Youtube: From the concert DVD "Re-Assembly," a film of the Spankers 10th Anniversary Reunion Concerts.

Band website: The Asylum Street Spankers are the only truly acoustic (no microphones, no amplifiers) band in the known universe; and as such, they have no electric gizmos to hide behind. Instead, they rely on their considerable chops and a heaping helping of verve as they jaunt merrily from one idiom to another, sometimes several in the space of a single song.

What might be a mess of conflicting forms, sounds and styles in the sweaty palms of lesser players, becomes, in the Spankers disciplined hands, a seamless, spellbinding and often hilarious history lesson in American music.

Founded in 1994 as a loose, freewheeling blues and jazz revival band that eschewed amplification on musical principle, the Spankers have evolved into a collective of virtuoso musicians centered on vocalists/ songwriters/ multi-instrumentalists Christina Marrs and Wammo. Within this group of lifelong musicians there is rich experience in just about every form of popular music from ragtime and country to hip-hop and metal.

As the group's membership has changed, its musical boundaries have necessarily expanded. The Spankers' dogmatic adherence to the principle of purely acoustic music succeeds in unifying their widely divergent interests into a cohesive whole.

With each player an encyclopedia of songs, the band's massive repertoire mutates and grows continually. Obscure hot jazz, delta blues and hillbilly music, racy novelty tunes, subversive, evocative or sophisticated originals, an odd Black Flag tune, references from Monty Python to Sesame Street to Public Enemy -- all are bent to the Spanker will.

This massive repertoire, the Spankers reflexively subversive sense of humor and an improvisational bent so brave it verges on recklessness have earned the band a rapidly growing international reputation as one of the most entertaining and musically satisfying groups performing today.