About The Album

Hailed at the start of his career as a brilliant young prodigy of the classical violin, Nigel Kennedy has been on a mission ever since to prove that no category is big enough to contain him. He has made landmark recordings of concertos by Elgar, Brahms and Beethoven, while branching out into explorations of Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, klezmer music and standards from the jazz repertoire. Today, he has his own jazz outfit, the Nigel Kennedy Quintet, as well as being founder and musical director of the Orchestra of Life.

If there was one recording which established Kennedy as a musical phenomenon, it was his 1989 disc of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, which sold an astounding two million copies and made Kennedy an international celebrity. For this new recording, he brings some of the contrasting themes of his musical life together in The Four Elements, a suite of pieces which he originally conceived as his own 21st century response to Vivaldi's baroque masterpiece.

"Obviously it wasn't an attempt to imitate Vivaldi in any way," Kennedy explains. "But I wanted to use the idea of creating some programmatic, pictorial music based on an underlying theme. The idea that everything is made up of the four elements - air, earth, fire and water - dates back to ancient Greece, and it was a concept that gave us a springboard to start from."

Kennedy spends much of his time at his home in Krakow, where he formed his band and met many of the musicians in his orchestra, but he loves such English composers as Elgar and Vaughan Williams, and he's always happy to return to England. He did the bulk of the composition work on The Four Elements at his house in Sussex, which is in a secluded village at the foot of the South Downs. For Kennedy, one of its main attractions is that you can't get a mobile phone signal unless you go down to a particular spot at the bottom of the garden. "Anywhere that doesn't get a phone signal is a real blessing for a musician," he claims. "It means you have the time and space to soak yourself in the music."

The Four Elements was recorded in the tranquil surroundings of Hook End studios in Oxfordshire. "It's an amazing studio, and it has a really beautiful vibe from being surrounded by typical English woodland," says Kennedy. "In this business you get stuck indoors most of the time, so it was great to be able to get outside and breathe the air and feel part of the landscape. Also I was working with a brilliant group of people, both the musicians and the production team."

It's difficult to sum up the music in a single word or phrase, but the more you listen to it, the more you can hear the way strands from Kennedy's entire musical universe have come together in these tracks. At the start of "Air", for instance, Kennedy plays a haunting violin passage reminiscent of Vaughan Williams's "The Lark Ascending", but as the piece develops it moves through blues, cool dance grooves and hints of Oriental melodies. In "Fire", powerful funk riffs contrast with a skilful blend of violins, keyboards, female voices and percussion. "Finale" begins with a broody motif played by piano and acoustic violins, before evolving through speedy unison passages, reflective vocal interludes and pastoral violin themes, then climaxes in a frantic electric hoedown.

A notable new ingredient in the mix is the electronic drum programming by Damon Reece, who has worked with Massive Attack and Goldfrapp. This lends the music a sleek cutting edge. "He's done some great stuff on the tracks, and it was inspirational having him in the studio. When we go on tour, we'll be playing The Four Elements alongside Vivaldi's Four Seasons, so we'll get Damon to add some beats and other stuff to the Vivaldi so it won't be just another version of the same familiar piece. We'll be adding vocals and lyrics too, so it will be something a lot more contemporary."

Kennedy adds that while making The Four Elements, "I was trying not to deny any part of my musical identity. I feel I don't have to be biased in any particular direction and I can just let the music come out in a way that feels the most natural. I think it's worked really well. Working with singers has maybe stopped me from worrying whether a piece is right for my band or not, and I just made sure everything was right for the song as a whole. It's the song that's more important than any other issues."

Singers featured on the disc include Zee Gachette (formerly known as Zee Starr), of whom Kennedy says: "She has amazing charisma! She's a brilliant improviser and story-teller and a great presence onstage as a performer."

Also returning to the Kennedy fold to add contributions to "Earth" and "Finale" is Xantoné Blaq, a former member of Amy Winehouse's band who featured prominently on Kennedy's single Carnivore of the Animals. "He's like a young Stevie Wonder in the way his voice sounds," says Kennedy. "I got something slightly different out of him this time, because I wanted him to sound a little bit more rock."

Meanwhile the Wood sisters, Sarah and Rachel - who have their own band called Sahreal - contribute a variety of vocal parts throughout the album. "They sing beautifully, and they're not so much jazz-orientated but more in a pop music style," Kennedy adds. "All the singers have done a great job for me, I think."

When Kennedy's ensemble plays the music onstage, it will inevitably stretch out into improvised passages and undergo impromptu changes, but whatever type of music he's playing, Kennedy is aware that he has to keep working at his musical skills. His grandfather and father were both classical cellists and his mother was a pianist, so he has been breathing intensely musical air ever since he was born.

"If you have a musical gift, you have to look after it," he says, "whether that's by doing loads of performances or by practising or whatever. Somebody like [jazz saxophonist] John Coltrane would practise for eight hours during the day and then go and play a gig for three hours. You have to have the artisanship there to communicate the inspiration, so you have to work things out technically to reach those more meditational or spiritual moments."

Some fans of his classical playing don't share his enthusiasm for jazz and improvised music, but these have been part of Kennedy's musical menu since he attended the Yehudi Menuhin school as a boy and was inspired by a visit by Menuhin's friend, the jazz fiddler Stéphane Grappelli. Kennedy often talks about the night when he shared the stage with Grappelli at Carnegie Hall in New York, and he has no doubt that playing jazz has been vital to his artistic growth.

"EarIy in my career, I had a lot of people telling me 'don't play jazz, it will ruin your career'," he remembers. "But I have a competitive edge when I'm improvising with other musicians, and I think that competition is healthy. Also there's intense discipline in listening to other musicians, and improvising for several hours gives you phenomenal stamina. I've learned all kinds of new scales through playing jazz, whether it's Indian ragas or gypsy scales, so my harmonic knowledge is much greater than if I'd only ever played strict classical music."

At the core of Kennedy's playing is the belief that however complicated - or not - the music may be, and whether it's The Four Elements or The Four Seasons, it must have some soul and convey emotion. Without that, it's meaningless.

"I don't like music which only has technique as its primary consideration," he says. "I like music of great technique, but it must have much more than that to get me interested. For instance it's all very well being intellectual about Bach, and a lot of people are, but it's got to have heart in it. People say Bach's music is 'mathematical', but if it was only maths it would be terribly boring.

"My job is to make it as simple as possible for people to appreciate the music, and not blind them with science in order to convince them that I'm a good player. I have to commit myself 100 per cent to go out and play and put my whole heart into it."

Raymond Charles