BY DAVID WEISS

Saxophonist Kenny G doesn’t care for the
“M-word” as it applies to him or his music.
“I am not mellow,” he tersely replied to one
interviewer, trying to dismiss the facile assertion that the putative Sultan of Smooth Jazz is the same guy onstage as he is off.

As the axiom goes, a man’s true character
emerges on a golf course, which is where you are likely to find the 52-year-old Mr. G (for Gorelick) on days when he isn’t tending to his music career. We caught up with him for a recent round on his home course in Los Angeles and found a man whose politesse and good cheer were balanced
by a near-obsessional devotion to the mechanics
of the golf swing. Can anyone be laid-back and
simultaneously intense?

One’s best guess is that the golf course is where the best-selling instrumentalist of all time channels the aggression and angst that he studiously leaves out of his music. You want frenetic, listen to late John Coltrane, who used to make a soprano saxophone squeal and bleat like a stuck pig. Kenny G’s soft and supple way with a ballad, by contrast, has probably increased the birthrate of his core audience demonstrably.

Conveniently, his new album is entitled “Rhythm & Romance,” a collection of Latin-tinged compositions that may tend to reduce global warming, as men across the civilized world dial down the wattage to enhance their chances at reproductive success. Gorelick, meet Al Gore.

But on this sunny morning in Thousand Oaks, it’s Kenny G (for Golf) who is front and center, and he is more ardent speaking of the great game than he is about saxophones or sambas. He is also prone to take four or five practice swings before hitting a shot, even during a casual round.

“Golf is much harder than music,” he said without hesitation, obviously used to the question. “The sax is going to play the way it plays—you finger an ‘E’ and it’s going to be an ‘E’ every time. With a golf swing, it almost has a mind of its own, it changes every day. And there are subtleties to the game that keep you off balance; for example, I never get bad bounces in my music. If I intend to play a song a certain way, it’s probably going to come out that way.”

Growing up in rainy Seattle afforded the young musician plenty of opportunities to stay inside and practice his horn, which he was attracted to after watching an anonymous section player stand up for a solo on the Ed Sullivan show one night. “That was it,” he said. “I just had it in my head that I’d like to try that. From the first time I took it out of the case and put it together, I just loved the challenge of it. So I just kept going and I think I made the right choice between music and golf!”

After racking up sales of some 75-million albums in the last quarter-century, including the most popular Christmas album of all time (not bad for a Jewish kid), one might tend to forgive him the obvious understatement. But humility is ever lurking around the dogleg, and Mr. G—a staple on the showbiz golf circuit—is the first to admit his good fortune at not having to make a living with his golf clubs.

“You know, I played a few events on the Nationwide Tour and there are a lot of guys out there whose name you rarely hear who had to qualify by shooting 65s,” he said. “I Tuesday night-qualified, by playing my saxophone and earning a sponsor’s exemption. And that’s about as much pressure as I can take, generally
speaking. God forbid if I had to make ends 
meet on the course and not onstage.”






Then again, in 2006, he was ranked the No. 1
golfer/musician by Golf Digest, besting guys 
like Jack Wagner, Alice Cooper and Huey Lewis. And he has repeatedly busted beautiful drives and putted fearlessly while playing with Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer, albeit without the onus of having to pay the mortgage on his Malibu manse thereby.

And he and playing partner Phil Mickelson did walk down the 18th fairway at Pebble Beach during the 2001 AT&T with a chance to win the tournament outright. “That was a really great feeling,” he said, savoring the memory. “We tied Tiger Woods and his partner for first-place. It was like a dream.”

Kenny has teed it up with Woods at Sherwood Country Club as well, where they were tuning up for a different pro-am, and where he discovered the world’s No. 1 golfer never goes gently into even a friendly match. “He beat me on the last hole, of course,” the musician said. “But what I like best about him is that he’s a smartass. A big smartass! He told me that I had to ‘get that cashmere insert removed from my putter’ and that I was ‘powder-puffing’ the ball. I asked him what he meant, seriously, and he said I was holding on to it too much, that I had to let the swing go. When Tiger talks, you tend to listen.”

Not that Kenny G lacks input on his golf swing. When he gave me a couple of short-game pointers that paid off in a decent chip, he quipped that he’d send me a bill for the $20K it cost him in lessons to learn the same skills. Then again, the VIP-barter system sometimes works wonders. Kenny spent a long day picking up wisdom from Butch Harmon in Las Vegas a few years ago and in gratitude brought his band to perform at the famed golf coach’s wedding the following year.

“We text message each other all the time,” he said of Harmon. “In fact, when I missed the cut at the AT&T one year, I was home watching it on television and I got a text from Butch that said I needed to cock my wrist more—he’d seen my swing on the 15th hole and took note. Here’s a guy with all these pros depending on him and he takes time out for his friends. That’s really cool.”

What’s cool is the Kenny G lifestyle, a sweet and sonorous major key existence, not unlike his music. With a wife and two sons, a worldwide and rabid fan-base and a double life as a competitive golfer, one is hard-pressed to find the hazards in his fairway-to-green routine.

“I do feel blessed,” he said after the round, as his copious curly locks dried for the impending photo shoot. “My office is a stage or studio,
I play music from my heart and people seem to like it. And I’m in love with a game that doesn’t know the definition of perfect. If that doesn’t make you want to wake up tomorrow and do it all over again, you need to have your head examined!”

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