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