The Aston Villa scarf draped over the piano lid is a giveaway: it’s Nigel Kennedy, back at Ronnie Scott’s for eight sets over four days. It begins, as ever, with a bit of banter as he introduces his Polish jazz quartet. Then, just when we think he’ll never stop talking: “let’s get this fucker out of the case”. He picks up his electric instrument – a five-string violin-viola combo – and they launch headlong into Jimi Hendrix’s Hey Joe, so loud that the nearest audience have their shiraz vibrating in their glasses.
It’s a characteristically eclectic set. The Hendrix, with a bit of Star-Spangled Banner thrown in, morphs into the Gigue from JS Bach’s D minor Partita, which goes off at tangents accompanied in folk-like style by Beata Urbanek-Kalinowska’s cello and by heavy drum beats from Slawomir Berny. This segues into Ryuichi Sakamoto’s East Wind, which has an almost 70s-cop-show feel until near the end, when Kennedy starts bending the tempo, with Berny and bass guitarist Piotr Kułakowski watching him like a hawk. It’s invigorating, and a little indulgent – the chord sequences of the Hendrix and Sakamoto go round until it feels like all their possibilities have been squeezed out. Kennedy beams through everyone else’s solo spots, and fist bumps them all at the end.
Sakamoto’s A Flower Is Not a Flower brings a change to acoustic instruments and for Kennedy, a switch on to piano, which he plays beautifully. Then he’s back on violin – the classical one, this time – for his own Melody in the Wind, written for his mentor Stéphane Grappelli, godfather of jazz violin, with whom Kennedy played here when he was genuinely a teenager (half a century ago, if you can believe it). Channelling Grappelli’s Hot Club style, there’s a light and cheeky version of Django Reinhardt’s Swing 39. A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square sounds somewhere between sweet, gentle jazz and the cadenza of a classical concerto, Kennedy weaving gossamer-light decoration around notes that go higher and higher until they really do sound like birdsong.
They end with Sakamoto’s Firecracker, and, as with the Hendrix, what’s remarkable is how convincingly Kennedy’s electric violin takes on the role of a lead guitar, shredding away with huge scope for tone and texture. Earlier on in the evening he and guitarist Rolf Bussalb were trading phrases; now Bussalb can only look on as Kennedy’s violin takes the spotlight.
Then he’s done – a few thanks, a short ramble about the inanities of Brexit, one last chance to call us “you motherfuckers” and he’s off, wading through the audience, posing for photos and greeting everyone like friends.
• Nigel Kennedy plays at Ronnie Scott’s, London, until Saturday 14 October.
