Kenny G Quotes

I just feed off the energy of the audience.

When playing any song in front of an audience, you're watching them experience it, and it changes. In a lot of ways, it's almost like the music is just the background buzz to what's happening between you and the audience in the room.

I feed off the audience a lot, their energy.

I'm always making micro-adjustments onstage, listening to the audience, and what a crowd is like can be infectious.

A performance is only as good as the audience you are playing to. A lot of times you feed off of the audience, and we always try to give them all we've got and sometimes you don't get a lot back, but we've never been dead whenever we've performed.

It's a constant challenge to get your arrangement and musical expression across to a new audience, especially when you're playing live every night like we are.

I don't ever really plan my sets. I just get out there and feel the energy of the crowd.

The audience plays a huge part in how a piece will actually form. They really allow the performers to walk a tightrope in a way that never seems to happen in the privacy of your own four walls. I'm listening to the audience, and they're listening to me.

Set lists are tough because you come up with this structure of how the songs are going to go from one to the next, but at the same time, you have to be spontaneous and take requests and change the set list at the drop of a hat.

Immediate, simultaneous connection between the audience and a performer is crucial to me. It's why I do what I do. Other things, like recording, are satisfying, but they're not the same. I love the connection I get with the audience when I'm sitting behind that piano.

I like that raw energy that I get from an audience.

There's nothing like performing in front of a live crowd and just having people literally react to whatever it is you do, and there's nothing better than when you get that connection with the audience.

The crowd really controls how I am onstage. One show, it might be a lot of young people, super-high-energy dancing. I mirror that. Other shows, it's much more calm.

The crowd is the crowd. You're gonna take them as an individual performer how you take them. The key is how do you learn from them. How do you use whatever is happening reaction-wise to get better.

When you talk about the exchange of energy between performer and audience and audience and performer, I hope that I'm one of the best.

Sometimes you really rely on the audience to have a good time playing live, and sometimes you could have zero people or a thousand, and you'd feel exactly the same.

When I'm on stage, my interaction with the audience is something that really makes me come alive. It's a feeling like no other. The energy of the crowd fuels something new inside.

I can't imagine playing a boring gig. Like, a boring audience without reaction, I will play against them.

Just me onstage with a mike having an intimate relationship with the audience. I don't get nervous for that. I just get excited.

Something that I think I figured out slowly was if you're playing a show and there's a chatter or there is, you know, a lot of noise - people talking or something - I was never the one whose instinct was to try to be louder than them.

There's something about small venues that's amazing for developing material. It's almost like you can not only hear people's response, but you can understand it. In bigger venues you lose that, but you gain this sense of camaraderie in the audience.

I think I'm more entertainer than musician. I like to get with the crowd, make this night special for them.

Music is a performance and needs the audience.

It's hard to beat the visceral high of playing live and creating something spontaneous.

I really love live performing!