IN THE LATE '90s, eastern European music was all the rage in the avant-garde community. Klezmer, Bulgarian wedding music, Romanian and Hungarian Gypsy music – all of it was getting a reappraisal from Yankee musicians, thanks to catalysts such as Don Byron's tribute to klezmer-song parodist Mickey Katz, John Zorn's Radical Jewish Culture series on his Tzadik label, and of course, the war in the Balkans.

After a while, it seemed like everyone in New York City was getting in touch with their old-world roots, and maybe they're still doing it – I don't know because I lost track about the time I reviewed the third Pachora album for my college radio station.

At first glance, Santa Cruz-Oakland outfit the Fishtank Ensemble seemed less like fashionably late arrivals to the scene than they did simply another band playing music that's probably more out-of-date than the typical hard-bop museum piece playing the San Francisco Jazz Festival. On top of that, the name conjures unfortunate images of some zany jam band you might find opening up for String Cheese Incident or Colonel Bruce Hampton's Aquarium Rescue Unit. Still, living, breathing bands that play this type of music are a rare commodity, and an excuse to make the trek out to the Outer Mission's great, one-of-a-kind Bistro E Europe was reason enough to go check them out.

Stylistically, the Fishtank Ensemble don't offer anything extraordinarily new or different, apart from the initial novelty of hearing Gypsy folk music played on the ancient Japanese shamisen, courtesy of band member Kevin Kmetz. They are, however, really great musicians who sound surprisingly natural together when you consider their different subspecialties: flamenco, Japanese folk, klezmer, Romanian wedding music, and so on. Kmetz, accordionist Aaron Seeman, and flamenco guitarist Doug Smolens are virtuoso players with the good sense not to beat us over the head. The fact that you're hearing shamisen, accordion, and flamenco guitar together doesn't even consciously register most of the time, which is subtly kind of amazing. When was the last time you heard a shamisen and an accordion together?

Even so, the stars of this band are Fabrice Martinez, a French-born violinist, and his wife, Swedish vocalist, violinist, and musical saw-magician Ursula Knudson. (In keeping with the band's multi-kulti globe-trotting tendencies, the couple recently moved to Italy.) Not only is Knudson the best musical saw player I've had the chance to witness (granted, there's not much competition), but she also sings with opera-worthy finesse and makes insanely difficult passages – singing at breakneck tempos in a foreign language in 7/16 time – seem effortless. She's cool. Martinez, who reportedly spent seven years traveling around Europe in a horse-drawn wagon learning songs, is a master at the sort of feverish Romanian folk tunes that bands such as Taraf de Haidouks are famous for.

Their collective talents aside, the best things to be said about the Fishtank Ensemble are that they sound like a real band, not a hastily thrown together supergroup, and they avoid turning their sound into a cheap world-music showcase. They steer clear of the dreaded shopping-list approach – "Look, we're playing flamenco! Now we're playing klezmer!" – that can easily take over. Instead, their repertoire flows naturally from flamenco to klezmer to Romanian and Hungarian folk and beyond. There's no catch here and nothing conceptual at work – certainly, Radical Jewish Culture isn't going to be much of a subtext for any band prominently featuring a Martinez and a Knudson. It's just great music played by great musicians, and so what if it's about five years behind the trend? (Will York)