Ménage Á trois

continued

together in 1998 completely justifies him. Indeed, the union of the three is not only the best thing that any of them has ever done, it is also one of the hippest fusions of classical and jazz since Yehudi Menuhin and Stéphane Grappelli.

In a word, the disc burns. The tunes Sergio Assad has written and arranged come from the Gypsy traditions of Spain, Hungary, Macedonia, and Transylvania. Every one of them leaves nothing but cinders in its wake. From the blistering "Andalucia" to the stomping "Somogy's Dream," Salerno-Sonnenberg and the Assad Brothers play together like a postmodernist Grappelli with twin Django Reinhardts.

The really amazing thing is that Salerno-Sonnenberg's burn-baby-burn violin playing fits so well with the Assads' ninety-nine-million-notes-per-second guitar technique. In most classical-jazz crossovers, the classical players sound as stiff as rigor mortis and the jazz players as loose as Jerry Lee Lewis — a combination that can be less appealing than necrophilia. But Salerno-Sonnenberg and the Assads play together with the funky tightness of a ménage Á trois in Ipanema.