Nigel Kennedy – Blue Note Sessions – Blue Note/EMI

by | Jul 8, 2007 | Jazz CD Reviews | 0 comments

Nigel Kennedy – Blue Note Sessions – Blue Note/EMI 3 57050 2, 66 min. ****:

(Nigel Kennedy, electric violin; Ron Carter, bass; Jack DeJohnette, drums; Joe Lovano, tenor sax; Kenny Werner, piano; Jo Allen, tenor sax; Lucky Peterson, B-3; Daniel Sadownick, percussion; Raul Midon, acoustic guitar/vocals)

Kennedy – who’s gone back to using his first name too – is a really amazing musician in every way. He’s the world’s best-selling classical violinist, has changed the world of classical performance and recording with his programs, performing style, clothing and even hair style.  It turns out he’s been involved with jazz from his childhood years, when Stephane Grappelli visited the Menuhin School of Music were he was studying on a scholarship. He has retained his passion of jazz over the years, occasionally performing with people like Ellis Larkins, Zoot Sims and Bobby McFerrin. In fact, it was his feeling of the joy of performance and sharing with Grappelli and the audience that Kennedy tried to bring into his classical performances. He now has his own touring jazz band of musicians from Poland, where he lives.

These New York sessions allowed Kennedy to achieve his childhood dream of having parallel careers in classical and jazz. He’s the first classical violinist ever asked to record for Blue Note. Carter and DeJohnette have been mainstays of modern jazz for many decades, and Lovano and Werner are two of the younger bright lights in jazz today.  The choice of tunes – including Duke Pearson and Horace Silver, entries from Carter and DeJohnette and even two originals from Kennedy – is superb, and Kennedy outdoes himself as an exciting violin jazz virtuoso. His lyrical ballad Maybe In Your Dreams sports a lovely melody that sounds like it could come from Jerome Kern, and his Stranger in a Stranger Land is a thoughtful ballad with Kennedy adding electronic tremolos behind the sax and piano solos. This treatment of Horace Silver’s familiar Song for My Father may well become my favorite version of the tune. The only track of the 11 which I felt didn’t work was the band’s guitarist doing the one vocal on Expansions.

TrackList: Midnight Blue, Sudel, Maybe in your Dreams, Sunshine Alley, Nearly, Expansions, Stranger in a Stranger Land, Song for My Father, After the Rain, I Almost Lost My Mind, Song for World Forgiveness.

 – John Henry

 

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