The Either/Orchestra is "the best little big-band ever," according to Downbeat.com, but the term hardly does them justice. For 26 years, the ten piece EO has been expanding the limits of jazz, Afro-Caribbean and Ethiopian music through a dozen albums and in venues around the world. No stodgy archival project, the musicians, from ages 21 to 57, play with the energy of a hot funk or Latin band and take the audience for a ride to unexpected places. Recently the Albany Times-Union called them "esoteric jazzbos [who] get down and get funky, too."

With six horns, keys, bass, drums and congas, the EO's former members include jazz stars John Medeski, Matt Wilson and MacArthur Genius Miguel Zenon.

Two big programs the EO did in 2011 will be featured in the Fete performance:

The Collected Unconscious is major new work composed by bandleader Russ Gershon, based on the scales and rhythms of Ethiopian music. The EO premiered the piece in on a short tour in November, and received fantastic reviews:

"Either/Orchestra At the Peak of Their Power at the New School (Lucid Culture, New York City): One of the two or three best New York concerts of the year...[the new piece] revealed an unexpected gravitas and lush, majestic power to rival or maybe surpass anything this band’s ever done, effortlessly and imaginatively bridging the gap between Cuba and Ethiopia...the shifting textures and voicings of these new compositions are equal to anything Gil Evans ever came up with."

"The Either/Orchestra Gets it All (Albany Times-Union): [The new piece is] slinky and sensual one moment, nostalgic and bluesy the next...complex and constantly shifting while remaining undeniably swinging throughout...The ensemble playing was precise and powerful...the Either/Orchestra features some of the finest jazz players in New England – and all 10 members took dazzling solo turns."

The other major program to be featured at Fete will be music from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Haile Selassie (a.k.a. Ras Tafari) was the last Emperor of Ethiopia, and during the last 20 years of his reign, he appointed Armenian expatriate composer Nerses Nalbandian to lead the National Theater Orchestra. Nalbandian's music was lost when Selassie was deposed in 1974. In 2004, Nalbandian's children heard the EO play in Addis Ababa and decided that they would be the perfect band to revive their father's music. This project came to fruition in May 2011, when the EO played the Nalbandian repertoire on the very stage where he and the Orchestra had performed regularly a half century before.

This music is exotic, groovy and fascinating - and you have surely never heard it before!

The Either/Orchestra is:

Tom Halter, Dan Rosenthal - trumpets
Joel Yennior - trombone
Hailey Niswanger, Russ Gershon, Charlie Kohlhase - woodwinds
Gilson Schachnik - keys
Rick McLaughlin - bass
Pablo Bencid - drums
Vicente Lebron - congas
www.either-orchestra.org