LIVE REVIEW + PHOTOS: Kenny G in Lexington, MA (09.17.26)
There’s a short list of musicians who are famous enough that you know the name even if you couldn’t hum a single note. Kenny G is on that list. Thursday night, in a sold-out Cary Memorial Hall in Lexington, I finally got to see him live and my first thought, honestly, had nothing to do with the music. The man is 69 years old, still built like he was in 1986, and somehow looks like he hasn’t aged a day since Duotones.
He opened with “Loving You,” the title track, and he didn’t open from the stage he started from somewhere in the middle of the room, up on a riser I couldn’t quite make out in the dark, with a single spotlight tracking him. That’s a hell of a way to start a show: no big entrance, just a voice and his sax coming out of the crowd itself before anyone even knew where to look. From there he moved straight into “Silhouette,” the other half of what’s basically his opening one-two punch, a song that’s been a smooth-jazz radio staple since the late ’80s.
Then came “G Bop,” and this is the part of the night everyone in that room is still talking about. Close to the midpoint of the song, Kenny G locked into a single note and just… stayed there. Five, maybe eight minutes, I genuinely couldn’t tell you, because time stopped making sense. What I didn’t know until I looked it up afterward: this isn’t just a stage trick. In 1997, Kenny G set a Guinness World Record by holding one note an E-flat for 45 minutes and 47 seconds using circular breathing, a technique that lets a player push air out through the mouth while sneaking a breath in through the nose at the same time. He’s lost that specific record twice since first to an Alabama saxophonist who quietly broke it in 2000 out of respect and never made noise about it, then publicly to Afrobeat legend Femi Kuti in 2017 but watching him do even a fraction of that live, walking backward toward the stage the entire time without so much as a wobble in the tone, it’s obvious why nobody’s touched the legend of it. There are no words in a Kenny G song, no lyrics to hide behind. It’s just tone, and last night that tone did more talking than most singers manage in a whole set.
He eased into “Sentimental” next, and that’s when he actually started talking introducing his band, several of whom have been with him for more than 30 years, longer, he joked, than most people’s marriages. He’s toured for decades with largely the same core group, and it shows in how locked-in they are with him; you could tell these aren’t hired guns, they’re people who’ve spent half their lives inside these songs with him. He got the crowd guessing what instrument he actually plays someone shouted “flute,” which got a laugh, and someone else pointed out he’s actually playing soprano sax, an instrument that gets mistaken for a clarinet or a recorder more often than people realize (it doesn’t help that he once got dragged into a Wayne’s World 2 dentist’s-chair gag over exactly that confusion). Somewhere in that same stretch, he pointed out a member of his band who’s literally known him since high school a genuinely sweet moment in a room that had just been losing its mind over a single sustained note ten minutes earlier.
From there the set moved into a deeper, more musicianly stretch: “Havana,” built around extended guitar solos, then “Saxoloco,” which lived up to its name with some of the loosest, most unhinged playing of the night, before he settled into “Forever in Love” —his signature, the song that won him a Grammy for Best Instrumental Composition back in 1994 and the one even people who’ve never heard of Kenny G have definitely heard. He followed that with “Desafinado,” the old Jobim bossa nova standard, opened with a piano solo before Kenny G came in on top of it, and then “Naima,” the John Coltrane ballad, which slid straight into a run of bass and drum solos from his band. It was the most overtly “jazz” stretch of the night no hooks, no crowd sing-alongs, just musicians who’ve played together for decades stretching out.
After band introductions, he brought it back down to earth with “Going Home” a song most Americans have never heard of but that’s absolutely massive in China, where it’s played over the PA to signal closing time at malls, train stations, and gyms. Then came the “Sax Giveaway,” basically an anthem built around picking someone from the crowd to come up and blow a note on his horn, followed by a genuinely goofy detour into “Heart & Soul,” the two-finger piano song everyone’s played badly at some point in their life, dressed up in a full-band arrangement. He wound down into a solo cadenza just him, unaccompanied, working the room in total silence before landing directly into “Songbird,” his 1986 breakout and the song that made him a household name in the first place. He closed with his cover of “Titanic” “My Heart Will Go On” on soprano sax which is exactly the kind of shameless, crowd-pleasing move that’s kept people either loving him or making fun of him for 40 years, and last night, in that room, it was pure love.
I’ll say this: critics have spent decades calling his music “safe,” elevator-and-dentist-office stuff, and I get why some jazz purists roll their eyes at him. But none of that matters when you’re standing in a sold-out room in Lexington watching a 69-year-old man hold a note until the whole room forgets to breathe with him. Say what you want about the genre. The craft is undeniable.
Photos – Kenny G at Cary Hall in Lexington, MA on September 17th:
