Using Corrigan’s keyboard prowess and Marguerite Ostro’s lively klezmer violin touches, this group creates a sweet swirl of exquisitely performed music informed by French Chanson, Gypsy swing, Balkan beats, contemporary chamber music, film scores and North African melodies, along with blues, jazz, folk and Latin elements.

“Memory” is only a half-hour long, but its 10 compositions are completely satisfying,  with each piece a fully realized work of musical heft.
The musical execution is often lighting quick, and at other times lyrically serene.

This ensemble has effectively picked the pocket of a score of musical styles from all over the world to create a melodic and cohesive work of originality, humor and melodic invention.

- Erc Feber, The Virginian-Pilot

-David Luhrssen, ExpressMilwaukee

Featuring accordion, guitar, banjo, piano, violin, percussion, and bass, this Bay Area ensemble will have listeners lapping from their coffee cups.

The musicians perform short songs, with the longest one, “Nowhere Else” clocking in at 4 1/2 minutes, and the shortest in less than a minute. The instrumental recording presents potent melodies with a circus tinge. However, on “For Those Who’ve Left” portrays an Erik Satie melancholy with its conversation between piano and violin.

The title track, sounds liked it hailed out of Bulgaria alternating with Central France with its plucky banjo, and swinging violin.

Sad or happy songs, you can hear the musicians having fun as they give their listeners an earful of yummy acoustic flavors. I’ll personally thank the bandleader and founder, Rick Corrigan (accordion, piano and composition), for leaving electronic music behind and charting in territory that journeys backwards in time. And after listening to heavier produced music, listening to “Memory” compares to eating an after dinner mint, it’s the final taste that lingers on the tongue.

- Patricia Herlevi, World Music Central

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.

-Delarue, Lucid Cultrue