London - REVIEW - Adam Sweeting - Preview May 2008
A very nice album.
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NIGEL KENNEDY
Nigel Kennedy Quintet
Featuring Xantone Blacq
brand new recording
A VERY NICE ALBUM
For release June 2008
“Grappelli came to the school when I was 11 or 12, and that really turned me on to the possibilities of the violin in improvised forms of music,” he recalls. “He asked us ‘does anyone want to play?’ and I had my fiddle there and I said ‘yeah’. He was really happy that someone from three generations underneath him was interested in the same music.”
Kennedy’s new double album, named in typically idiosyncratic fashion A Very Nice Album, marks his boldest excursion into jazz so far. His previous outings, 2006’s Blue Note Sessions and his 1999 album Nigel Kennedy Plays Jazz, focused on interpreting compositions from past masters of the jazz repertoire, but this time Kennedy steps to the fore as composer as well as improviser.
“I did kind of announce my intentions by making that Blue Note album,” he says. “It was a fantastic opportunity to work with musicians like Jack deJohnette and Ron Carter, and to see their attitude to their work. To be 60 or 70 years old and still able to give themselves completely to the music, and not worry about whether they’re going to build a new swimming pool in their garden or something.”
A Very Nice Album is the latest evidence of the sustained surge of creativity which is currently driving Kennedy onwards. He has recently released two classical discs for EMI, reviving little-known Polish violin concertos on Polish Spirit and throwing new light on the core repertoire with his Beethoven & Mozart Violin Concertos. Both featured the Polish Chamber Orchestra, of which Kennedy is artistic director, and earned rave reviews even from critics who have been known to frown on some of his more unorthodox career choices. Meanwhile, his work with his band of Polish jazz musicians, recruited in his adopted home town of Krakow, where he spends a large portion of the year with his wife, Agnieszka, hasn’t prevented him from his concerto commitments.
“Krakow is at the heart of the Polish jazz scene, which is well respected worldwide,” he points out. “You can meet jazz musicians who are playing all night, and I happen to live 200 metres from the nearest jazz club. I picked each player for their particular qualities, and the band seem to be sparking off each other really well. We play together four or five months a year, and the rest of the time they play musicians from Poland or from other countries.”
A Very Nice Album affords plentiful opportunities for all the musicians to shine, from the ever-inventive rhythm section of drummer Pawel Dobrowolski and bassist Adam Kowaleski to the fluent soloing of pianist Piotr Wylezol and the muscular tenor sax of Tomasz Grzegorski. Dig, if you will, the way Grzegorski skips across the skittering rhythms of Where All Paths Meet in the manner of the great Hank Mobley, or admire Wylezol’s free-flowing yet carefully weighted inventions during Invaders. But of course it’s the bandleader who has his name in lights over the door, and Kennedy seizes every opportunity to dazzle.
He himself admits that “some people might not call all the songs I’ve written jazz”, and he isn’t afraid to test the term to destruction as the compositions roam from blues and bebop to ballads and bossa-nova, interspersed with an occasional blast of metal. The brooding, steadily intensifying Hills Of Saturn might even be described as prog-rock. Still, anybody who heard his work with the Polish klezmer band Kroke on the East Meets East album, or heard his radical overhaul of the music of Jimi Hendrix on The Nigel Kennedy Experience, should soon be able to find their bearings.
The opening track, Donovan (an unexpected tribute to the eponymous hippy minstrel), offers a preview in microcosm of what lies in store, as it progresses from its mellow opening theme to a screaming electric holocaust of multitracked, echoplexed violins. The tempo clicks up a few gears for the infectious groove of Carnivore Of The Animals or the vaguely sinister pulse of Hudson’s Ibitha, while the Nigel Kennedy Quintet seem to be marching purposefully across scorching Arabian sands during Invaders.
“It’s the first album I’ve made of my own material in 10 years, and it’s just about the right time in my life to be doing it,” Kennedy observes. “The material is quite far-ranging, though I didn’t have any specific idea as to what the album should be. It’s just a collection of songs I wrote over three or four weeks when I went off to a little chalet in the Polish mountains. So you have some semi-rockish stuff and some blues-ish stuff, and I got into some latin styles because it leaves the melodic solos with so much freedom.”
Beyond their recorded incarnations, the songs also serve as platforms for collective improvisation when the band play live. “Each number will probably be twice as long when we get onstage,” says Kennedy. “That’s how it is when you can have unlimited solos from any of us. There’s not really a shortage of ideas within the jazz music fraternity.”
Check Boo Booze Bloooze for further details. The track features not only Kennedy, ad-hoc blues vocalist, but also a Nigel who runs the gamut from respectful classicist to incandescent electric maestro. After lulling the listener into a false sense of security with some decorous acoustic playing, he suddenly shatters the conservatoire atmosphere by winding up the volume and uncorking a psychedelic frenzy, reminiscent of some of his guitar-playing idols.
“I approach the electric violin very much in the way a guitarist would,” he agrees. “I love horn players, like jazz saxophonists Wayne Shorter or John Coltrane, but the electric guitar really hit me hard as well, listening to people like Jimmy Page, Santana or Jeff Beck. Jimi Hendrix freed up the guitar and made it into a totally different instrument. I’ve got a volume pedal, two or three delay pedals and a pitch-shifter, they’re all old Boss effects for the guitar really but they seem to work very nicely with the violin. But I’m not desperate to sound like either a guitar or a horn. It’s just got to come from your heart and you say what you want to say.”
Looking back, he remembers his violin teacher at the Juilliard School in New York, Dorothy DeLay, warning him about the perils of playing jazz, after Stephane Grappelli had asked him to perform with him at Carnegie Hall. “She said ‘don’t play the jazz stuff because if a record executive hears you, you’ll be cut out of a classical career straight away’.”
But the impetuous 16-year-old understood that Grappelli’s offer was too precious to turn down. “I wouldn’t have missed that night for pretty much anything, to play with the greatest jazz violinist on one of the great concert hall stages. If I hadn’t done it, I’d be regretting it now. In the short term it seemed like my teacher had been correct in predicting a mini-disaster, but now here I am in a studio making exactly the type of music I want to make.”
CD number: 5099921317125
www.averynicealbum.com
(Note from the editor: this is a preview of the press release and the web site is still in construction. Please wait for the "Official launch" of the CD in June 2008.)
(The fan says: A very nice album. Nigel thinks: Melody and invention. Note from the Editor.)
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