I hate Kenny G.

Kenny G is Velveeta Jazz. For people who reside in pastel look-alike subdivisions and play mass-produced muzak on their mini-stereos.

One guy put it like this – “Truly, truly, this is everything that is wrong with music. It’s one Coltrane lick cooked like an English vegetable until all soul, all flavor is gone. It’s so nondescript it’s used on every Muzak system in America… It didn’t spawn the “smooth jazz” movement, but it’s the flagship for that white-ified garbage.”

I pity those who incline their ear to Kenny G, for they have never heard – or perhaps never acquired any appreciation for – real Jazz. Soulless creatures who live vapid lives of plasticized desperation.

They’ve never spent a lazy afternoon with Miles Davis, playing Kind Of Blue on a real music system. They’ve never experienced the seductive romance of Duke Ellington or Louis Armstrong, or the soulful scat of Ella Fitzgerald.

Vince Guaraldi brought the house down at the Monterrey Jazz Festival in 1958. Fans who’d just heard Dizzy Gillespie and Billie Holiday chanted for multiple encores from a “reformed boogie- woogie piano player.” Later, Guaraldi was commissioned by Charles Schulz to score the music for the A Boy Named Charlie Brown. In case you’ve never seriously listened to it, the PEANUTS soundtracks are true blue Jazz music, too. Just now I’m listening to Linus and Lucy on Guaraldi’s A Charlie Brown Christmas and it rivals everything else in my collection.

Charles Schultz was a man with a soul. Quoting the liner notes:

With producers searching for music for their cartoon, the PEANUTS creator suggested Guaraldi. They told him it was unheard of to mix cool adult jazz with an animated program. But on the screen, the trio’s gentle jazz riffs balanced magnificently with Charlie Brown’s youthful exuberance, bouncing along in musical accompaniment that quickly became a PEANUTS staple – as familiar as Linus’ blanket and Snoopy’s friend Woodstock.

Most television executives didn’t give it much of a chance. Mixing high spirits, religion, consumerism and charity, the PEANUTS characters used a church pageant to tell children that there was more to Christmas than opening presents, and adults that it was normal to get melancholy during the holidays. Looking back at a blanket-toting Linus when he looks at a scrawny spruce tree and says “It’s not a bad little tree. All it needs is a little love,” you knew Schulz was ahead of his time.

Animators in the early ‘60s never used children’s voices for children characters. Schulz did, enlisting a nine-year-old-boy to speak for Charlie Brown. Animation was always backed with a soundtrack of rollicking, yet corny car-tunes, which blared from black and white TVs on Saturday mornings. Schulz, however, went for a hip soundtrack of West Coast jazz by a San Francisco beatnik named Vince Guaraldi. Suddenly, adults nestled in with their kids and thought it was cool to watch a cartoon.

So what does this have to do with you?

Puh-lenty. This whole lecture about Kenny G vs. Duke Ellington is all about being real. It is about being a real human being, communicating with customers in a real human voice, admitting mistakes and openly apologizing for them. It is about being frank about the fact that nothing’s perfect, that everything that’s not make-believe is tainted to some degree, but that you are committed to doing your level best to make the most of it. It’s about shedding the institutional guise and putting real flesh and personality and feeling into whatever you do. It’s about presenting a real face instead of a manufactured one.

Now most “marketing gurus” would tell you that you ought to study Kenny G. Some might say “Move over Miles Davis, the new king of Jazz is movin’ in.” They may point out that Kenny lives in the same Seattle Gold Coast neighborhood as Bill Gates and that his fortunes tell the whole story.

No.

Kenny G is for the unwashed masses. It’s for people who don’t even know how to spell jazz.

It’s the Wal-Mart version of culture. Lowest common denominator.

Very few people reading my newsletter deal with a mass consumer audience. Nearly every subscriber of mine is in some kind of specialized discipline, dealing with sophisticated customers and the high end of their market, not the low end. You’re selling to the top, not the bottom.

So when you think about reaching out to your customers, don’t associate them with the insipid droning of 100 sound-alike smooth-jazz radio stations. No, picture Miles Davis blowing his horn, with the sound of clinking glasses and beads of perspiration on his forehead, in a smoky Jazz club in Manhattan.

In some way or another, that’s you. You’re Miles. You’re Ella. You’re Duke. You’re Quincy.

You’re laying down the groove that others dance to.

Photo by Micah Sittig cc by-sa

About the Author

Perry Marshall has launched two revolutions in sales and marketing. In Pay-Per-Click advertising, he pioneered best practices and wrote the world's best selling book on Google advertising. And he's driven the 80/20 Principle deeper than any other author, creating a new movement in business.

He is referenced across the Internet and by Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, INC and Forbes Magazine.