Nigel Kennedy

0:00BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts.

0:11Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which the world's leading artistic figures reveal the most important people, places, events and cultural works that have inspired their own creativity. I'm John Wilson, and my guest in this episode is the violinist Nigel Kennedy, a prodigy whose childhood talents were nurtured by Yehudi Menuhin. Kennedy became an international star in 1989 with his recording of Vivaldi's Four Seasons. It sold over three million copies, topping the UK classical charts for a year, and it went on to be listed as the biggest-selling classical album of all time in the Guinness Book of Records.

0:48But an unconventional classical musician from the outset, it wasn't just his wardrobe, accent and attitude that set him apart. As well as recording all the major violin concertos, his repertoire includes jazz standards, folk tunes and Jimi Hendrix. Nigel Kennedy remains one of the world's greatest virtuosos. Nigel Kennedy, welcome to This Cultural Life. Great to be with you. You were born in Brighton in England in 1956 and there was a lot of music already in your blood, your mother, father and grandfather, all musicians. Your mother was a single mum, brought you up by herself and taught piano at home.

1:28So is that your earliest cultural memory, listening to her? Yeah, my earliest recollection of anything cultural was like hearing her teaching pupils coming into the flat. I was kept under the piano because piano teaching was not a renumerative profession, really. and so there wasn't a babysitter possibility. So she'd dump me under the piano and I'd hear Chopin and Schubert and Beethoven at kind of Led Zeppelin levels, you know, with accentuated bass because under... I tell you, I still like lying under a piano if I'm in a bad party of mine and someone's playing it. I'll go and lie down and listen to it.

2:07It's a completely different noise. Because of the reverberation? Yes, and the deep lower frequencies and I'm always careful if I'm playing the piano because I play a bit in my gigs and that, that I'll have a mic underneath the piano to capture those rich, darker sounds as well as the more prosaic, treble-orientated sounds. Wow, so that really is a very early formative experience. Yes, and it put me into the direction of harmony because hearing the piano and piano music being so harmonic, it gave me something which maybe as a normal violinist I wouldn't have. What did you know about your father and your grandfather at this time?

2:47Well, I knew they were a long way away, like both of those guys, because my dad was back in Australia while I'd been born in England. He was Australian. He was Australian-Irish kind of background.

3:03You know, he was a really talented cello player, and as a 21-year-old, which is really pretty much just out of college, He was leading the cello section of the Royal Philharmonic in London when Beecham started that orchestra.

3:25And then my granddad, Laurie, he was a pretty renowned cellist. He was working under Toscanini. He played with Heifetz. He played also with Rubinstein. He played with Rachmaninoff, I believe.

3:43So, you know how in Scotland they say you can't be a real piper unless you're third generation. Well, I'm third generation, so I'm real. Nigel, the real deal Kennedy, man. You know, but, like, there's almost something DNA about it as well as environmental.

4:04So if your father and your grandfather were both renowned cellists, why did you not take up the cello? Well, my mum thought I'd be good at string instruments, but because my dad had kind of vamoosed over to Aussie world, she didn't want a cello in the house. Oh, but it really was a reaction to her relationship breaking down and him leaving. Exactly. She didn't want to remind her of that. She didn't want to remind him or even gratify his ego that his son was playing the cello. So she got me on the violin, which I'm so happy about now. When I was a child, I always wanted to play the cello and maybe that was to do with being kept under the piano because hearing those deep bass frequency sounds, I preferred the richer sound of the cello rather than the more strident, piercing sound of the violin.

4:54But she just wouldn't let me go on it and then I got into Yehudi's school of music, Yehudi Menuhin School of Music, and I got a scholarship from him and so I think they definitely wanted me to play the violin if I was going to be the recipient of the Menuhin scholarship. So then my future was kind of set. Well, Nigel, that was simply terrific. Come up to my height now. Well, now, for a seven-year-old, that was pretty good playing, I think. How long have you been playing the piano? Two years. You also play the violin, don't you? Yes. And how long have you been playing that? Eight months. Mrs Kennedy, you must be very proud of your son.

5:35This is a very valuable scholarship he's just won. It's worth almost£4 ,000, I believe. Yes, it's the most wonderful thing to have happened because it assures his education for the next eight or nine years. Did you take to it right from the start? No, it was a gruesome process. You know, standing up and playing the violin was very unattractive compared with sitting down and playing the piano. And this is common with all violinists, that we all feel very uncomfortable in the early years. You know, guitar or piano, they're self-sufficient, whereas the violin, you're playing these meaningless lines which only start meaning something if you've got a pianist accompanying you.

6:16Like, I don't know, Sati Gymnopadi, for instance. You've just got this melody.

6:27And that's as nice as I can do it. If you don't know what the harmonies are, then it's just... It's like a sentence with no meaning to it. Listeners will be aware that you have arrived in this Cultural Life studio with your violin. Does it go everywhere with you? It hounds me, man. That's always around. You know, I don't let anyone else carry it. On the aeroplane, it has to go in with me. The fiddle's always there. I might sometimes have a couple of days without playing it, but I've always got a violin around. You never know when the opportunity might arise. You think of an idea or you meet somebody you want to play with.

7:03You know, I quite like meeting people on the street or, you know, something might happen in a pub. And then if the fiddle's not within half a kilometre or something, you're kind of, you can't do anything. My singing is not anything to write home about. It's something to leave home about if I start doing it in the home. But like the violin, it reflects your heart. That's something I learnt at a young age. The intonation, how you play, it'll just give away your feelings. And that's something which happens without pre-planning.

7:36On This Cultural Life, Nigel Kennedy, I asked my guests to choose the formative influences and the inspirations that have helped forge their own work. And your first choice, or choices I should say, are two violinists, Yehudi Menuhin and Stefan Grapelli. And at the age of seven, you won a scholarship to the Yehudi Menuhin School of Music. Let's start there. How did you get to the Menuhin School? By car. I don't know, you know, like there were auditions when I was about six years old and my mum thought I was going to be something good on the violin. And so she said, all right, I'll take the kid down there to London.

8:19because for the first year the school was in Kensington, then they bought this country house, huge estate in Surrey.

8:30I went and played for Yehudi and one or two other strange-looking teachers who were there.

8:41Yehudi was charismatic, and it was a good audition in the aspect that I couldn't really play the violin. and I'd only been playing it about six or seven months. Wow, really? Yeah, and he noticed that I could play in tune. It's not that I could play like Paganini or anything, but I was playing in tune with a good tone production. By the clarity and rhythm of his violin playing, which was still an embryonic stage, but already had the mark of strong rhythmic personality, and the impeccable ear that demanded perfect intonation, regardless of the awkwardness with which he may have handled the instrument, I knew that I was dealing with one who would inevitably become the musician he was destined to be.

9:29Then also he was singing to me phrases and he was saying, can you make up the second half of this phrase? And it turned out I was very good at that. So they were judging not just for instrumental virtuosity, they were trying to see what the potential of a musician was. Your musicality. Yes. This is the early mid-60s then, I guess, so he probably would have been the most famous violinist in the world. Did you know who he was? I'd been to a concert of his in the Brighton Dome and he was such a charismatic guy, you know, with his blonde hair and blue eyes and then playing with the soul. You know, that five notes of his, this is something I kind of learnt later, but it must have transmitted to me at the time, five notes of his were worth, like, more than a thousand of another violinist.

10:30He could play a melody and every layer of it, the poignancy, the melodic qualities, the direction of it. He would have that. Other players, you'd be impressed by how clever they were, how good their bow was, how quick they were playing. This man, he could convey the emotional intelligence of whichever music he was playing.

11:07So you won a place at the menu in school. You're away from home at seven years old. What was that like? What was school life like? It was a very strange place, I have to say. It wasn't like the greatest gift from God to be in a place where Yehudi would get a fad. One time it would be he'd turn up at the school and say, oh, it's good for all the kids to be taking Bairstraf, which was some kind of dark brown liquid which you'd have to have out of a little medical mug thing. And it was syrupy and that. It probably had a lot of yeast and other stuff in it. He was into health foods and yoga. He was into that, yeah.

11:46And another time he'd turn up with seaweed tablets. So then we'd have to have seaweed tablets or shoals, you know, those wooden clanking shoes and that. And it was just really uncomfortable. I mean, my trousers came back from the laundry like concrete because I'd stashed the seaweed tablets in the pockets because I wasn't going to eat that stuff. So that was very weird. He had a lot of sycophants around him who would do whatever he thought. What was great with him later was making some kind of musical relationship with him. When I started playing jazz on the piano and the teachers were coming in, giving me a rap on the knuckles and saying, get out of the room, you can't play that stuff there.

12:28His reaction was, oh, it's fantastic that his mind's actually working. When did you first hear jazz then? I first heard it when I was about seven or eight from my stepfather's jazz record collection, which people call Vinyl now. So he had all of these albums of Fats Waller and Satchmo and the Louis Armstrong Hot Five, you know, the early stuff from the 30s. and so I really got into swing.

13:01That's interesting because a lot of people think, you know, Nigel Kennedy started out as the classical violinist who then explored jazz, but jazz was there right from the start. It was there right from the start and, I mean, it was the kind of jazz which maybe a middle-class doctor might listen to because that's what my stepfather was, but at least it was great jazz. To the extent that, when I heard Stefan Grappelli the first time, when I was about 13, and he was the first important... Him and Django Reinhardt were the first important European jazz. Yes. But I thought, that's not jazz.

13:43But you've chosen Stefan Grappelli, the French jazz violinist, alongside Menuhin as a formative influence. When did you first come across Grappelli then? When did you first meet him? You made such a smooth segue. Well, Stefan, like, he was invited to Yehudi's school when I was maybe 13. And he came and played for us and he was very nervous, all of us precocious brats, all so clever on our little violins and stuff. At one point he asked us a kind of joke to loosen things up. Will, does anybody want to play? And I said, yeah, and I'd got my violin underneath the chair. An expletive almost slipped out of my mouth then, but I'm keeping it straight for the BBC now.

14:31I was ready to play and I knew his repertoire. I knew the Fats Waller songs he played. I knew the Gershwin songs he played. And he was so happy that someone from two or three generations below him was into his type of music. That's amazing. So you were already aware of his repertoire? Yes, yeah, and I played in a very different way. I played more like a violinist who was equally great called Stuff Smith, who was from Detroit, I reckon, originally, and he played Brutal Swing, but it swung like a bucket hitting a donkey's head, you know. It was phenomenal. He wasn't so suave like Stefan, and so it made a really good mix.

15:13Stefan playing his beautiful, flowing music and me playing my more minimal style. If I'd have just been copying him, I don't think it would have worked. That must have been an amazing moment to have stood up in front of your classmates, I presume, with Stefan Grappelli playing a different style to the sort of music that you were being taught every day at the menu in school. Did that give you the taste for the limelight for being centre stage, do you think? Well, it kind of gave me, first of all, the confidence that I had was because I tried to get a few others playing along to the records in Yehudi's school of the old jazz stuff, and they were proverbial toilet at it.

15:53So I knew I could get up and play and I wouldn't disgrace myself because the other ones were, they just weren't into it. I knew I loved improvising and it actually gave me a whole sense of vitality in my classical playing, the realisation that the moment is now. It's not yesterday, it's not tomorrow, it's this magic moment. And I started learning that when I was about 13 from trying to play with the albums of Stefan. And so when I was allowed out of the school on the weekends, he was just reviving his career after having played with Yehudi on the Parkinson's show. Because that was 1971. It was Michael Parkinson who brought Yehudi Menuhin and Stefan Grappelli together.

16:32Exactly. Stefan Grappelli and Yehudi Menuhin joined together, need I say, for the very first time, to play their version of Jealousy.

16:46And then that collaboration... And they jammed in that programme. Yeah, and Stefan was playing in Sacha Distel's club in Paris for 100 francs a week. So nothing, really, even in them days. And, like, his career started going, and Stefan was playing in folk clubs and places around England, and I was able to go on Friday and Saturday nights to play with him if it was within a 30, 40-mile radius of Yehudi's school. so I got an amazing apprenticeship as a young teenager playing with him. He never told me how to do anything. He just liked it that I played different and he'd say, Lady Be Good, Limehouse Blues, you know, all of that stuff and we'd just play it.

17:33And there were wonderful players in his group which showed me another way of life altogether as well. It wasn't so rarefied, you know, it was like He'd go around antique shops every day and I'd go with him and he'd look at everything in the antique shop and say, I do not like this, let's go somewhere else. And he'd just do that all day. And then he'd get up on the stage, play like an angel without four hours' practice preparation and just from his ear and his sense of life was an eye-opener. So what was Yehudi Menuhin's attitude to incorporating jazz into your repertoire and having this new sense of musical freedom?

18:09His attitude was also phenomenal, I have to say. He respected Stefan as an equal, which was very unusual in classical music at the time where they had kind of delusions of superiority over any other form of music. Perhaps musically the most adventurous of our youngsters, particularly because he's lost his heart to Stefan Grappelli. I rather approve of that. it doesn't meet with unanimous support. People have strict categories in their thought and they imagine that certain things don't mix with others. The other thing with Stefan, it gave me a whole joy in music making which I didn't have before.

18:53It was all a bit like Harry Potter and like Gormungust in the Yehudi Menuhin School. It was all weird characters and frustrated kids away from their families and, like, all with huge parental expectations. And Stefan enjoying that magic moment and making relationship with the audience, it became a live art form music as opposed to being a pre-planned intellectual art form. Well, you could say he freed you up or he corrupted you. He corrupted me into enjoying life. I mean, God forbid, you know.

19:33After the Yehudi menu in school, you continued your musical studies at Juilliard, the prestigious conservatory in New York, and you've chosen this time that you spent in New York as your next big formative experience. You're talking about not what you heard there in the classrooms, but what you heard in the clubs, specifically the jazz clubs of New York. Before we talk about that, what was your first impression of Juilliard? How different was the teaching to the sort of thing that you'd experienced at the menu in school? Very backward, I would say. You know, they were way behind the musical knowledge that we had in Europe.

20:06We're really taught about how to analyse the shape of a symphony by Brahms or like Beethoven and to be able to analyse harmonic progressions. That, of course, going down to the village later, I would be able to develop my harmonic understanding much more by playing jazz. But the classical students in Juilliard were pretty much ignorant of that aspect of music. Nigel is quite an extraordinary talent. I've seen few people who were as open and as receptive to ideas as Nigel is. We had a master class last week, and Nigel was to play a movement of a Bach solo sonata at this master class, and we had to pry him away from playing jazz on the piano to get him to take his violin out.

20:56There's quite a lot going on. In fact, I think I'm improving at my jazz faster than I am at classical music now and playing with different people is helping me find new ways of doing things. You mentioned two jazz pianists in particular, people that you saw, I presume, in these clubs in New York. Jimmy Rolls and Ellis Larkins. When did you see them and where did you see them? Well, I was actually lucky to be able to play with these guys. With Ellis Larkins, in those days, some of the clubs, it was really only black clientele. And I'd be this young guy turning up with a violin and the only white one in the club.

21:34And at first, I'd get opposition to even be going in and they'd say, are you old enough? Basically, it wasn't that question, which was one which mattered. And what is that? What you got? and they'd say violin and obviously violin wasn't equated with jazz at all in these clubs. But meeting Ellis Larkins and playing with him, it was wonderful to hear the harmonic changes that he was doing and the smooth, beautiful touch on the piano.

22:20Whereas Jimmy Rolls, he was playing in Bradley's. It was a club down in Crennish Village, as opposed to up in Harlem. And, like, he knew 3 ,000 songs.

22:38He was a baron leader, composer and a company... He was just playing with Trio. Yeah, but, I mean, that was his reputation. His reputation was like as kind of the piano player who was so great with repertoire. He could just pick up any song and his harmonic understanding was great. And I remember when I said, look, I'm off to England now. I've been offered a lot of classical gigs to play. He really thought I'd sold out. He thought I'd sold out into a more commercial form of music. His feelings were quite hurt by the whole idea of a musician choosing another type of music over jazz.