…and damn you Spotify and damn my inquisitiveness too, for they have all combined to expose me to the worst piece of music I have heard in a long time. Possibly for ever.It all started when I was listening to a Word magazine podcast which was basically an interview with Richard Thompson.  At some point RT was asked about a song he performed called I agree with Pat Metheny.  He told the story of the song which was that Kenny G did a version of  What a wonderful world which was him dubbing his soporific sax onto the Louis Armstrong classic and Pat Metheny really dissed him about it, in the sort of terms that serious musicians rarely use about other musicians.  RT then wrote a song saying that he agreed with what Metheny said.  Here it is:

With my curiosity thus piqued, I decided to hunt out Pat Methey’s comments, and the track that inspired them.   I found the Metheny comments (or a version of them) and they made me laugh quite a bit – I have never particularly liked Kenny G anyway.  I also found the offending/offensive track and that made me want to run with scissors or something.  In fact I only managed to get halfway through it before moving onto something (anything!) else.

For anybody who missed the link above, or can’t/doesn’t use Spotify, here is a Youtube clip:

And for anybody who can’t be bothered to follow the other link, here are the highlights from Pat Metheny’s comments:

“…not really an advanced player, even in that style. He had major rhythmic problems and his harmonic and melodic vocabulary was extremely limited, mostly to pentatonic based and blues-lick derived patterns, and he basically exhibited only a rudimentary understanding of how to function as a professional soloist in an ensemble”

So far so good.

“The other main thing I noticed was that he also, as he does to this day, played horribly out of tune – consistently sharp.”

Ouch!

“…he sells an enormous amount of records while not being anywhere near a really great player in relation to the standards that have been set on his instrument over the past sixty or seventy years.”

“There must be hundreds, if not thousands of sax players around the world who are simply better improvising musicians than Kenny G on his chosen instruments. It would really surprise me if even he disagreed with that statement.”

There is more in the same vein, until he says:

But, like I said at the top, this relatively benign view was all “until recently”.

Hmm.  So that was him being nice about Kenny G?  Makes me look forward to the rest of the piece even more.  He soon builds up to this masterpiece of prose:

But when Kenny G decided that it was appropriate for him to defile the music of the man who is probably the greatest jazz musician that has ever lived by spewing his lame-ass, jive, pseudo bluesy, out-of-tune, noodling, wimped out, fucked up playing all over one of the great Louis’s tracks (even one of his lesser ones), he did something that I would not have imagined possible. He, in one move, through his unbelievably pretentious and calloused musical decision to embark on this most cynical of musical paths, shit all over the graves of all the musicians past and present who have risked their lives by going out there on the road for years and years developing their own music inspired by the standards of grace that Louis Armstrong brought to every single note he played over an amazing lifetime as a musician.

I don’t think he was impressed.  Suddenly the phrase ‘relatively benign’ makes sense.  He goes on to say that “Kenny G has created a new low point in modern culture” but I think this was written before “I’d Do Anything” was broadcast.

For the record, I’ll happily stand alongside Richard Thompson and say “I agree with Pat Metheny”.

Favourite line from the RT song:

How does he hold those notes so long?
He must be a genius…     WRONG!