For more than two decades, saxophonist Kenny G has warmed the hearts of countless fans with his velvety smooth delivery of romantic jazz tunes.
The king of smooth jazz visits Taipei tomorrow and Taichung on Sunday for concerts that will see him play a few classics and preview
a new tune from his upcoming album Heart & Soul,
which will be released worldwide at the end of next month. He will also appear tonight in the season finale of the TV talent show One Million Star (超級星光大道), when he will share the stage with Taiwanese singing sensation Lin Yu-chun (林育群).
A prodigy who started his career by playing as a sideman in Barry White’s Love Unlimited Orchestra when he was only 17, Kenny G (last name Gorelick), has moved on to a career as the most successful instrumentalist of his time by selling more than 75 million albums worldwide.
He has collaborated with the likes of Andrea Bocelli, Whitney Houston, Natalie Cole, Celine Dion and Aretha Franklin, and his 1994 album Miracles is the best-selling Christmas album ever.
“I consider good music to come from an artist who has spent a long time perfecting his art and accomplishing his style,” the 54-year-old star in a phone interview last week.
Of his compositions, Kenny G considers his breakthrough hit Songbird and Coming Home as two of his favorites.
Asked why he thinks he has managed to build such a successful career, he said, “I’m glad audiences around the world responded to these melodies. I’m just glad my music communicates with people.”
Kenny G will perform two Chinese tunes for his Taiwan concerts, the folk song Jasmine Flower (茉莉花) and Teresa Teng’s (鄧麗君) classic The Moon Represents My Heart (月亮代表我的心).
“I’m glad to have the chance to play these two songs because I don’t normally have the chance to perform them in the US,” he said.
Asked who he would like to perform a duet with, Kenny G replied, “Jackie Chan (成龍). I have performed on stage with him before. It would be great to record a duet with him.” The two met in the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and became friends.
To establish a closer connection with his fans during concerts, Kenny G makes it a routine to roam through audiences while performing.
Kenny G is often criticized by purists for crafting easy-listening background music, but he jazzes up his tunes during concerts by improvising — which he considers to be “visually entertaining.”
“There won’t be any stage effects in this concert. It will just be my music,” he said.
The unexpected collapse of the recall campaigns is being viewed through many lenses, most of them skewed and self-absorbed. The international media unsurprisingly focuses on what they perceive as the message that Taiwanese voters were sending in the failure of the mass recall, especially to China, the US and to friendly Western nations. This made some sense prior to early last month. One of the main arguments used by recall campaigners for recalling Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers was that they were too pro-China, and by extension not to be trusted with defending the nation. Also by extension, that argument could be
Aug. 4 to Aug. 10 When Coca-Cola finally pushed its way into Taiwan’s market in 1968, it allegedly vowed to wipe out its major domestic rival Hey Song within five years. But Hey Song, which began as a manual operation in a family cow shed in 1925, had proven its resilience, surviving numerous setbacks — including the loss of autonomy and nearly all its assets due to the Japanese colonial government’s wartime economic policy. By the 1960s, Hey Song had risen to the top of Taiwan’s beverage industry. This success was driven not only by president Chang Wen-chi’s
Last week, on the heels of the recall election that turned out so badly for Taiwan, came the news that US President Donald Trump had blocked the transit of President William Lai (賴清德) through the US on his way to Latin America. A few days later the international media reported that in June a scheduled visit by Minister of National Defense Wellington Koo (顧立雄) for high level meetings was canceled by the US after China’s President Xi Jinping (習近平) asked Trump to curb US engagement with Taiwan during a June phone call. The cancellation of Lai’s transit was a gaudy
The centuries-old fiery Chinese spirit baijiu (白酒), long associated with business dinners, is being reshaped to appeal to younger generations as its makers adapt to changing times. Mostly distilled from sorghum, the clear but pungent liquor contains as much as 60 percent alcohol. It’s the usual choice for toasts of gan bei (乾杯), the Chinese expression for bottoms up, and raucous drinking games. “If you like to drink spirits and you’ve never had baijiu, it’s kind of like eating noodles but you’ve never had spaghetti,” said Jim Boyce, a Canadian writer and wine expert who founded World Baijiu Day a decade
RSS