Reviews of Memory
GEORGEOUS RAINY DAY MUSIC FROM THE PICKPOCKET ENSEMBLE
Sometimes the best albums take the longest to get to know: that’s our excuse for sitting on this one as long as we have (it came out last fall). Bay Area instrumentalists Pickpocket Ensemble’s latest album Memory is one of the most unselfconsciously beautiful ones to come over the transom in recent months. Their dark, austere, gypsy-tinged acoustic melodies linger over tricky rhythms that sometimes shift shape to the point where it’s impossible not to get lost. Plaintive but not sentimental, wistful without being hokey, this is tremendously captivating rainy-day music.
The opening cut, Home, blends elements of Belgian barroom musette with tricky gypsy rhythms, bandleader/accordionist Rick Corrigan layering one track over another like a piece of baklava, guitarist Yates Brown and violinist Marguerite Ostro’s lines mingling with the wary ambience over the shifting pulse of bassist Kurt Ribak and percussionist Michaelle Goerlitz. The aptly titled 3 AM veers closer to gypsy jazz with staccato piano and memorably spiky solos from both piano and guitar. The third track, If (not to be confused with the cheeseball 70s hit by Bread…or the Pink Floyd tune, come to think of it) is another brooding minor key number, violin taking the lead over incisive, thoughtful fingerpicked guitar. Brown’s gorgeously spiraling solo over shuffling acoustic guitar and bright piano on the fourth track, Sometimes Never, is one of the album’s high points.
Baroque meets jazz on the wistful ballad Bird in a Web, featuring another beautiful Brown solo. They follow that with the bittersweet, elegaic waltz For Those Who’ve Left and then Seriously, which blends gypsy jazz with a cosmopolitan, Astor Piazzolla-ish elegance. The title track adds banjo and brass – and a sizzling muted trumpet solo – over a bracing minor-key gospel melody; after a brief Arab-flavored spot for solo cello, they close the album with a characteristically pensive, rhythmically dizzying number titled Nowhere Else. Fans of eclectic pan-global bands from Beirut to Kotorino will enjoy this: count it among the best we’ve heard lately. - Lucid Culture 2.19.11
"Rick Corrigan’s self-labeled ‘café music’ bleeds across genres, mixing and matching continents and cultures, ultimately creating an intimate experience that doesn’t segregate—but rather celebrates"
On MEMORY The pickPocket Ensemble incorporate violin, accordion, trumpet, guitar and banjo compositions, scored to complex, yet toe-tappingly vibrant time signatures that allow listeners to meander through European cities, become caught up in the winds above the Atlas Mountains and trace steps back to the strangely familiar lands of a foreign cinema soundtrack. Their name relates to the pocket-sized capacity of the instrumentals of around three-minutes in length, whose small bursts intertwine influences from European cities onto the contours of their Balkan inspired landscapes. From the Latino rhythms of 3am to the melodic longing of the violin-led, and piano-accompanied If, the five-piece hailing from North California create music full of mystery, heartache, joy and spirit—but at the core of this—memory.
Corrigan himself noted numerous listeners’ comments on the nostalgic feel unearthed upon watching the collective, and on playing this release: of fans ‘remind[ed] of music they heard as a child…[yet] it’s never the same song twice and never the same place twice.’ There is something both familiar and dreamily evocative in what is, in essence, world music tastefully pickpocketed from Paris, Tuscany, Eastern Europe and Africa.
Thankfully the quintet is deft in its stitching, and in distilling this music, through simplifying though never losing flair or originality, the pickPocket Ensemble have succeeded in creating an album that seamlessly skips effortlessly through the continents of their influence, with arrangements so full of energy and emotion that you can almost feel them standing before you in some dusty Parisian cafe. - Melanie McGovern, Maverick Magazine 3.11
Instrumental compositions of near perfect café music… if they were playing at a café near me I’d stay there all day.
- Nick Brown, whisperin&hollerin
GEORGEOUS RAINY DAY MUSIC FROM THE PICKPOCKET ENSEMBLE
Sometimes the best albums take the longest to get to know: that’s our excuse for sitting on this one as long as we have (it came out last fall). Bay Area instrumentalists Pickpocket Ensemble’s latest album Memory is one of the most unselfconsciously beautiful ones to come over the transom in recent months. Their dark, austere, gypsy-tinged acoustic melodies linger over tricky rhythms that sometimes shift shape to the point where it’s impossible not to get lost. Plaintive but not sentimental, wistful without being hokey, this is tremendously captivating rainy-day music.
The opening cut, Home, blends elements of Belgian barroom musette with tricky gypsy rhythms, bandleader/accordionist Rick Corrigan layering one track over another like a piece of baklava, guitarist Yates Brown and violinist Marguerite Ostro’s lines mingling with the wary ambience over the shifting pulse of bassist Kurt Ribak and percussionist Michaelle Goerlitz. The aptly titled 3 AM veers closer to gypsy jazz with staccato piano and memorably spiky solos from both piano and guitar. The third track, If (not to be confused with the cheeseball 70s hit by Bread…or the Pink Floyd tune, come to think of it) is another brooding minor key number, violin taking the lead over incisive, thoughtful fingerpicked guitar. Brown’s gorgeously spiraling solo over shuffling acoustic guitar and bright piano on the fourth track, Sometimes Never, is one of the album’s high points.
Baroque meets jazz on the wistful ballad Bird in a Web, featuring another beautiful Brown solo. They follow that with the bittersweet, elegaic waltz For Those Who’ve Left and then Seriously, which blends gypsy jazz with a cosmopolitan, Astor Piazzolla-ish elegance. The title track adds banjo and brass – and a sizzling muted trumpet solo – over a bracing minor-key gospel melody; after a brief Arab-flavored spot for solo cello, they close the album with a characteristically pensive, rhythmically dizzying number titled Nowhere Else. Fans of eclectic pan-global bands from Beirut to Kotorino will enjoy this: count it among the best we’ve heard lately. - Lucid Culture 2.19.11
"Rick Corrigan’s self-labeled ‘café music’ bleeds across genres, mixing and matching continents and cultures, ultimately creating an intimate experience that doesn’t segregate—but rather celebrates"
On MEMORY The pickPocket Ensemble incorporate violin, accordion, trumpet, guitar and banjo compositions, scored to complex, yet toe-tappingly vibrant time signatures that allow listeners to meander through European cities, become caught up in the winds above the Atlas Mountains and trace steps back to the strangely familiar lands of a foreign cinema soundtrack. Their name relates to the pocket-sized capacity of the instrumentals of around three-minutes in length, whose small bursts intertwine influences from European cities onto the contours of their Balkan inspired landscapes. From the Latino rhythms of 3am to the melodic longing of the violin-led, and piano-accompanied If, the five-piece hailing from North California create music full of mystery, heartache, joy and spirit—but at the core of this—memory.
Corrigan himself noted numerous listeners’ comments on the nostalgic feel unearthed upon watching the collective, and on playing this release: of fans ‘remind[ed] of music they heard as a child…[yet] it’s never the same song twice and never the same place twice.’ There is something both familiar and dreamily evocative in what is, in essence, world music tastefully pickpocketed from Paris, Tuscany, Eastern Europe and Africa.
Thankfully the quintet is deft in its stitching, and in distilling this music, through simplifying though never losing flair or originality, the pickPocket Ensemble have succeeded in creating an album that seamlessly skips effortlessly through the continents of their influence, with arrangements so full of energy and emotion that you can almost feel them standing before you in some dusty Parisian cafe. - Melanie McGovern, Maverick Magazine 3.11
Instrumental compositions of near perfect café music… if they were playing at a café near me I’d stay there all day.
- Nick Brown, whisperin&hollerin
Soul Cafe
SF's Pickpocket Ensemble follow up their fine fourth album Fingerpainting in Red Wine with Soul Cafe, an EP of seven songs drawn from an intimate liver performance at a venue called Strings. As alsays Rick Corrigan and co. conjure somber, slinky atmospheres from their ensemble of violin, doulbe bass, guitar, accordion and percussion. Although we file their cds in the jazz section of aQ, their sound is far-reaching, stretching across genres and regional borders to incorporate elemts of Klezmer, swing jazz, Balkan gypsy folk, classical chamber, Asian and African rhythms. Terrific!
-Aquarius Records
SF's Pickpocket Ensemble follow up their fine fourth album Fingerpainting in Red Wine with Soul Cafe, an EP of seven songs drawn from an intimate liver performance at a venue called Strings. As alsays Rick Corrigan and co. conjure somber, slinky atmospheres from their ensemble of violin, doulbe bass, guitar, accordion and percussion. Although we file their cds in the jazz section of aQ, their sound is far-reaching, stretching across genres and regional borders to incorporate elemts of Klezmer, swing jazz, Balkan gypsy folk, classical chamber, Asian and African rhythms. Terrific!
-Aquarius Records
If I Were A Highway
If you only knew how good this act is... the pickPocket Ensemble is a band from San Francisco founded by accordionist and composer Rick Corrigan. They play a certain style of music that can't be found anywhere, not even in the geographical areas they claim their music to be coming from. Middle eastern? Gypsy Music? let's call it pickPocket style. If I Were A Highway is their best production and it should be looked closely not as a pop phenomenon nor as a potential world success, but just as beautiful music with no boundaries of any kind. "Prague" is a gypsy dance tune that recalls those Czech Republic cafes on the street where beautiful women are trying to steal your heart as well as your tourist-ass-wallet. "Valls" is a connection to spanish-peruvian waltzes, arriving softly on our ears. Once again, where's Sony, Nonesuch or Telarc? Can't they sign this band already? The world needs this band ASAP.
-Javier Moreno, CacaoRock
If you only knew how good this act is... the pickPocket Ensemble is a band from San Francisco founded by accordionist and composer Rick Corrigan. They play a certain style of music that can't be found anywhere, not even in the geographical areas they claim their music to be coming from. Middle eastern? Gypsy Music? let's call it pickPocket style. If I Were A Highway is their best production and it should be looked closely not as a pop phenomenon nor as a potential world success, but just as beautiful music with no boundaries of any kind. "Prague" is a gypsy dance tune that recalls those Czech Republic cafes on the street where beautiful women are trying to steal your heart as well as your tourist-ass-wallet. "Valls" is a connection to spanish-peruvian waltzes, arriving softly on our ears. Once again, where's Sony, Nonesuch or Telarc? Can't they sign this band already? The world needs this band ASAP.
-Javier Moreno, CacaoRock