Luzio Altobelli is excited about the music he’s going to play on his band Sagapool’s West Coast tour. And just as stimulating, he says, will be the sounds he’s going to get to listen to.

The Montreal-based sextet is gearing up to record its fourth CD this year, and as part of the process each of its members has been asked to load an iPod with five tracks that indicate where they’d like the band to go. “We’re going to get to spend a lot of time together in the van,” Altobelli reports, on the line from his home. “So we’re looking for different sounds that we might want to use—different instruments, different percussion, different styles.”

The accordionist hasn’t quite finished compiling his personal playlist, but he suggests that music from northern climes might be a big part of it.

“For a long time I didn’t like so much the winter,” he says, with a French-Canadian lilt that belies his Italian heritage. “But three years ago I bought myself a real great winter coat, and that changed everything. That was the beginning of this story, and then I did this trip to Nunavut with another band, and I thought to myself that here in Montreal we are not in the North, we are to the south of the real North. And also I discovered some other bands, like Sigur Rós, that I listen to a lot—music where you feel the wind and the air and the coldness.”

But let’s back up a bit. As we’ve noted, the next Sagapool record will be the fourth for its members, who met a decade ago as students at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal. But it’s only the second under the Sagapool name: until 2008 the group recorded as Manouche, an allusion to the “Gypsy jazz” style that was once its forte.

So how did a group that started out as a Django Reinhardt tribute act end up listening to bands like Sigur Rós?

“At the start, we really had a big, big buzz on this gypsy and klezmer stuff,” says Altobelli. “And at the time it was fitting perfectly for us to do this Gypsy music, because we felt like we were always travelling. We changed apartments often, so we were like nomadic people, and we played in bars for almost nothing, so the image was very strong. And also we were just getting out of the conservatory, so the clash [of styles] was also really fun.”

Ten years later, their tastes have diversified—as can be heard on the first official Sagapool release, 2008’s Episode Trois. The frantic rhythms of klezmer music can still be heard on tracks such as the carnivalesque “Hot-dog élégant”, and Django-style swing jazz makes an appearance on “Le wagon des sans-vergognes”, but elsewhere the sound is considerably more expansive.

Siblings Alexis and Zoé Dumais—who play piano and violin, respectively—come from the St. Lawrence River estuary, as does guitarist Dany Nicolas, and their compositions often use traditional Québécois music as a jumping-off point for elegant tunes that capture a vivid sense of that region’s landscape. Altobelli, in turn, is the driving force behind a couple of stylishly enigmatic numbers that reflect the time he spent playing the late Swedish avant-folk accordionist Lars Hollmer’s scores as part of Montreal big band Fanfare Pourpour. With strong contributions from drummer Louka Sirois (since replaced by Marton Maderspach) and clarinettist Guillaume Bourque, Sagapool’s approach is a singularly creative take on a variety of acoustic-music styles—and one that, according to Altobelli, will be even stronger and more personal next time out.

Sagapool plays the Norman Rothstein Theatre on Saturday (March 13) as part of the Chutzpah! Festival.