By James Kaplan

SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON POST

Kenny G wants you to know that he doesn’t like the term “smooth jazz.”

“For me,” the saxophonist says in his new memoir, “Life in the Key of G,” “it evokes a feeling of something that’s too light, too fluffy, and not strong enough.”

Funny — that’s precisely how his many detractors would characterize his music.

In the four decades since he burst upon the scene, Kenny G — born Kenneth Bruce Gorelick in Seattle in 1956 — has become the best-selling instrumental artist of all time (75 million records and counting) and, probably, the most widely detested musical artist ever. He and his music have been both adored and reviled for so long — his first, self-titled album dropped in 1982, and he broke big with his fourth solo LP, “Duotones,” in 1986 — that it could be said that hating Kenny G has become as much of an institution as Kenny G himself.

What is it about his lulling, syrupy sound that stirs people up so? His memoir airs the question right from the start (he tells an elevator-music joke on Page 1), holds it up to the light from many angles and then finally, and fundamentally, leaves it unanswered.

For the first half of the 20th century, jazz, the great homegrown art that America, and in particular Black America, gave the world, was a very big deal. Great players like Miles Davis, Art Blakey, John Coltrane and the Modern Jazz Quartet, and great vocalists such as Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, kept the music vital and relevant.

But around 1959, jazz began to fly off in increasingly esoteric and intellectual directions. Then, in the 1960s, rock-and-roll landed on it like a neutron bomb. By the 1980s, jazz, now blended with rock elements (electric instruments), still had its passionate adherents, but it had become niche.

When Kenny G showed up, his lilting, mellow, unchallenging melodies seemed to calm a nervous world. Jazz’s players and gatekeepers, though, were anything but calmed. The only problem with the term “smooth jazz,” they said, was the word “jazz.” What could possibly connect this tootling schlockmeister with titans like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Sonny Rollins?

Of course, we wouldn’t be talking about any of this — the love, the hate, the book — if Mr. G hadn’t been so very, very successful. That’s something his memoir reminds us of from the start. He sells zillions of records; he fills stadiums; he makes a lot of money. He flies his own plane! He consorts with many celebrities; he’s a scratch golfer. He’s proud of all of it. Why shouldn’t he be?

Co-written by Philip Lerman, this is an exceedingly strange book, by a disquietingly strange man who holds a uniquely strange place in popular music. Readers may be struck by the heavy thud of dropped names, the quiet boasting, the many lame sax jokes (sax/sex — get it?) and Mr. G’s insistent, tone-deaf habit of referring to himself in the third person (“When you’re Kenny G, every day is a good hair day”).

Picked on in high school, roasted by the jazz establishment, he has outlasted and outearned the bullies and haters and acquired an odd, angry steeliness: “Don’t let this wimpy Jewish exterior fool you,” he tells us. “I can be a tough guy when I need to be. … I know if A plus B equals C and you tell me otherwise, I’ll really fight you tooth and nail.”

Yet there’s something odd about his interior. He’s especially fond of golf, he writes, because as is the case with his saxophone, which he plays for three hours a day, golf is something you can get better at if you practice a lot. It is also something for which success can be objectively measured. Which is why Kenny G doesn’t like dancing. “I don’t like dancing because it doesn’t have a right way or a wrong way,” he writes. “There’s no objective means of measuring your success.”

What? Surely dancing is, at least ideally, a human activity that flows from the soul … as is improvised music. Isn’t it?

When his two sons are born, Kenny G takes to studying parenting as he studies the saxophone, flying and golf: methodically. “I consider myself a perpetual student about almost everything, and that includes parenting,” he writes. He offers a three-page riff on the wonders of parenthood and how good he was at sleep-training his infant sons – without saying a single word about their mother. The one woman who gets more than a passing mention in this male-dominated book is G’s mother, and even she doesn’t come off well. He casually mentions she never told him that she loved him or that she was proud of his accomplishments, even when he played Carnegie Hall – and she was there. When G confronts her about her coldness, she tells him: “You were always a happy and confident person. You didn’t need it.”

Ah, but it appears he did. Maybe, in the end, Kenny G’s music serves to soothe him as much as it does his listeners.

James Kaplan is the author of 15 books, including, most recently, “3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool.”

Warwick’s presents Kenny G

When: 7 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 1

Where: Warren Auditorium, University of San Diego, 5998 Alcala Park Way, San Diego

Tickets: $29.99-$38.88 plus tax

Online: warwicks.com/event/kenny-g-2024