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Nigel Kennedy (born 28 December 1956) is an English musician and composer. He plays the violin, viola and piano.
His early career was primarily spent performing classical music, and has since expanded into jazz music, klezmer, and other music genres.
Kennedy was born in Brighton. A child prodigy, at age 10 he picked out Fats Waller tunes on the piano after hearing his stepfather's jazz records. At the age of 7, he became a pupil at the Yehudi Menuhin School of Music. He later studied at the Juilliard School in New York City with Dorothy DeLay. While there he helped to pay for his studies by busking with fellow student and cellist Thomas Demenga.
In 1992, Kennedy announced the end of his career in classical music. Around this time, he recorded the album Music in Colours with Stephen Duffy. He returned to the international concert platform in the mid-1990s. In 1997, he received an award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music at the BRIT Awards, and in 2001 received the 'Male Artist of the Year' award.
In other music genres, Kennedy recorded a cover of Jimi Hendrix's "Fire" for the 1993 album . The same year, he made an appearance on Robert Plant's solo album Fate of Nations on the track "Calling to you". In 1999, Sony Classical released The Kennedy Experience, which featured improvisational recordings based on Hendrix compositions. Kennedy's autobiography, Always Playing, was published in 1991.Nigel Kennedy Always Playing. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991
Kennedy returned to the 2008 Proms after an absence of 21 years, performing Edward Elgar Violin Concerto and a late-night Prom with the Nigel Kennedy Quintet. He was appointed artistic director of the Polish Chamber Orchestra and in 2010, founded the Orchestra of Life, an ensemble of mainly Polish musicians.
In August 2013, he again returned to the Proms performing The Four Seasons at a concert featuring Kennedy with a group of young Palestinian musicians, the Palestine Strings from the Edward Said Conservatory of Music, and the Orchestra of Life. According to Michael Church of The Independent, in the first movement "Spring", Kennedy "swerved off-course with a flurry of bird-tweets followed by a jazz riff from his bassist; the staccato chords of the next movement were decorated by a microtonal Arabic riff from one of the guest players". Near the end of the concert, the BBC removed the violinist's attribution of apartheid to Israel from the television broadcast on BBC4. The comments were broadcast live on BBC Radio 3. A representative of the Corporation said they did not "fall within the editorial remit of the Proms as a classical music festival." Kennedy said:
Kennedy objected to the removal of his remarks from the broadcast. A condition of the booking, to which Kennedy had agreed, was not making such a comment, according to his manager.
Kennedy also plays the viola, and has recorded Sir William Walton's Viola Concerto. Kennedy's own compositions include incidental music for Chekhov's play Three Sisters. Kennedy published his second autobiography, Nigel Kennedy Uncensored!, in 2021.;
Until 2006, Kennedy expressed his intention of not appearing on the classical London concert scene with a London orchestra, which was seen by some as arrogance, although he rationalised it in terms of frustrated perfectionism:
It all comes down to the amount of rehearsal you get, or don't get, in this country. I insist on three or four sessions prior to a concert, and orchestral administrators won't accommodate that. If I didn't care about getting it right, I could do three concerts in the same amount of time and earn three times the money. But you can't do something properly in less time than it takes.
Kennedy expresses a preferencebooklet Beethoven violin concerto (1992) for the immediate appeal of live performance, and often records entire works or movements in single takes to preserve this sense in his recordings. He also introduces improvised elements to his performances, as in his Jimi Hendrix-inspired cadenza to Beethoven's Violin Concerto and his jazz and jazz-rock fusion recordings.
In September 2021, Kennedy cancelled a performance at the Royal Albert Hall after the host, Classic FM, prevented him from including a Jimi Hendrix composition at the concert. He had intended to perform a version of "Little Wing" in the manner of Ralph Vaughan Williams
Kennedy acknowledges regularly smoking cannabis to aid his creativity.
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