Nigel Kennedy is one of those people who never seems to get older. He still swears, shaves infrequently and remains loyal to the peculiar hedgehog haircut he has sported for the past 30 years. It comes as something of a surprise to discover that this year he will be 50. Yet there must be times when he wonders if he will ever outgrow his image as the bad boy of classical music, especially since he’s currently grounded.
As the owner of a violin worth more than most people’s homes, Kennedy is among those musicians who, the week of our meeting, find themselves unable to travel by plane because of anti-terrorism restrictions that prevent instruments being carried as hand luggage. ‘I mean, I’m not going to carry a fucking Guarneri in a clear polythene bag,” he says.
Actually, transporting a priceless Cremonese instrument in a carrier bag seems precisely the kind of attention-seeking slovenliness Kennedy became famous for. Even today, he cultivates an air of carelessness, choosing to be interviewed amid the chaos of his garden, where the first thing one notices, lying in the sun, is a violin baking beneath a thick coat of resin. It hasn’t been wiped clean for months.
These days he spends his time shuttling between his home in the Malvern hills in the midlands of England and the new base he has established in Krakow with his Polish wife, Agnieska.
Jazz is Kennedy’s current passion, and it will perhaps come as no surprise that he is about to fulfil a long-held ambition to release a jazz album. It was inevitable that a musician whose interests range from gypsy music to an album of Jimi Hendrix covers would get round to a jazz record sooner or later, yet it’s hard not to associate the words ‘long-awaited” and ‘jazz project” with maturing musicians seeking to rationalise their dwindling popularity.
Kennedy is eager not to be seen to be falling into this trap. ‘I’ve been listening to jazz ever since I had it on underneath my pillow at the Menuhin School,” he says, ‘and there have always been post-concert jams.”
Kennedy’s CV indicates that he is far from a stranger to the form. He has already tackled it with his arrangement of Duke Ellington’s Black Brown and Beige Suite; and part of his passion for Krakow is explained by his regular appearances at the city’s jazz clubs. Yet the most significant aspect of Kennedy’s jazz recording is the pedigree behind it: the album marks his debut for Blue Note, the label behind the golden age of bebop in the 1950s and 1960s. Kennedy performs on the record alongside musicians who were present at some of the most revolutionary jazz sessions of all time. Bass player Ron Carter and drummer Jack DeJohnette provide a living link with history, having played with greats such as Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Coleman Hawkins. Blue Note veterans Joe Lovano and Kenny Werner also appear on saxophone and piano. ‘I just drew up a wishlist of all the cats who were still alive,” Kennedy says, ‘and luckily for me, they said they were available.”
The album features Kennedy playing electric violin with a dry, vibrato-less tone on a selection of Blue Note standards interspersed with his own compositions. Most first-timers might have found it fairly daunting to record with such esteemed names, but Kennedy claims not to have been intimidated. ‘It’s no harder than giving out instructions to the Berlin Philharmonic,” he says, ‘and these guys are cool.”
Perhaps Kennedy’s ease is explained by the fact that, but for a slightly different set of circumstances, he might easily have pursued a jazz career.
The standard biography relates that the young violinist was the protege of Yehudi Menuhin. What is less well-known is that Kennedy also caught the attention of the great jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli, who he looked upon as his jazz godfather.
Although temperamentally and professionally polar opposites, Menuhin and Grappelli were close friends and recording partners, which left Kennedy ideally placed to absorb the influence of both.
‘Yehudi and Stephane were at the height of their powers when I got to hang out with them as a kid,” he says. ‘One day I’d see Grappelli getting ready for a gig with his brandy and a spliff; on another it would be Menuhin with his muesli and his wife combing his hair.”
At first, it was relatively unproblematic to study the classical repertoire during the day and unwind with some jazz after hours, but Kennedy reached a significant turning point when Grappelli invited the 16-year-old prodigy to appear alongside him at New York’s Carnegie Hall. At the time, Kennedy was being courted by classical recording executives, and his teachers at the Julliard School of Music warned that if he played in public with Grappelli, his classical career would be finished.
‘I remember being backstage, with a bottle of whisky, trying to rationalise my decision,” says Kennedy. ‘Eventually I got so pissed that I thought ‘sod it’ and went out there. What was I supposed to do? Spend the rest of my life regretting that I didn’t play at Carnegie Hall with Stephane Grappelli?”
Yet, supposing the Julliard professors had been right and Kennedy really had scuppered his classical career, would he have been content with a much less lucrative calling as a jazz musician? ‘Yeah, man. The basic difference between classical musicians and jazzmen is that, for the orchestral players, it’s a job. For jazz players, it’s an extension of their social lives.”