Rock byRichard Cook
Remember The Four Seasons? Virtuoso classical pop, music that could turn a generation on to the old stuff, and who better to make it happen for them than a punk Kreisler with a fine line in cheeky-chappie insouciance? The beginning of the 1990s seemed to herald an entertaining amount of uproar as several musical worlds braced themselves for irremediable fusion, and it looked certain that Nigel Kennedy would be one of the prime stirrers of the mixing bowl. Somewhere along the line he lost his grip, stardom impinging on achievement, and for the past few years he has been notable by his absence from a productive major role. Nothing has so far quite caught the public imagination again with the same fervour as the Vivaldi, and with classical crossovers from Vanessa Mae to Charlotte Church getting younger by the minute, a 42-year-old violinist with funny hair and bovver boots suddenly seems a bit passe.
More than one admirer said back then that Kennedy's ferocious talent would see him through any fall from fashionable grace, and perhaps The Kennedy Experience (Sony Classics) vindicates such faith. While a comfortable living in the established repertory could still keep him busy, this dense, almost sumptuous record suggests he has very different ambitions. It's a homage to another Experience, the one fronted by Jimi Hendrix, with six of the guitarist's compositions reinvented for an eight-piece acoustic ensemble, which Kennedy leads exultantly from the front. The results are startling on so many levels that it's hard to know where to start considering it.
Thirty years dead, Hendrix has become more of an icon than a listened-to musician, and his surviving music is a patchy, problematic legacy. Scruffily recorded, the original albums have been remastered countless times already and only rarely reveal the instrumental genius which one feels is always compromised by his settings. Kennedy has chosen some of Hendrix's most demanding pieces and imposed a sometimes forbidding complexity on them. It's a tribute to Hendrix's original ideas that the themes stand up: there are moments where the criss-cross virtuosity of the eight players might have been asphyxiating. Yet Kennedy's conviction tends to sweep doubts aside.
For one thing, there are few compromises of his own. "1983 . . . (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)" was always one of the most extravagant of Hendrix's creations, but Kennedy's even longer interpretation rebuilds the piece with head-spinning intensity. "Little Wing" allows for a guitar solo by John Etheridge that rivals the master himself for exuberant invention, and the colours that come out of this unamplified ensemble (violin, two cellos, two guitars, flute, oboe and bass) are a match for any guitarist's pedalboard. "Drifting", one of the smaller pieces, becomes a lush lament, sprung off the bass line and climaxing in the leader's skittering improvisation over a repeated vamp on the guitars. It's the delicacy that is the unexpected ingredient here, Hendrix reborn as pastoral minstrel.
There are fireworks in abundance, too, and occasionally - well, often in fact - Kennedy overreaches himself. The groomed chaos of "Purple Haze", which the Kronos Quartet used to play as an encore, is an overcooked finale, and sometimes the violin parts can sound like a frantic sawing. But that emphasises how Kennedy has refused to approach this as a jazz-based project: just as Hendrix was an improviser born out of rock, Kennedy plays in a style that sounds nothing like the jazz violin masters, even if the album is partly dedicated to Stephane Grappelli. Portamento and false-register effects, deliberate scraping, riff-based solos - Kennedy has done his damnedest to translate Hendrix's language without bridling his own awesome technique. Whatever you expect this record to sound like, it sounds like something else, as myriad and lavish and heated as Hendrix might have wished his music to be. Welcome back, Nigel.
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