Nigel Kennedy

Ronnie Scott's, London
4 out of 5 4

In case anyone's overwhelmed by the presence of a world-famous classical violin virtuoso, Nigel Kennedy's jazz-club persona finds him sucking a bottle of beer, making hip-hop hand gestures, swearing, and calling everybody "man". But when he tucks the multi-coloured electric fiddle under his chin while a funk pulse cranks up, he looks as absorbed as if he were playing Brahms. Like a lot of jokey musical giants, Kennedy can't help revealing what he's really serious about.

The violinist was at Ronnie Scott's with the young Polish cross-genre players from his adopted city of Krakow, and it was a much better gig than the group's 2008 jazz Prom. Kennedy stayed out of sight to let a soaring unaccompanied rhapsody of swooping lines and electronic echoes fill the room, and then a Latin swing emerged, in which Tomasz Grzegorski's soprano sax punctuated the violin lines. Grzegorski (a more characterful tenor saxophonist than soprano player) barely shook the piece out of its unassuming groove in his own solo, but Kennedy's later variations brimmed with sharper melodies than the theme itself.

Grzegorski coaxed a softly surging tenor solo of fluent double-time in the gently lyrical second piece, and Kennedy cut loose with an improvisation of plunging downward runs and climactically flurrying ascents that jazz violinists of Jean-Luc Ponty's or Jerry Goodman's stature might have blanched at. A slow, chanson-like dance had the violin and tenor sax entwined, a romantic ballad of classical symmetries brought a similar intimacy with pianist Piotr Wylezoł, and some choppy chordal playing over flat-out funk stoked the show to the boil.

Kennedy's jazz improvising remains stronger than his compositions, but he's a long way from being a dilettante at this kind of thing.

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