POP MUSIC REVIEW : The Pied Piper of G Wizardry

With beams of white light making him look like a cute-as-a-button 20th-Century Pied Piper, curly-locked saxophonist Kenny G didn’t waste any time Monday at the Universal Amphitheatre in pulling out his sure-fire gimmick to get the audience’s most visceral reactions via a showy display of circular breathing.

That’s a technique that allows wind instrument players to perform extended held notes and/or melodic passages without having to take a breath, and it has become an important part of G’s musical arsenal. Throughout the show he returned to it over and over again--on one occasion holding a tone for a good three minutes before building up to a predictable climax.

The results were always the same--rousing cheers and enthusiastic applause, to which G usually responded with a boyish smile and a breathless, “Gee, this is so fun!”

And he should be having fun--his latest album is cruising the pop charts, President-elect Bill Clinton has called him his favorite saxophonist and he’s in the middle of a four-night booking at the Universal, including a New Year’s Eve show. It’s a strikingly successful argument for the commercial viability of instrumental music.

This, despite the fact that his skills as an improvising saxophonist are modest, at best. His soprano--which most accurately defines his musical image--was played with a thin, quavery sound that verged, in its worst moments, toward the nasally qualities of a kazoo. His alto was marginally better, and only his tenor playing suggested the possible presence of a still-reticent inventiveness.

When he wasn’t holding long notes, G--whose program included early works as well as a few tunes from his current album--ran through a standard litany of blues licks, altering them from time to time with rapid-fire arpeggios straight out of a saxophone practice book. Brief solo segments allocated to bassist Vail Johnson, drummer Bruce Carter and percussionist Ron Powell provided the evening’s most significant musical substance.

But the measure of G’s ability is not his somewhat questionable technical and artistic abilities--it’s his capacity for moving an audience, especially at a time when vocal music dominates the pop horizon. Even with the presence of similar saxmen David Sanborn, Dave Koz and Curtis Stigers in the pop-jazz world, G stands far above the crowd in terms of his commercial appeal.

The best evidence was that the audience loved every minute Monday. When G capped the program with his now-familiar sax-playing stroll through the crowd, the rapturous response probably wasn’t too different from that of the entranced children who followed the Pied Piper himself.