Toni Braxton & Kenny G: Playing for the Overlooked

How lucky can Toni Braxton be? Two million-selling CDs, songs written for her by love wizard Babyface, a powerful gut voice as lush as the fullest life, and -- at last! -- a first concert in Boston. At the FleetCenter, no less, opening for Kenny G last Friday. Fronting a five-piece band, her voice supported by the well-known harmony foursome Mint Condition, Braxton delivered the luscious, horny mournfulness that's been her signature ever since "Another Sad Love Song," her first CD's first cut.

Braxton's forte is the unfulfilled but ever-so-needy love ballad. And when she performed them, she moved as slowly as a sigh. Although standing, with the mike held high, she seemed recumbent. In vertiginous songs like "Breathe Again," "Unbreak My Heart," and the transcendent "You're Makin' Me High," she choked up her notes and contorted them, giving herself up to the drummer's painful tempos as no fewer than three keyboardists overlaid her husky solos with a thick burden of melody. Mint Condition's nearly unison singing quadrupled the music's sweet melancholy, forcing its distanced attentions onto Braxton, who responded by raising her arms as if in supplication or by spreading them wide -- a suggestion of breathing room -- as she slid her torso across the stage.

It's been said that Braxton owes her style to Anita Baker, but she doesn't. Where Baker, always the activist, lowers her voice and forces the music, Braxton lets the music lead her. At the FleetCenter all she did, in her hit songs' ready-to-be-loved mode, was to respond, and to accept, as if the music were a god and she a mere mortal.

Braxton was right about that, because there was indeed a god of music on stage that night, in the person of Kenny G, the concert's main attraction. The saxophone star is not held in high esteem by most critics, but he didn't seem to mind. He entered from the back of the FleetCenter audience, as is his custom, his tenor sax speaking brief, fast, elfin notes as he approached the stage. He played melodically simple stuff. His gently sentimental solos seemed to be remembering bygones and faraway images. His slim face grinned a bit as he extended his favorite instrument, the soprano sax, sideways toward off stage. Like Braxton, he hardly ever varied the theme. Supported by a first-rate five-piece band, he did venture, twice, into deeply danceable, Latin-tinged beats.

But ensemble work was only a diversion from Kenny G's main point: that what counts is the still, small voice of the inner soul, in which quiet joys can in turn raise their voices. At his most characteristic -- and best-played -- moments, he seemed almost invisible as he ran briskly through riffs as fiercely joyous as anything in pop music today.

This was appropriate, because he had attracted to his please-overlook-me sound an audience of all ages and as racially integrated as any I've seen at a Boston concert since the disco years -- an audience of what, in the month of media-noted O.J. Simpson divisiveness, could only be called the overlooked. It was not an audience of spiked-hair conformists or drag-queened narcissists, and Kenny G's unadventurous embellishments (they were too structurally restricted to merit being called improvisations) were hardly music of difficulty or in-your-face. But his many-minute circular breathing solos did signify a bold steadfastness, and his very simpleness -- so like Forrest Gump in its pithy transparency -- aroused the audience, just as his entering and exiting through the crowd sent a message of an unmilitant solidarity far more singular than the conventional rebellions ranted by the poseurs of MTV music. For Kenny G and his audience, it was a night of headline-free reaffirmation.

-- Michael Freedberg