The pickPocket Ensemble sounds like players roving between tables at a restaurant with a wide ethnic menu, or cosmopolitan buskers with instrument cases open on the sidewalks of some big city. The San Francisco band could be termed “world music” for the diversity of their influences, but their all-acoustic, honed-from-playing-live arrangements set them apart from the increasingly dull digitalization of global sound. On Memory, the Ensemble draws from Serbian and Gypsy influences, with echoes of jazz and Appalachia, on instrumental compositions that could be the soundtrack to an art house film no one has made. Memory is music to dream with.
