{"id":482282,"date":"2019-02-15T08:02:59","date_gmt":"2019-02-15T15:02:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/?p=795319"},"modified":"2019-02-15T08:02:59","modified_gmt":"2019-02-15T15:02:59","slug":"kenny-g-explains-his-sweet-sax-serenade-for-kim-and-kanye","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/music-news\/kenny-g-explains-his-sweet-sax-serenade-for-kim-and-kanye\/","title":{"rendered":"Kenny G Explains His Sweet Sax Serenade for Kim and Kanye"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Kenny G<\/a> almost definitely had a better Valentine\u2019s Day than you this year \u2014 at least if your idea of a romantic date involves performing at Kim Kardashian<\/a> West and Kanye West<\/a>\u2019s California home.\u00a0\u201cI\u2019m having a\u00a0busy Valentine\u2019s Day,\u201d says the sax man, 62, when\u00a0Rolling Stone\u00a0reaches him later that evening. \u201cBusier than I thought.\u201d<\/p>\n

He was on his way to taping an appearance on James Corden\u2019s show when he called.\u00a0After that, Kenny G\u2019s Valentine\u2019s night was open: \u201cI\u2019m going out to dinner later, and I have my sax with me, so you never know,\u201d he adds. \u201cI could be serenading everyone at the restaurant, whether they want it or not.\u201d<\/p>\n

Can you walk us through how, exactly, you came to perform at Kim and Kanye\u2019s house?<\/strong>
Well, really late last night I got a couple of emails, one from a publicist that knows Kanye\u2019s manager. He told me that Kanye had requested me to come to the house and serenade Kim in the morning. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be a room surrounded with roses, and you\u2019re going to stand in the middle of the roses and play.\u201d I thought, \u201cThat actually sounds really beautiful.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then I got a text from [pop songwriter] David Foster, who told me he had heard about the request and told me I should definitely do it. I didn\u2019t get the message until, like, eleven o\u2019clock at night. It just happened to work out, \u2018cause I\u2019m in town and I don\u2019t live very far from where they live. So it worked out really well.<\/p>\n

Were the vases with roses all set up when you arrived?<\/strong>
Not quite. It was raining in L.A., so I went early just to make sure I wasn\u2019t late. They were putting all of this stuff together. I did not see the room completed until literally 20 seconds before I started playing.<\/p>\n

How many people were working on this? Was it a big team?<\/strong>
I don\u2019t even have enough hands to count all the people that I met. Once I got to the house, I was just warming up in a room, and then Kanye came in. He could not have been nicer. He was so warm and accommodating.\u00a0Just chit-chatting about music. It was super cool.<\/p>\n

What did you and Kanye talk about, music-wise?<\/strong>
Well, when he walked in, I was playing my sax, so I figured I would just play to him. So I started playing some really sweet blues riffs and soulful riffs and a couple of jazz<\/a> riffs, and I could see he thought it was really good. I said something like, \u201cThis kind of sound would be really great with some of your music.\u201d And he said, \u201cYeah, maybe we can go to the studio and check it out.\u201d So I thought that was cool.<\/p>\n

He wasn\u2019t wearing a MAGA hat, was he?<\/strong>
He was not wearing a MAGA hat.<\/p>\n

Are you a fan of Kanye\u2019s music?<\/strong>
I\u2019m a fan of everyone\u2019s music, some of what they do. I\u2019m not a not-fan of anybody. Anybody that\u2019s out there doing stuff, I appreciate how hard they work and that they\u2019re putting their heart and soul into their music. Afterwards, we went over to his studio and I got a chance to hear some of his music and talked again about, maybe there\u2019s a possibility of a little sax on a Kanye West record.<\/p>\n

What was Kim\u2019s reaction to your performance?<\/strong>
I started playing before I saw her. She was coming around a corner, and I got the nod from Kanye to go. And so I started to play, and\u00a0 when she came, she just went, \u201cOh my god,\u201d and then she looked at me and was smiling and just kind of stopped. She didn\u2019t know what to do with herself for a minute. Then she got her phone out, which was awesome.<\/p>\n

\n

NO BIG DEAL KENNY G IN MY LIVING ROOM!!! Happy Valentines Day ??? pic.twitter.com\/A1GD0UlEwu<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Kim Kardashian West (@KimKardashian) February 14, 2019<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Had you met either of them before this?<\/strong>
It was my first time meeting him. I had met Kim before \u2014 we flew on a flight together once. I think it was from Miami back to L.A., and we were sitting next to each other. I remember that there was a 13-year-old girl from the back of the plane that wanted to come up and talk to Kim, and I\u2019m thinking she\u2019s going to say, \u201cListen, I\u2019m in my private space, blah blah blah,\u201d but Kim said \u201cNo, send her up.\u201d\u00a0I was super impressed by how friendly and encouraging Kim was to this young girl that I\u2019m sure was so starstruck.<\/p>\n

Are you working on any music of your own right now?<\/strong>
I\u2019m actually working on a new CD. It takes me a long time to make records. It just does. I think there\u2019s enough material out in the world, so you gotta make a record for a reason. This one is called New Standards. It\u00a0sounds like the old jazz standards from the \u201950s and \u201960s, but they\u2019re new songs that I\u2019m composing, so they have my melodic sense, and I\u2019m playing them the way that I like to play, and I\u2019m trying to honor the old jazz greats as well as making sure that it still sounds like me.<\/p>\n

Who\u2019s your favorite jazz great?<\/strong>
That\u2019s just so hard to answer. I mean, you sound like you\u2019re pretty young, so I don\u2019t think you know too much about jazz. And I don\u2019t say that with any disrespect, but I could name you six or seven names you wouldn\u2019t know. Stan Getz, John Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins\u2026there\u2019s so many. Then you have Miles Davis, who played a beautiful trumpet.<\/p>\n

Do you like Chet Baker?<\/strong>
How do you know that name?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a big fan of jazz.<\/strong>
I am sorry if I insulted you. Good for you. Chet Baker\u2019s one of my favorites.<\/p>\n

On your Twitter, is that actually you tweeting?<\/strong>
It\u2019s me tweeting probably 30 percent.<\/p>\n

Those puns are incredible.<\/strong>
There\u2019s a good team. We definitely see eye-to-eye on humor. They surprise me sometimes with some super-funny ones. The Weird Al Yankovic one<\/a>, that was my tweet. I did that myself. I saw him at the Grammy party, Clive\u2019s party. I\u2019d never met him either. I said \u201cWeird Al, this is way long overdue.\u201d<\/p>\n

via:: Rolling Stone<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kenny G almost definitely had a better Valentine\u2019s Day than you this year \u2014 at least if your idea of a romantic date involves performing at Kim Kardashian West and Kanye West\u2019s California home.\u00a0\u201cI\u2019m having a\u00a0busy Valentine\u2019s Day,\u201d says the sax man, 62, when\u00a0Rolling Stone\u00a0reaches him later that evening. \u201cBusier than I thought.\u201d He was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-482282","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-music-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-14 03:35:29","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KQZR - The Reel","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=482282"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482282\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=482282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=482282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=482282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}