"Paris By Night" is a romantic ballad composed by Kenny G, Sam Hirsh, and Walter Afanasieff for Kenny G's 2021 album New Standards on Concord Jazz. Written in C minor at a slow tempo of approximately 50 BPM, the piece features soprano saxophone over a bed of piano, guitar, strings, keyboards, bass, and drums across a duration of about five and a half minutes. The melody is characterized by deliberate pauses, spacious phrasing, and a quality of starting and stopping that evokes the imagery suggested by its title. Kenny G has described composing the tune while picturing a foggy nighttime stroll across Paris bridges over the Seine, and that atmospheric quality pervades the composition's unhurried, wistful character. Rather than continuous melodic flow, the piece relies on simple thematic ideas that pivot gracefully between notes, creating an airy, daydream-like mood. The composition belongs to the New Standards project, a collection of original instrumentals inspired by the aesthetic of 1950s and 1960s jazz ballads but executed with Kenny G's signature smooth jazz sensibility. "Paris By Night" has not been widely covered by other artists and remains primarily associated with Kenny G's original recording and subsequent live performances.
