“I hadn’t even heard of Coltrane until I had been playing for a long time. “I was 20 or 21 when I started listening to guys like Coltrane and Adderley and Charlie Parker,” Gorelick said. and R&B-style horn units like those accompanying Tower of Power and Earth, Wind & Fire. You won’t notice much of the classic be-bop style in his playing because he grew up emulating pop horn players like Grover Washington Jr. “I wanted to be able to improvise like that.”Ī self-taught player, Gorelick would record solos and play them on sax during his private practice sessions. “I loved the way that guy was jamming,” he said.
Though Gorelick also plays alto and tenor saxes, he is thought of as a soprano man because that’s what he plays on “Songbird.” Actually Gorelick, 32, started on alto.Īs a 10-year-old in Seattle, his hometown, he was so impressed by a soloist on Ed Sullivan’s TV variety show that he asked his parents to get him an alto sax. What he did is make a very commercial album-including two vocal cuts, one featuring Smokey Robinson-that should please his fans. What I did was try to be sincere and innovative.” “When I was making this album,” he said, “I didn’t think about trying to top the sales of the last album. His new one, “Silhouette,” is in the same commercial vein as “Duotones.” He is not taking chances on alienating his audience-and you can’t really blame him. The pop following he has cultivated doesn’t want to hear sophisticated, elitist jazz. He is clearly capable of a much more substantial album-the kind that would please his critics-but it would undoubtedly cost him his pop audience. You get a better feeling for his skills in concert than you do on his commercially-oriented albums. His music is never searing but it can be touching. Exposure on those easy-listening stations helped both “Duotones” and the single “Songbird” gather momentum. One change in radio in recent years is the emergence of stations that play that soothing music. “Duotones” became such a smash hit album because it appealed to all those yuppish New Agers. “My music isn’t New Age,” he insisted vehemently. New Age music is that soft-core, vanilla-flavored, easy-listening jazz that hardly any musicians want to be associated with-Gorelick included. Pop has infiltrated jazz to extent that a whole genre of music-called New Age-has evolved. Comparing Gorelick to the masters isn’t really fair because jazz-Gorelick’s kind of jazz-is so different. Gorelick’s poppish, skin-deep jazz can’t compare with the work of sax-playing giants like John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Sonny Stitt and Sonny Rollins. “What they say doesn’t invalidate what I do.”īut the critics, in one sense, have a point. “I’m a good player and I write good music,” he said, protesting a bit too much. As he went on about how the criticism didn’t bother him, there was an inescapable feeling that it did. Camouflaging his emotions isn’t something he does well. Intense and hyper, Gorelick has an endearing, puppy-dog enthusiasm. Most jazz critics and hard-core jazz fans simply don’t take him seriously.Īt the mention of critics, Gorelick spouted things like, “I don’t care what the critics say” or “I don’t really read what the critics say.” But that bravado registered false. Yuppie jazz is another term applied to his instrumentals-pleasant but plastic. To them, he plays the jazz equivalent of elevator music. Many jazz critics cringe at the mention of his name. What’s missing for Gorelick, though, is credibility.