Kenny G

Kenny G plays soprano saxophone with a tone so smooth and so consistent that it has become shorthand for an entire style. Melody comes first in his writing: long, unhurried lines built to be hummed back rather than puzzled over, carried by an instrument he has spent decades shaping to sound exactly the way he wants.

Born Kenneth Gorelick, he arrived in the mid-1980s with music that had no obvious home at the time, and he has refined the same approach ever since through a practice regimen he talks about with more enthusiasm than almost anything else. Purists have never settled where the work sits in relation to jazz, and he has been openly untroubled by the argument.