A jazz promoter's son who banged on pots and pans at three

Lenny Kravitz was three when he started playing the kitchen's pots and pans as drums. By five he had decided he wanted to be a musician. His mother was the actress Roxie Roker, and his father, Sy Kravitz, was a television news producer and a jazz promoter whose friends included Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and Miles Davis. Ellington played “Happy Birthday” for him on his fifth birthday.

He spent weekdays on the Upper East Side and weekends at his grandmother's house in Bedford-Stuyvesant, listening to R&B, jazz, classical, opera, gospel and blues. Around the age of seven he saw the Jackson 5 at Madison Square Garden, and they became his favourites. In 1974, aged ten, he moved with his parents to Los Angeles after his mother was cast in The Jeffersons.

His debut album, Let Love Rule, came out in 1989, blending rock, funk, reggae, soul and R&B. Hits followed: “It Ain't Over 'til It's Over”, which reached the Billboard Hot 100's top ten, then “Are You Gonna Go My Way”, “Fly Away”, “American Woman” and “Again”. From 1999 to 2002 he won the Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance four years in a row, a record for consecutive wins by a male performer in a single category. He has sold more than 40 million albums worldwide.

Songs such as “Heaven Help” and “I Belong to You” show the softer side of that range, while the big riffs show the other. He has also acted, in Precious and the first two Hunger Games films, and founded the design studio Kravitz Design. What ties it together is a restless taste for old sounds worn in a new way, the result of a childhood in which every kind of music was welcome at the table.