Quartet Puts a New Spin on Traditional Music : Concert: Group performs with hurdy-gurdy, electric bass and humor.

The folk quartet known as Ad Vielle Que Pourra takes its name from an old French saying, “Advienne que pourra,” meaning “what will be, will be.” Conveniently wheeling “vielle,” the ancient French wheel fiddle now known as a hurdy-gurdy, into the expression opens up a world of possible translations.

Like, “What wheel be, vielle be?”

“The closest we’ve come is ‘Have you heard-y my gurdy?’ ” responded group member Daniel Thonon, reached by telephone in Montreal.

Ad Vielle Que Pourra will appear tonight at Shade Tree Stringed Instruments in Laguna Niguel. Purporting to play “new French folk music,” the Montreal-based group, whose members hail from Brittany, Belgium, Quebec and Algiers, will use instruments as diverse as the bombarde, bouzouki, shakuhachi (Japanese flute) and electric bass, as well as the vielle, in a program of original songs and dances.

Thonon is the group’s hurdy-gurdler.

“We are serious musicians, but we are not strange beasts of ethnography and history,” Thonon said. “We don’t want to talk about the social and economical background of the provinces of France. Our sense of humor, the absurdities on stage--these are basically our way of avoiding all possible questions.”

Does that mean we can’t ask how new music, with influences ranging from 8th-Century Arab Andalusia to bossa nova, can possibly be considered traditional?

“We call it traditional music because a tradition is something that is supposed to continue, to go on,” explained fiddler Alain Leroux. “If you keep making the same music, that is not tradition--that stops tradition. The people who wrote traditional music were writing new music when they wrote it. They simply used the old forms.”

As Thonon put it: “We totally respect the rhythmic structures of the original dances. Only the melodies and harmonies and arrangements are new.”

Thonon may or may not be a “strange beast of ethnography,” but he confessed to maintaining a menagerie of strange beasts that includes 40 snakes, among them pythons, boas and California kingsnakes. They kept him company as he put finishing touches on his latest hurdy-gurdy. Thonon also has a huge coral-reef aquarium and “a few regular things” like dogs and cats.

Thonon has earned an international reputation as a designer and maker of hurdy-gurdies. In fact, he said he sold three of the instruments to members of rock group Pink Floyd.

“They haven’t made a new record since,” he said. “The instruments are quite difficult to tame. I assume they gave up.” Thonon also plays accordion and the shakuhachi.

Gilles Plantes plays bagpipes and, among a plethora of obscure instruments, the bombarde , a primitive double-reed ancestor of the oboe. Jean Louis Cros plays guitar and electric bass.

Leroux, primarily a fiddle player, plays bouzouki, a Greek instrument related to the Arabic lute and Syrian saz , and the mandocello, the appropriately named cello of the mandolin family.

Although the musicians had previously worked together in various duos and trios, they formed Ad Vielle Que Pourra after playing together at a small festival in 1986.

“We all thought, wow, what a great sound!” Thonon recalled. “But it wasn’t easy to mix all these instruments in all these different keys. After a year of trying, we got fed up with the existing repertoire.” They decided to write their own songs, such as “Polkas Ratees,” a hybrid suite of saucy classical, country and Cajun polkas. The title translates as “no good polkas.”

The group’s latest CD, “Come What May”--yet another take on the old “what will be” saying--includes “A Cossack in Paris,” which Leroux dedicates “to Gershwin’s charwoman and to my great-great-grand aunt, who met Cossacks in Paris in 1814 after Napoleon’s defeat, finding them exquisitely boring.”

Also from Leroux is “ Tu Nous Les Kas-Ebarh Tois ,” a traditional Breton dance that suddenly gives way to jazz, a compositional technique he describes as “monstrous genetic deviationism.” Thonon contributed “Adagio for These Dull Years,” a nostalgic tune “in the cinematographic mode,” and “Potatoes Have Sprouted in St. Amable.”

Despite its French sources, Thonon believes that the group’s music embodies a philosophy of “universalism.”

“The music originally comes from regions of France,” Thonon said. “But we’ve all been influenced by a lot of things. We live in this century. We visit a lot of countries. We have different backgrounds.

“Whether you’re talking about culture or economy, this is a time of fusion,” he said. “Our music is from the global village. A blues man in the Deep South is in his time when he’s composing the blues. We are in our time.”

* Folk quartet Ad Vielle Que Pourra will play tonight at 8 and 10:15 at Shade Tree Stringed Instruments, 28062 Forbes Road, Laguna Niguel. (The 8 p.m. show is sold out.) $14. (714) 364-5270.