The Pickpocket Ensemble is a collection of five musicians from Northern California that specialise in chamber café music.
The band consists of Marguerite Ostro on violin, Rick Corrigan who is the composer and plays both accordion and piano, Michaelle Goerlitz on percussion, Yates Brown who plays guitar and banjo, and Kurt Ribak on bass. This is the band’s sixth album release, and is exactly what you would expect.
‘Memory’ is a ten track album, the tracks varying between forty nine seconds and four and a half minutes all instrumental compositions of near perfect café music.
The starter track ‘home’ is an accordion based French-sounding jazz café soundtrack, which eases the listener into the album beautifully. In fact there are no duff tracks on the album, and the music takes on the colours of various different folk and Gypsy music styles.
My favourite compositions on this album are ‘3AM’ a jazzy piano and guitar number, ‘Bird in a Web’ which is primarily guitar based and is bright and uplifting; ‘Seriously’ which has some Eastern European influences and the title track ‘Memory’ which features some fine banjo work from Yates Brown along with some great trumpet from Peter Jacques who was guesting, and is the perfect party accompaniment.
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In fact, there’s very little that I can add about this. The band clearly know their stuff, and Rick Corrigan knows how to compose the perfect café soundtrack. Whilst their music is so specialised that I can’t see this CD flying off the racks, that should not distract anyone from the band members’ undeniable talent.
If they were playing a café near me, I’d drink there all day.
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