"Cultural displacements, borrowings and diasporas are always fascinating. How does something from there become an obsessive craze there? What can there possibly be in common between people from a snowy, mountain-ringed land and those from hot plains, and how do settlers from one ever manage to make a life in the other without succumbing to that dread disease, first identified in Swiss mercenaries in the south, nostalgia?

The spread of jazz is fascinating, perhaps the fastest moving cultural movement and style in history. One minute the Original Dixieland jazz Band, the next jazz clubs in Shanghai, Bombay, Tokyo, Moscow, a global reach. Sometimes the spread is more specific and local. Take tango. A music that was born in port bars and thrived in brothels along the Rio de la Plata has become a national obsession in ... Finland.

Often cultural exchanges are sustained by small emigrant populations, who may maintain a certain self-determined distance from the parent culture, though each is changed more than they originally recognise. Many national cultures are deeply changed by relatively small immigrant populations. Post-colonial Britain has become as much a melting pot as once America aspired to be. In the United States, there are still towns dominated by German, Norwegian or Bohemian settlers, clinging on to language and traditions. In South America, which has the greatest relevance to our real subject here, small populations of German (in Mexico) and Swiss (in Argentina) settlers exert a disproportionate influence.

Sophie Lüssi, whose music you are hearing now, or are about to, claims a mixed Swiss- Argentine heritage. She studied jazz violin in Zurich (consider how remarkable that actually sounds!) before continuing her music education in Buenos Aires, where she lived for the better part of twenty years, a powerful catalyst on the Argentine music scene and founder of new groups intended to revive and reinvent the role of violin in jazz. (There is still a small prejudice here. Our sense of a "typical" jazz group probably involves horns, piano, guitar, drums, but the very earliest jazz groups, or proto-jazz groups, were probably string ensembles.)

Lüssi returned to Switzerland after a pandemic that spread even faster than "Spanish flu" and jazz had done in 1917. What she brought back with her was a deep feeling for tango and the other vernacular musics of South America. It's possible to hear echoes of the milonga and the habanera in some of the pieces on the delightfully named Atlantic Puffin. But what did the Swiss settlers leave behind in Argentina? One fascinating example suffices. In Belgrano, Buenos Aires, there is an educational institution, ninety years old this year , called the Pestalozzi Schule or Colegio Pestalozzi. Its mission is to foster a humanistic education. It was established in 1934 by Ernesto Alemann, a Swiss-Argentine, based on the educational philosophy of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. He may be less widely celebrated than Rudolph Steiner or Maria Montessori, but the kind of learning he advocated in the early 19th century - transformative in Switzerland - has a strong bearing on present day culture and on the art of improvisation.

We all understand what is meant by the distinction between "music for the head" and "music for the heart". And we probably recognise that some music is for the hips and feet. One of the things that Pestalozzi advocated was a system of learning "by head, hand and heart". Training had to be practical as well as theoretical and it had to involve the whole person, rather than just a specialised scholastic, exam-passing corner of the self.

This, it seems to me, is the great strength of Sophie Lüssi's music here on Atlantic Puffin. It is clearly skilled and doesn't deal in casual approximations. It is built on solid technique, a brilliant appropriation of classical violin methods in the interests of improvisation. But her music, which draws on folk as well as canonical forms, is one that emanates from and addresses the whole person. It's generous music, kindly and open, and in its gentle humour it engages a part of the spirit that in our grim-faced, superserious way is too often overlooked. So: music for the head, hand and heart; and you might find yourself dancing a little, too, in delight if not in strict time."-Brian Morton