Aging & Wisdom Quote by Jerome Richardson

Jerome Richardson isn’t critiquing Kenny G’s notes so much as his choreography. The jab lands because it treats a supposedly spontaneous “in the aisles” stunt as a tired piece of stagecraft, a magic trick that depends on the audience mistaking movement for risk. “With his thing” is dismissive on purpose: the sax becomes a prop in a routine, not an instrument in a conversation. When Richardson says “playing the same time,” he’s mocking the breathless implication that multitasking equals artistry. Of course he’s playing while walking; the point is that we’re being asked to applaud the logistics.

The line also reads like a veteran’s irritation at how smooth-jazz celebrity repackaged the saxophone’s cultural capital. Richardson came out of bebop and big-band worlds where virtuosity was earned in the bandstand crucible, where showmanship existed but didn’t pretend to be innovation. Kenny G’s aisle-walk is the pop concert’s promise of intimacy: I’m not on a stage above you, I’m among you. Richardson punctures that by calling it “old hat,” a phrase that carries both age and craftiness: a hat trick, done to death.

There’s class politics in it, too. Jazz musicians watched “jazz-adjacent” stars inherit the instrument’s mystique while sanding off its friction. Richardson’s complaint is really about substitution: spectacle standing in for surprise, proximity standing in for depth. The wit is that he refuses to be dazzled by what was designed to dazzle.