WHAT a tasty treat was served up by this five-piece to the NCEM audience, hungry for their slices of passionate world music, peppered with Jewish, Balkan, Russian, Scottish and Latin American flavours, spiked with folk and jazz improvisation and lashings of personal anecdote.

We held on to our emotions, just, during this globe-trotting tour, through the joyful rhythms of tango and rumba, the high spirits of hiya, followed by an Algerian lament and the slow-stepping of a klezmer Horah circle dance.

Wide smiles gave way to happy tears from some of the crowd as the personal stories behind the tunes were told. Charismatic violinist Greg Lawson’s painfully beautiful and melodic New Morning was composed to honour four lost friends.

While writing a processional dance in tribute to his ancestors who fled persecution in Europe, he popped out to a Glasgow shop at midnight to buy milk. The result is the Spar Shuffle featuring a conflicting change in tempo after the piano’s melancholic opening, when a drunk drops his kebab on the store floor, an Indian-inspired percussion solo and a furious Balkan dance finale.

Pianist Phil Alexander’s Timgad composition evoked the heat of the Algerian Roman city. Bassist Mario Caribe led us musically through his grandmother’s journey from Spain to Brazil with an exhilarating soundtrack by percussionist Guy Nicholson on tablas, bongos, tambour and cymbals, sitting cross-legged on the floor.

Yorkshire-born Pete Garnett’s rootsy accordion is inflected with the influences of the ceilidh, jazz, folk, Latin and theatre bands he also loves to play with.

This virtuoso bagel served up an infectious, intricate, intoxicating, humorous and ultimately uplifting evening that left the enthusiastic crowd leaping to their feet for a standing ovation after the encore.