Fishtank Ensemble: Live at KDHX 7/18/10

On first listening, Fishtank Ensemble’s music sounds like swirling, complex gypsy music played with a rockabilly sensibility. And it is; but with that, the band also seamlessly threads each member’s myriad styles. The ensemble stopped by Music from the Hills to ring out a selection from its deep sonic well.

What is most remarkable about the members of Fishtank Ensemble is not just the expansive music vocabulary that they’ve built together -- drawing on years of studying and playing everything from Romani, Swedish and Japanese folk, drum and bass, rock & roll, and classical -- but how fluidly their songs move through seemingly incoherent realms of music. With their newly released third album, Woman in Sin, the band pushes each song along with individual flair, but the songs each work as self-contained units, not just expressions of a talented band’s ability to play so many styles.

The song, “After You’ve Gone,” for example, is driven by the meaty bounce and slap of Djordje Stijepovic’s upright bass and Douglas Smolens’s swinging gypsy guitar; then Ursula Knudson’s acrobatic voice swoops in with a cross-emulation of Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. Not only is it a great 1920s swing tune, but a swing tune that only this band could write and play in the midst of an album of operatic jouncing and traveling tent music.

Written by Mike Herr. Photo courtesy of Fishtank Ensemble. Sound by Dan Kinney.