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.
May 26 to June 1 When the Qing Dynasty first took control over many parts of Taiwan in 1684, it roughly continued the Kingdom of Tungning’s administrative borders (see below), setting up one prefecture and three counties. The actual area of control covered today’s Chiayi, Tainan and Kaohsiung. The administrative center was in Taiwan Prefecture, in today’s Tainan. But as Han settlement expanded and due to rebellions and other international incidents, the administrative units became more complex. By the time Taiwan became a province of the Qing in 1887, there were three prefectures, eleven counties, three subprefectures and one directly-administered prefecture, with
Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) and the New Taipei City Government in May last year agreed to allow the activation of a spent fuel storage facility for the Jinshan Nuclear Power Plant in Shihmen District (石門). The deal ended eleven years of legal wrangling. According to the Taipower announcement, the city government engaged in repeated delays, failing to approve water and soil conservation plans. Taipower said at the time that plans for another dry storage facility for the Guosheng Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Wanli District (萬里) remained stuck in legal limbo. Later that year an agreement was reached
What does the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) in the Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) era stand for? What sets it apart from their allies, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)? With some shifts in tone and emphasis, the KMT’s stances have not changed significantly since the late 2000s and the era of former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九). The Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) current platform formed in the mid-2010s under the guidance of Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), and current President William Lai (賴清德) campaigned on continuity. Though their ideological stances may be a bit stale, they have the advantage of being broadly understood by the voters.
In a high-rise office building in Taipei’s government district, the primary agency for maintaining links to Thailand’s 108 Yunnan villages — which are home to a population of around 200,000 descendants of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies stranded in Thailand following the Chinese Civil War — is the Overseas Community Affairs Council (OCAC). Established in China in 1926, the OCAC was born of a mandate to support Chinese education, culture and economic development in far flung Chinese diaspora communities, which, especially in southeast Asia, had underwritten the military insurgencies against the Qing Dynasty that led to the founding of
RSS