Tom Halter - trumpet; Dan Rosenthal - trumpet; Joel Yennior - trombone; Godwin Louis - alto sax, flute; Russ Gershon - tenor, soprano sax, leader; Charlie Kohlhase - baritone sax; Rafael Alcala - piano; Rick McLaughlin - bass; Pablo Bencid - drums; Vicente Lebron - congas, percussion
Influences
Duke Ellington, Sun Ra, Gil Evans, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the Beatles, Sly and the Family Stone, Stevie Wonder, James Brown, Fela Kuti, Mulatu Astatke, Abdullah Ibrahim, Eddie Palmieri, Ruben Gonzalez, Bela Bartok, Claude Debussy, Edgar Varese...etc, etc, etc.
Well, it's been almost three years since I've updated this bio, and an "industrial accident" led to the deletion of the old bio, so here goes...
The Either/Orchestra was founded in fall of 1985 by yours truly, Russ Gershon, tenor and soprano saxophones. I had finished a year at Berklee after playing five years on the Boston rock circuit and five years as a jazz DJ, and felt that I was just getting into a nice composing/arranging groove. Inspired by Sun Ra, Gil Evans, Mingus and Ellington, I decided to form a rehearsal band to play my music. I had also recently played a recital of seven-horn charts written by Edouardo Souza and I very much liked playing in that size of horn section. Cobbling together a lineup out of musicians I had met at Berklee and on the rock scene, including the great drummer Jerome Deupree, I began leading Monday night rehearsals at my rented house on Columbia Street in Cambridge.
A couple of weeks later, Tom Halter, a trumpet player whom I had met five years earlier in a free jazz session, came walking down Columbia Street in a giant sombrero playing with a Mariachi band and I shouted to him "do you want to join a rehearsal big band?" He's still on board, 23 years later.
After a month or so of rehearsing, the lure of free beer at rehearsal needed to be augmented by the incentive of an upcoming gig, and another early early member of the band, Russell Jewell, found a jazz series that the late Ken Williams was booking at the Cambridge Public Library. We played our first show on December 17, 1985. In the band were Tom, Dan Drexler (trumpet), Russell, Josh Roseman (trombone), Robb Rawlings (alto sax), yours truly (tenor, soprano sax), Steve Norton (baritone sax), Kenny Freundlich (keys), David Pouyorow (bass) and Jerome on drums.
OK, at this rate this will take forever, so I'm going to jump to our most recent stuff now and fill in the middle as I have time........
23 years later!
In 2008, the Either/Orch has continued our ongoing collaborations with the greats of Ethiopian music, and added a new one: the great singer Alemayehu Eshete. We've played wonderful shows in Oakland, Cambridge, Holland, Germany, London, Glastonbury, Lincoln Center, Toronto, Dublin and of course, Columbus OH. All the shows were with some combination of Ethiopians including Mulatu Astatke, Mahmoud Ahmed, Alemayehu Eshete, Getachew Mekurya, Hana Shenkute, Setegn Atanaw, Minale Dagnew. Most were either in sold out theaters or in front of giant outdoor crowds, with ecstatic audience and promoter response. We had to learn a lot of music, as each show was a little different from the others. At this point, I would estimate we have learned between 40 and 50 Ethiopian songs and memorized complicated arrangements for about half of them. The guys in the band can hardly remember the notes of a major scale any more. Vive la pentatonique!
All the members of the band feel really fortunate to have had this opportunity to work with such fantastic instrumentalists and singers, to delve ever deeper into the Ethiopian music traditions, and to have been welcomed into the Ethiopian music community. Almost all Ethiopian people seem to enjoy our version of their music, and Mahmoud and the others are eagerly participating the new synthesis of our modern jazz and latin sounds with their songs. Occasionally a listener or a critic will "object" to our presence in the Ethiopian music scene, but most of these people (at least the most outspoken) are usually not Ethiopian themselves. How ironic. They are often people that know little about Ethiopian music (except perhaps owning a handful of CDs) and fail to recognize that the Either/Orchestra has been playing this music since 1997, immersed in the history and tradition of the music while introducing our own perspective. Our work with such masters as Mahmoud, Alemayehu, Mulatu and Getachew teaches us that as North and Latin American musicians, so much of our music comes from African roots that if we follow our instincts we find a lot of common ground. Conversely, these Africans were profoundly influenced by sounds coming from America and have actually build a bridge halfway to America decades ago.
In culture – as in economics and politics – the world has become increasingly interconnected. The guiding principal for the musicians of the Either/Orchestra is to understand, live and feel, to the best of our ability and circumstance, the history and traditions of all the musics we play: jazz, soul, rock, new music, Afro-cuban, Ethiopian; to respect what makes them tick and how they fit into their cultural contexts; to fearlessly use this experience and knowledge to create something new, uncontrived and true to our own emotions and ideas. We have been privileged to visit and perform in many countries and most of the US and we try to bring this broad view to the table when we create music and perform. For us, music is both a universal language and a complex conversation in many languages at once. Like language, music is a medium to communicate what is beautiful and terrible about living on Earth among the human race, and that's what we try to do.
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Available in all online stores and will be re-realesed on beatport on 26.June
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Malian world music superstar Bassekou Kouyate - his band Ngoni Ba, Tartit - an all-female band from Timbaktu (Mali) return with their addictive African blues. For more info & bookings visit www. barbican. org. uk/rn
