Attempts to fuse classical music and jazz go back as far as the years even before jazz had a name, to New York's "Ragging the Classics" contests around the last turn of the century. But Swiss pianist and conductor David Greilsammer has new ideas with his collection Sounds of Transformation, which features the Geneva Camerata and the jazz piano-and-drums team of Yaron Herman and Ziv Ravitz. Greilsammer begins, as have others, with Baroque pieces, by Lully, Purcell, Marais, and Rameau. These are already different from the Bach works usually employed for such projects: they offer the performers pictorial images to work with, and an emphasis on percussion besides. Greilsammer's innovation is to treat each work differently. Purcell in Transformation is a fairly straightforward jazz improvisation on the Prelude to The Fairy Queen, but it's the only piece that works that way. Elsewhere Greilsammer applies the greater freedom of modern jazz styles, or the elaboration of big-band arrangements, or he creates an original work inspired by Marais, or he leads off with the jazz version (sample Rameau's Secret Cavern, a kind of experimental soundscape) and then joins the classical piece to it. He performs straight one of the jazziest works of the classical repertory, Ravel's Piano Concerto in G major, and he applies jazz not just to Baroque music but to Charles Ives' The Unanswered Question. This effort stands apart from the rest of the album not only in the source material but also in the fact that the two pieces related to the Ives are separated on the album, while all the other pairs are adjacent. This comes out of left field, but musically the sequence of events is satisfying. At the very least, Greilsammer has new ideas about how jazz and classical music might be combined, and this is certainly of interest to anyone fascinated by the question.