Do swing and avant-garde jazz get along at all?

Definitely when two masters meet.

This is what happened in 1966 at the Berlin Jazz Days, when the idea came up of Stéphane Grappelli performing in a violin duo with Jean-Luc Ponty.

But does an adventurous jazz fiddler from Europe get along with a cheeky rock guitarist from America?

It's great if one is called Jean-Luc Ponty and the other is called Frank Zappa.

This is what happened in 1970 for Ponty's album "King Kong" with Zappa's "Music for Electric Violin and Low Budget Orchestra", one of the craziest violin concertos of the twentieth century.

Another try: Can a musician play with the Debussy string section in the Orchester des Concerts Lamoureux during the day and emulate John Coltrane as a soloist on the tenor saxophone in Parisian jazz clubs at night?

No,

And so the aspiring classical violin virtuoso Jean-Luc Ponty did not become a jazz saxophonist, but at least a virtuoso jazz violinist.

After all, he was still able to unite the two souls in his chest and transform the violin, the classical instrument of his choice, into jazz, the current music of his choice.

In archaic jazz, which was not called that at the time, violins were common, then fewer and fewer and usually only as a secondary instrument, and finally more often again when jazz conventions were left behind and the delicate tones of the violin began to be denatured in free jazz – as with Ornette Coleman – or connected the violin to the mains.

Ponty was responsible for this, not only electrifying his instrument, but also alienating it with a wah-wah pedal and connecting it with MIDI technology.

What that sounds like can be heard on many recordings that the French violinist from Normandy, with an excellent classical exam at the Paris Conservatory, made with numerous luminaries of modern jazz in Europe - Wolfgang Dauner, Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen,

There are recordings that show Ponty as a technically brilliant violinist, with whom one could always pull the plug without fearing a loss of substance and realize how much the electrical engineering is a plus, not a must.

With Ponty, classics like “Nuages”, which Django Reinhardt popularized with Stéphane Grappelli and the Quintette du Hot Club de France, are just as inspiring as the parallel high-speed phrases with guitarist John McLaughlin in the Mahavishnu Orchestra or the futuristic siren sounds in his Solo from "Wandering on the Milky Way".

In his versatility, which he also demonstrates in a quartet or trio with his piano-playing daughter Clara Ponty, he has long been unrivaled in jazz.

Today he can celebrate his eightieth birthday.