Charles J. Gans, New York: The easygoing, smooth jazz star Kenny G makes an unlikely rebel. But he had to put his sax down when his longtime record label insisted that he do yet another album of standards.

The G-man saw no point in following other older artists like Rod Stewart and Barry Manilow down the well-worn path of playing cover tunes. So he arranged an amicable divorce from Arista Records in order to return to making original music.

"All my success in the past ... have always been my original compositions played the way that I play and people seem to connect with that," said KennyG, in a telephone interview from his Malibu, Calif. home.

"I lost sight of that a little bit and I'm glad to be going back to my roots and re-establishing the integrity that I've had in my music."

His new CD Rhythm & Romance, his debut for Concord/Starbucks Entertainment, is not only the 51-year-old saxophonist's first album of original music since 2002, but also finds him exploring new territory in Latin music.

His inspiration came from the jazz bossa nova recordings by Cannonball Adderley and Stan Getz that the young Kenny Gorelick heard growing up in Seattle.

"I love the way the saxophone feels with a Latin rhythm, and I felt maybe I can do something like that, but of course do my thing and have it sound different than anything else," he said.

"You've got to continually try to reinvent yourself. "I always thought that my music could have a little bit more rhythm and a little less ballads," he added.

"There's a lot of really uptempo songs ... and much more improvisation on this record ... There's more rhythm here than anything I've ever done but yet it's still romantic."

The new record marks the end of his 25-year relationship with music mogul Clive Davis, who first spotted the saxophonist when he was a sideman in Jeff Lorber's jazz-fusion band and released his self-titled debut album in 1982.

Their partnership resulted in 26 albums, with global sales totaling more than 75 million records, including his breakthrough 1986 Duotones, which went multi-platinum thanks largely to the success of the sultry Songbird; the Grammy-winning 1992 Breathless, the all-time best-selling instrumental album; and 1994's Miracles: The Holiday Album, which put the Jewish musician right behind Elvis Presley on the list of top-selling Christmas albums in the United States.