MASTER OF ALL VIOLIN MEDIA

Since outgrowing child prodigyhood, England's celebrated concert violinist Nigel Kennedy has adopted an affable punk persona and taken to crossing over to most every cool musical genre he can lay his ears on.

Usually when classical music icons make such bold forays, it seems to have more to do with vanity or greed than musicality -- a squirmy-to-watch lesson in how ill-equipped such purebred show animals are to walk on the wild side.

Nigel Kennedy's Kafka -- released in 1996, but if you haven't heard it yet, it's new to you! (as it was to me until a couple months ago) -- is a glorious exception. It would be inadequate to say that Kennedy demonstrates that he has the chops to take on the sprawling hypergenre of progressive fusion music (rock/jazz/world/classical...). He does it so outstandingly (even better, I think, than his genrally peripatetic mentor Yehudi Menuhin) that one wonders if this is where Kennedy's true musical homeland lies.

The eleven tracks of Kafka (don't ask me what the title has to do with the famous writer) -- all written or cowritten and coproduced by Kennedy -- are uniformly good music: engaging, stirring, exciting. But it's Kennedy's astonishing musicianship -- his deployment of an arsenal of acoustic and electric violins as if they were third arms -- that makes one's mouth drop. Kennedy is truly the master of all violin media.

And genres. Ably accompanied by journeyman musicians like Manu Katche (drums), the late Stephane Grappelli (violin, of course), and Canadian diva Jane Siberry -- and through the wonders of modern electronic violin processing -- the fortysomething violinist's pyrotechnic virtuosity spills across one genral boundary after another, gliding and morphing from typically British classical refinement and lyricism one minute, to winsome, sentimental Gypsy jazz, a la Msr. Grappeli the next, to reedy microtonally-inflected mid-Eastern wailing, and on to explosive full-metal jacket. Stradivarius meets Jimi Hendrix (a longtime idol of Kenendy's).

There isn't a single grain of grit in Kennedy's exquisite volleys of grunge and towers of artful noise that isn't convincing and true. As spectacular as the motions are, he isn't just going through them.

Kennedy is a Gypsy in the late twentieth century musical landscape and his contemporaries on either side of the classical/pop music divide could learn an awful lot from him.