By TAI HAOTING

Business Correspondent

BEIJING (China Daily Show) – Zhang Li can still remember the first time he heard a Kenny G record.

The 34-year-old was walking past an artisanal tripe store when he caught the opening strains of ‘Songbird,’ the classic third single from the 56-year-old American saxophonist’s breakthrough studio album, Duotones (1986).

“It was flat. Uninspiring, almost,” Zhang recalls. “I have been a lifelong fan ever since.”

Now, every time Zhang wants to catch some Kenny, there is no need to reach for his CD collection; all he has to do is slip on an overcoat and pop down to his nearest department store or supermarket.

“It’s great. They play all the classics — all the time!” Zhang enthuses, his foot tapping to the sophisticated weavings of ‘By the Time This Night Is Over.’

“They put the Greatest Hits on a loop, so you never get tired of listening.”

To some extent, the story of Kenny G’s success in China holds a mirror to the influence of Western rock n’ roll music in the Middle Kingdom.

Originally arriving in wax-sealed containers, illicitly floated across the Shenzhen River by Hong Kong human-right activists, the first dakou (‘saw cut’) CDs of G Force, 1983’s astonishingly insipid second album, hit the Chinese mainland in 1992.

The record was swiftly bootlegged, spreading like wildfire around the hip industrial-punk neighbourhoods of Foshan, in southern Guangdong. Suddenly, Kenny G was big in China — a full decade after he first stultified Western youth. Zhang recalls it as an “electric moment” in modern mainland music history.

The announcement, therefore, by Alan Clancy — Vice-President of Operations (Asia Pacific) at Time Warner — that sales, downloads and licensed usages of Kenny G’s popular alto-saxophone ballads have reached their strongest-ever throughout the first quarter of this year should come as no surprise.

While the star of the Seattle-bred saxophonist has somewhat dimmed in the US since the slow decline of smooth-jazz FM radio, in the East its light burns as bright as ever. This is due, in no small part, to licensing agreements with several major Chinese supermarkets to play the exact same song, all day.

“Kenny’s dulcet tones have long serenaded Chinese listeners during their final moments of shopping, and can be expected to continue blandly ringing in their ears for many more decades of development,” Clancy stated during the shareholders’ call.

Listeners throughout the PRC have grown so accustomed to the transcendently bitter-sweet stylings of ‘Going Home’ that most shoppers can expect to hear its languorous saxophone arpeggio roughly 4,876 times during their lifetime.

“It feels like every time I hear this song, I’m taken to a different place,” said Jinkelong regular Sun Demin. “One moment, I’m in a hand-made canoe, paddling slowly towards a log cabin on a frosty winter’s morn, there to spend the afternoon wistfully looking through old sepia photographs.

“The next, I’m hustling over to Kitchen Goods before they turn off the escalators. It’s a song to savor.”

Kenny G was recently inducted into Beijing’s ‘Great Hall of the Moderately Prosperous Western Musical Success,’ alongside all surviving members of The Carpenters and the cast of It’s a Chipmunks Christmas.

Asked to explain the abiding popularity of Kenny G in China, long-time fan Zhang observed: “I think people just basically like listening to the same song over and over again.”

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Red Rock: soft-rock hits in China

‘Take It Easy’: Janitor Peng Damen, who tearfully describes himself as “a child of the Sixties,” says he loves the 1972 Eagles hit precisely because it doesn’t remind him of 1972. “At the same time that record peaked at Number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100, I was very much not taking it easy. I was being forced to pick fruit at a Yunnan collective, instead of finishing off my law degree at Peking University.” Peng says of his hippie-farmer days. “Kicking back, listening to Glenn Frey, I can forget all about my formative years, and just enjoy the moment for one goddam minute.”

‘Yesterday Once More’: “The lyrics perfectly encapsulate everything that is truthful about the progress of a moderately prosperous developing society,” says shopper Sun Demin of The Carpenters’ 1973 easy-listening classic. “La-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la. You see?”

‘My heart will go on’: Perhaps the most popular Canadian song of all time in China, Celine Dion’s theme song from Titanic endures just as much as her lyrics. “Whenever I hear this song, I too wish I was onboard a doomed ocean liner,” agrees IT worker Pi Zhang

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