie in the warm embrace of a heroin injection.

100/100 was his fix.

“I remember our first Bake Day in that class. We paired off, and each had a small table with our tools and ingredients. When I scraped off that first, perfectly level cup of flour something primal was triggered inside me. The flatness of it. The exactness of it. Pure and undisturbed. Still, it was only one component within a larger, choreographed interaction between ingredients. I wouldn’t have been able to articulate that back in home ec. But something flipped in my brain that day. I was never the same.”

Measurements, temperatures, timers, ratios, and specialized tools became the furniture of the world Kenny would inhabit from that day forward. A world, part imagination, that would manifest in the kitchen, with breads and pastries so textbook in their consistency and presentation as to seem inedible.

“You know when food looks so good you don’t even want to eat it?” Kenny said. “I love that. The only thing I love more than that is when you do eat it, and it tastes even better than it looks.”

Kenny received one sub-100 score in his home economics class, a 98. He’d used old eggs with thin yolks and transparent whites in a carrot cake batter. This caused mediocre binding and a semi-crumbly cake. Even a glass-smooth spread of cream cheese frosting couldn’t mask the imperfection. Kenny carries that moment with him to this day. It even inspired the name of his latest baking show on HGTV, Fresh Eggs with Kenny G.

After graduating high school Kenny staged at a few local Seattle bakeries, pissing off the head bakers by repeatedly presenting off-beat menu adaptations. During off hours, Kenny would sneak back into the bakery to test new creations and log the results. On walks home he’d hand his gourmet franken-scones to Seattle’s homeless beggars.

He turned his after hours testing-and-logging into a menu that would become the bedrock of his first bakery, Kenny’s, which specialized in morning pastries and homemade-bread-and-schmear combinations at lunch. He opened Kenny’s when he was 21. A positive review in The Stranger, Seattle’s leftist, bohemian news publication, prompted a scout from HGTV to pay Kenny’s a visit.

“The chives-and-honey cream cheese on sourdough was like tasting bread for the first time.” said Jess Coughlin, the HGTV scout who discovered Kenny. “But what sold me on Kenny was his personality. He radiated a passion for his craft that was contagious. Always smiling. We signed him within ten days of me biting into that schmear.”

Five James Beard Awards for Outstanding Baker, two James Beard outstanding Pastry Chef Awards, Two James Beard Leadership Awards, three television shows, six bakeries, ten cookbooks, forty three magazine articles, two appearances as the SNL host, and a stint hosting Jeopardy later, and Kenny G is the most recognizable and highest earning culinary figure ever.

Martha Stewart times a thousand.

Some in baking’s old guard are put off by Kenny’s celebrity, arguing that anyone so preoccupied with fame — the social media stunts, the biopics, the podcasts, the NFTs, the courtside seats at Seattle Supersonics games — can’t maintain the requisite dedication to their craft to keep pushing the art form forward.

But the bottom line remains: put Kenny G in a kitchen with anyone, and he’ll bake the better bread.

When I visited the set of Fresh Eggs and sat in the studio audience, there was no sign of fatigue in him. He took the stage with long, sure strides and seemed to teleport from station to station, the camera cranes swiveling and sliding to capture every dollop and wry grin.

Today’s recipe: a meat pie with cubed lamb rump, carrots, sweet onion, and capers, in a flaky herb-buttered crust. Kenny G patiently demonstrated each step in the process, indulging himself along the way in brief tangents, and emanating complete rapture throughout.

At the end of the show, per tradition, the audience, along with Kenny, was given a taster of the final dish. Instructed by the show’s crew, everyone waited to take their bite simultaneously.

Three. Two. One.

I lifted the small forkful of lamb pie into my mouth in sync with 115 other audience members. The groans were orgasmic. The sighs, heavy. A room full of grown adults in communal mesmerism involuntarily smiled.

Nobody’s smile was bigger than Kenny’s.

He closed the show, through eyes squinted with ecstasy, with his signature sign off, “Thanks for joining me today. I’ll see you soon for another recipe so good it’ll blow your yokes!”

II. The Haikuist & The Transportation Chairman

“Thanks for joining me today. I’ll see you soon for another recipe so good it’ll — .”

A middle aged man lifted his thumb from the mute button, inhaling the fresh silence of his wood paneled study as a smiling Kenny G beamed out from the TV. The study’s inlaid mahogany shelves were dustless, and filled with books: On Love and Barley: The Haiku of Basho, Leaves of Grass, Falling Up, The Classic Tradition of Haiku: An Anthology, Think and Grow Rich. Next to his armchair was a small wooden side table spotlighted by a simple, chest-high, brass lamp. On it, a cup of cold coffee and a pen.

The man fluffed the newspaper in his lap and smelled his coffee, setting it down without taking a sip. He combed the page with his pen, muttering “mmhm,” as he found where he’d left off.

… the new rapid-onset anesthetic has shown zero side effects in both lab and animal trials. And its ability to be dosed across species and weight classes — from elephants to chickadees — has veterinary experts dubbing it the biggest breakthrough since gene sequencing. Whispers of a Nobel Prize are already rippling through the scientific community. Should he win the Nobel, this would be Dr. Kenny Parker Gorelick’s second Nobel award in a seven year span. His first, of course, for eradicating malaria through gene pool manipulation of mosquito populations, first in sub-saharan Africa, then around the world.

In the margin of the newspaper, the man in the study began scribbling.

A silent sparrow

Sewn together carefully

Blinks and chirps again

He lifted his gaze back to the television and swiped through apps and subscriptions, landing on ESPN. The US Open final was almost over and the television cameras were trained on a sinewy athlete, bouncing on the balls of his feet and dribbling the tennis ball with his racket. His hair, a curly, afro-like mullet, bounced with him. Then he served, a fluid blur. The scoreboard flickered. R.Faison: 0, K. S. Gorelick: 40.

The man in the study looked back down at his newspaper and began to scribble again when a knock on the door stopped him mid stroke. It was a familiar knock — two heavy clacks, then a rhythmic ratatat tat — like an advertisement jingle from childhood.

On the doorstep was a man in a blue suit, red tie, smiling with a glint in his eye.

“How was traffic?” said the man from the study.

“Good one.” replied the suit, chuckling.

“Come in. I have some coffee we can reheat and a few of Theo’s cookies if you’re hungry.”

The suit’s name is Kenny Art Gorelick. He’s a lean thirty year old, with an accepting yet inquisitive gaze, and a knack for making good first impressions. His work on vehicular traffic has catapulted him all the way into the President’s cabinet as the National Chairman of Transportation. Three years earlier he’d invented a new system for managing the flow of autonomous vehicles called AVAI (Autonomous Vehicle Adaptive Interaction). Given that autonomous vehicles are the only cars on public roads these days, the breakthrough eliminated traffic altogether. Now, he’s coordinating airports such that there’s never a wait to takeoff or to access a gate after landing, and, when his role calls for it, schmoozing amiably with Capitol Hill’s whiskey-breathed influencer class.

The two reheat coffee. No cream. No sugar.

They exchange family news, talk about the new veterinary anesthetic and the possibility of another Nobel Prize for Parker. They chat tennis. And soon the conversation lands on Dad.

“How’s he doing? Last I heard he was locking the nurses out of his studio so he could practice sax. Denying meds.”

“Yep. Still getting his three hours in per day. And concepting a new album, apparently — Marcy Blues III with Jay Z.”

“Another project with Sean? I gotta give it to Pops. If he finds something that works, he’ll squeeze it until every creative angle is exhausted. I’m just impressed Jay is keeping pace at his age.”

“One of the great poets of his time, that guy.

Well look, I’m glad you stopped by. Good to see your face. You seem to be brushing off DC’s bull crap admirably.

Take some cookies with you. They’re unreal. Theo is putting the recipe in his next cookbook, an all cookies collection. I think he’s calling it Batter & Soul.

And I’ll see you at Dad’s 108th next week? It’ll be the first time all 25 of us will be in the same place since like, what? ’57?”

“Something like that. Gosh. Crazy to think about.

Speaking of… ” the suit paused, fumbled with his keys, a rawness belying his polished attire washed over him, his inner eyebrows lifted and he caught his brother’s eye, “… you ever think about why this all happened to us? Why us? You know? What’s it mean?”

“Sure. All the time. I could ruminate on it all day. But it feels unproductive to me. So I work. That’s what matters. You know what Dad would say.”

Then in unison the two brothers spoke a sing-songy recitation, “Follow your dreams. And practice, practice, practice.”

The man from the study closed the door as his brother’s vehicle reversed out of the driveway, its barely audible electric hum fading from earshot. As he walked past the kitchen island, back to his study, he grabbed the now-cold cup of coffee off a magazine he’d been using as a coaster. Under a circular brown coffee stain, the title of a New Yorker article was legible: Humanity Distilled: What the Latest Collection of Poems from the World’s Most Prolific Haikuist, Kenny Damian Gorelick, Reveals About the Condition of Society.

Below it was a scribble.

As a whole, troubled

Individually, too

I blame Facebook ads

III. The Original

The story of the Brothers Gorelick — all twenty five of them, including The Haikuist, The Transportation Chairman, The Tennis Star, and The Veterinary Researcher — goes back to 2020, when a pandemic-induced lockdown forced Kenny Bruce Gorelick (The Original Kenny G) into a state of deep contemplation.

With government mandated freezes on live music, weddings, and corporate retreats, the world’s foremost purveyor of smooth jazz found himself with time on his hands. He stayed consistent with his saxophone and clarinet practice — three hours per day, every day. And he continued to log productive recording sessions in his home studio. But he picked up the habit of walking, sometimes for hours, around the wooded streets and pocket parks of his Seattle neighborhood.

It was on these walks that he began to confront his own mortality, earnestly, for the first time. He was 65 and figured that by sustaining his current diet, exercise, and sleep patterns, he had twenty five to thirty years left of life. Twenty active ones. He thought about his legacy. He thought about the criticism he’d received over the years, all the public vitriol. He thought about The Last Dance, which he’d just watched. He thought about Tiger King, which he’d watched just before that. Then he thought about a voicemail his agent had recently left him regarding a documentary HBO wanted to do on him, and he called his agent back.

Tiger King Winners and Losers

The pitch was simple when the HBO execs put it to him: “We’ll tell the story of how you became the world’s best-selling instrumentalist of all time, from your humble beginnings, to where you are now. Within that context we’ll explore one central question: Why are you such a polarizing musician, loved by so many and yet hated by so many? You’ll have every conceivable opportunity to tell your own story, address the criticism, and let the world know, unfiltered, where your work comes from and the intention behind it.”

If he wanted to craft his legacy, Kenny figured, this was the way to start.

One year later, Listening to Kenny G was released by HBO Music Box. Kenny is heavily featured throughout, answering questions about the many staunch critics, about claims of “musical necrophilia”, and about accusations of bastardizing the art of jazz. He doesn’t dodge any questions. Instead he sits, with perfect, tireless posture, on a simple wooden dining chair, and says, with an innocent smile, that his music is simply an expression of what he feels. He’s childlike in his candidness. He’s a people pleaser. He repeatedly asks the interviewer, “Was that good? Did you get what you want?” At another point he says, “I’ll sit here for six hours and not eat or drink if that’s what you need. I want make sure this is the best interview you’ve ever had.”

Did Kenny G dumb down jazz for the mainstream? Did his white skin help him cash in on an historically black art form? Did he make your girlfriend think dirty thoughts?

Depends on who you ask.

Ask Kenny, though, and all he did was practice jazz. And practice, and practice, and practice. And put out music, and perform, and meet the right people, until one day, with a little help from Clive Davis, he got some radio play. His seductive saxophone melodies wormed their way out of car radios and into the ears of commuters across the country. Smooth Jazz was born. It went global. And by 2021, businesses in China were playing Kenny G’s “Going Home”, every day, to signal the end of the workday.

What Listening to Kenny G showed viewers, though, other than Kenny G’s seeming stillness in the eye of a perpetual cyclone of hate, is that he’d probably be great at anything he did. He has a compulsive work ethic, hyper consistent. He picked up golf at one point and, for a stretch in his middle age, was arguably the best celebrity golfer alive. At one point in the film, he’s showing the HBO crew around his house and he takes a pie out of the oven. It looks perfect.

The HBO documentary was Kenny G’s first move at shaping his legacy, and it cemented this much: There’s probably nothing he can’t do, if he chooses to. And he’ll do it with an amiable demeanor and a persistence Michael Jordan would respect.

Kenny G’s next legacy-shaping move would bare this out, and it started with an application to Yale University.

The next seven years, from 2022 to 2029, were an epic of higher learning. In late 2021 Kenny G put a freeze on all personal and professional musical pursuits, celebrations broke out in cities nationwide. In 2022 he began his undergraduate studies at Yale. In 2025 he graduated with his Bachelor’s of Science in Biology and Chemistry. In 2028 he earned his PhD in Theoretical BioChem. And in 2029 he earned his Masters in Applied Theoretical BioChem. An academic journey that takes a vampiric, obsessive nerd twelve years to complete, Kenny completed in six. It was as if he plugged in to the Matrix — strapped to a metal dentist’s chair in the Nebuchadnezzar, eyes darting in every direction behind closed lids — downloaded an academic career’s worth of medical science, then suddenly opened his eyes, gasping, and whispered, “I know clone-fu.”

Which, of course, was his ultimate goal: to clone himself. This, he figured, would extend his legacy across generations, disciplines, perhaps even planets.

He knew what he could do in any domain given the time to practice. But time was the elusive ingredient. By cloning himself he could exponentially increase his (collective) practice time.

During the completion of his Masters degree Kenny would slink off into dimly lit corners of the Yale student laboratory and tinker. When the lab was completely inaccessible to students he worked out of a makeshift lab in his guest house. Patching together lab time at every opportunity, he was able to accelerate his practice, and breakthrough in ways established cloning experts never had — or maybe ever wanted to.

By the time Kenny G had completed his Master’s Degree, he had also successfully developed a proof of concept for safe, repeatable, scalable human cloning. After the results of his studies were published in the journal Nature, and he released a string of viral selfie videos on social media explaining the process, a global erupted over the ethics of cloning. The world wasn’t ready.

After close to a decade free of public scrutiny, Kenny G was once again among earth’s most polarizing figures.

Kenny G made mass market human cloning possible. But in 2032, just over two years after the results of his replicable cloning study had been published, the furious socio-political hullabaloo crescendoed with a Supreme Court ruling that indefinitely paused Gorelick’s work on cloning and banned the technology from being offered on the open market, or further developed in any fashion. Cloning was illegal — exactly the ruling he’d hoped for.

The media firestorm lasted another month. The Clone Filter on TikTok — which translated a video version of you dancing into ten independent, visually identical versions of you, all dancing in different ways — dropped from the most used filter worldwide, to the seventh most used. The tweets slowly stopped trending. The four-paneled talk shows eventually glommed on to new fodder. Kenny G was none the wiser, though, because he’d been hard at work in his guest house’s home laboratory.

Before he’d ever published the results of his breakthrough cloning study, Kenny G had retrofitted his home lab with a scaled down version of the Yale science lab. Every beaker, dropper, and incubator was state of the art, gleaming stainless steel and pyrex. He’d even had an underground tunnel built between the main house and the lab in the guest house, to avoid being surveyed crossing the yard in the open.

After the State v Gorelick ruling, Kenny took a three-day at-home retreat, putting work aside and letting the press get their think pieces out. But he didn’t rest long. On day four he donned his lab coat and began the careful process of growing clones in his guest house, twenty five of them, all seeded with his own DNA.

Two months of staging was followed by multiple trial experiments to ensure the home lab could see a starter through from conception to the early stages of proper cell division. Finally, in January of 2035, he commenced his official batch clone cells.

He knew once they had heartbeats, they were free. No government entity would publicly take the lives of 25 human fetuses, with beating hearts and tiny clenching fingers. He’ll never forget the morning of March 23, 2035, when he walked in to his lab and the first little Kenny had a heartbeat. Three days later, all 25 little Kennys had heartbeats and the Kenny G experiment had officially reached cruising altitude.

He gave them each a unique middle name so he could tell them apart, and he raised them in secret for the first year with the help of an assistant who was sworn to silence and remains anonymous.

In their second year, the news got out. It broke Twitter, frying two hundred private servers and crippling the platform for two days. The Clone Filter on TikTok rocketed back to number one. Every conceivable human reaction bubbled up across the internet, including calls for legal action and Child Protective Services to seize the kids. But Kenny was prepared for this. He’d constructed, in advance, a careful legal argument supporting his custody of the Kenny’s and the legality of his private at-home cloning. Ultimately the question became, what was best for the kids? Which, it was decided, was being raised by their dad, around each other.

Time passed. The little Kennys grew to embody their father’s maniacal dedication to practice and desire to be great at things. And to this day they share his affable, unflappable demeanor. Which helped with the unending press inquiries.

The Kennys have been the subject of much debate over the subsequent thirty years. They’ve become, collectively, the most famous humans in earth’s history. There have been be books written about them. Some of those books have been written by them. Their impacts have already been far reaching. Through practice, and an unflinching pep they‘ve each catapulted their respective fields, and humankind, into the future.

Here are the Kennys, and a few of their most noteworthy accomplishments to date:

• The Baker, who became the most prolific, awarded, critically acclaimed, and richest culinary figure in history. Accelerating human evolution, one banana bread recipe at a time.
• The Veterinarian, who revolutionized veterinary anesthesiology, and who completed the first successful underwater caesarean section operation on a birthing blue whale.
• The Haikuist, whose daily email newsletter containing a single haiku became the most read email newsletter of all time, and centered pop culture, for the first time in history, on poetry.
• The Transportation Official, who eliminated road traffic once and for all, and who became the first non-comedian invited on Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.
• The Tennis Player, who won Wimbledon at 24 and brought the mullet-headband look back to tennis.
• The Other Tennis Player, who won Wimbledon doubles with his brother at 23 and who holds the record for most consecutive serves without a fault.
• The Plastic Surgeon, who changed plastic surgery culture to the point where celebrities publicize the fact they’re going to Kenny G to get their nose done, and then publicize it again when they do it a second time. It’s a badge of honor.
• The Fly Fisherman, who’s been Fly Fishing World Champion for eight of the last eleven years (yes, in 2065 that’s a thing), and whose proudest accomplishment is his record for most river trout caught in a 24hr period, 217.
• The Furniture Designer, who popularized the toilet-chair for the home office, allowing ambitious remote workers to improve overall work efficiency by an estimated 5.2%.
• The Cross Country Skier, who completed the first unsupported traverse of Canada on skis. His contribution to society is debatable.
• The Newscaster, who set a record 4,700 hours of live television broadcasts without saying the word “um”, and who would occasionally host four expert panelists on his show, all of them Kenny Gs.
• The Material Scientist, who made actual flubber.
• The Historian, who wrote early biographies on all 24 of the other Kenny G’s. And one on Arsenio Hall.
• The Game Show Contestant, who, in 2064, made as much money from game show winnings as the three highest paid NBA players, combined.
• The Poker Player, who won the World Series of Poker seven consecutive years, got banned, and now runs clinics for aspiring young poker players. A movie is in development about his life.
• The Ad Agency Creative Director, who produced 35 of the 61 ads that ran during Super Bowl XCVI (96). Three commercial brakes during the game featured his ads exclusively.
• The Subway Franchisee, who opened 148 Subways before buying the entire Subway corporation.
• The Civil Engineer, who built the first fully functioning network of subterranean bullet trains that spans the continental US and Canada.
• The Diplomat, who has held numerous political offices and is best known for bringing peace to the Middle East.
• The Rabbi, whose streamable sermons at one point were among the top ten most watched shows on Netflix for 64 weeks running. He also popularized the yamaka across cultures, largely through collaborations with Supreme and the Jordan Brand.
• The NBA General Manager, whose scouting efforts within the subculture of Korean street ball unearthed a string of MVP point guards. He also made so many consecutive trades that panned out in his favor, that other teams refuse to trade with him. His current team, the Seattle Supersonics, hasn’t made a trade in four seasons and still made the NBA finals in three of those four seasons, winning championships on two of those.
• The City Planner, who revived the movie theater industry through the legalization of marijuana products inside theaters, and heated massage chairs for every attendee. He also popularized the optional theatre seat add-on of a small tank you can soak your feet in that has those little fish that will nibble away your dead skin. He also ended homelessness.
• The Anthropologist, who made first contact with a previously undiscovered Amazonian tribe, and lived with them, by himself for three and a half years before emerging with a root that when mashed, boiled, strained, and consumed, cures gout.
• The Biologist, who discovered three new types of psychedelic mushrooms and who in a joint effort with his brother, The Diplomat, passed a bill with a house majority vote, that every presidential candidate is required to have taken a Heroic Dose of magic mushrooms on at least one occasion prior to running for office.
• The Painter, who basically superseded Bob Ross, but also re-painted the Sistine Chapel, with the Pope’s blessing.

It’s 2065 and the Kennys are 30 years old.