One of Boston’s longest running local ensembles, the Either/Orchestra, is celebrating 40 years on December 17th at the Regattabar in Cambridge. The band has served as a launch pad for dozens of successful artists, including John Medeski, Matt Wilson, Miguel Zenón, and Jaleel Shaw. We caught up with bandleader Russ Gershon earlier this week.
Va Lynda Robinson: I am so interested in how you came up with the name, Russ.
Russ Gershon: Well, this was 40 years ago now, right?! I thought the band was just going to be a rehearsal band. I thought a 12 piece band could never be a working band. Itwas just a rehearsal band so I could hear my music played, you know? I invited people over to come and play it, offered them a case of beer if they would come over, and then one day somebody said, “I got us a gig!”, which was in the Cambridge library’s children’s room! And they said “We need a name for the band.” Well, I went to hear Wayne Shorter play that night and he was playing at Jonathan Swift’s, a little club that used to be in Harvard square. And I sat there and listened to Wayne Shorter and all night I’m like, “What am I naming this band?!” And then I woke up the next morning, it was the first thing that popped into my head; Either/Orchestra. So I kind of give Wayne’s creativity some credit but that was about it! anything.
Va Lynda Robinson: Russ, how do you describe your music? I mean, it is so eclectic!
Russ Gershon: Well, that’s a really hard question and I’ve been struggling with it for 40 years! I took inspiration originally from bands like Sun Ra and his Arkestra and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Mingus too, who saw the whole history of jazz and wanted to present a picture that went all the way from the earliest roots of jazz through swing and bebop, and modern jazz, and all the way to outer space. Over the years I got interested in Ethiopian music, and then in 1999 we added a conga player, a Dominican man named Vincente Lebron, who’s one of the top Latin musicians around town. He’s been a loyal member of the band ever since and and he really gave us a strong Latin flavor So, I’ve kind of just followed my interests!
Va Lynda Robinson: Forty years is a long time! Tell me about those early years.
Russ Gershon: Well it started when I’d been in a couple of rock bands that were pretty successful, but as a saxophone player and also as a jazz person I always felt I’d be a second-class citizen in the world of rock, cause I wasn’t a great singer or a great songwriter and I didn’t play guitar or drums. And so after the last successful rock band I was in broke up, I went to Berklee for a couple of semesters to work on my technique. When that ended, I was like, I want to keep working on this, but I don’t know how! So I started just writing music and then inviting people over to play it. And as I said, one thing led to another, we wound up with a gig. And then somebody said, “why don’t we record something?” We recorded it. I said, well, “I could put that out as a record.” Cause I had worked in radio before that. So I knew how it all worked. And then somebody in the band said, “Let’s go on tour!”, which is a preposterous thing for an eleven piece semi-unknown jazz orchestra to do. Eric Jackson was very helpful in giving us many boosts along the way, as soon as we started releasing music. He picked up on what we were doing, he liked it. I think he was very eclectic in his jazz taste too, as you know, and I think he appreciated the way that we kind of covered the gamut and put it together in some interesting ways. And because he was such a voice in national jazz radio and a tastemaker really, the fact that he came out for us and started playing our stuff and putting us on playlists right from the beginning really gave us a boost and gave us some national credibility. And one thing led to another. We started touring, people started knowing us about the country. Our next records did better. We would go to the top of the college radio charts and I got nominated for a Grammy in 1992!
Va Lynda Robinson: Yeah, I want to talk about that!
Russ Gershon: Well, I was nominated in the very obscure category “Best Arrangement of an Instrumental Composition” for one the tracks on there, and that came out of the blue. I wasn’t campaigning for it. It was Bob Blumenthal, he was a long time jazz writer for the [Boston] Globe and for the Phoenix. He called me up one day, this was before the internet, and he said, “You’ve been nominated for a Grammy!” And I was like, “What are you talking about?” He had gotten it off the Associated Press or something like that. And so that was a good surprise. It made me realize that people were listening. And then it’s always been one thing led to the next. I had so many talented musicians in the band, and many who have gone on to greater fame without us, like Miguel Zanon, Jaleel Shaw, John Medeski, Matt Wilson, you know, people who’ve become band leaders in their own right and in demand musicians around the world. I always thought of what we do as a little bit like what Art Blakey used to do with the Jazz Messengers. It was like a graduate school for musicians. We’ve had great members come through that way. And then we’ve also had some loyal members who have been with us for decades and decades and who remember the whole history of the band and have been through the whole adventure.
Va Lynda Robinson: Well, speaking of adventure, I want to talk about you crisscrossing the U.S. from the 1980s to 2000s in a van. Yes, a van!
Russ Gershon: Well indie rock bands always used to tour by van! I was in rock bands that did that. My thought was like, if rock bands can do it, why can’t the jazz orchestra do it? Which was kind of a crazy thing to think, but I just started calling up clubs around the country. And I would ask the people at radio stations all across the country, is there a jazz club in your area? And so to me, being a radio person, the whole using radio as my intelligence network kind of enabled us to build up a touring circuit and get out there. And then we started doing it. Part of my theory about all of that was, when you look back in the history of jazz, and you look back at the great big bands of the thirties and forties, the Count Basie Band used to drive around in a bus, they weren’t flying anywhere, and they would play night after night, and then they would drive for hours. Duke Ellington had a train car for a while but then he went back to driving by bus. I felt like the way to get that great sound of a large group was not to try to imitate their sound, but to imitate their working conditions, get out there on the road and play night after night after night until the music is really strong. And it turned out to be a lot of fun for everybody. Certainly they weren’t getting rich doing it, the musicians, nor was I as the band leader, but the musical rewards were huge.
Va Lynda Robinson: Can you tell me a little bit about your upcoming album that is being released on December 5th? I’m really looking forward to it.
Russ Gershon: Yes, it’s a very strange project, I have to say. As I mentioned, we fell in love with Ethiopian music over the last 20 years, it’s very cool sounding music, and the deeper I got in, the more I learned about the story of modern Ethiopian and music and all these strange little threads in the story. And it turns out there was a man... this is a story that can take an hour. I want to try to do it in three minutes.
Let’s go to Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia, the last emperor, also known as Ras Tafari. He heard a brass band play in 1925 in Jerusalem in a monastery, and the brass band consisted of Armenian genocide refugees. They were mostly kids, like teenagers. And then their leader was a musician named Nalbandian, Kevork Nalbandian. And he taught them all how to play instruments. Haile Selassie heard this band, and he said, this is great music, and I want to have a band like this for myself, because I’m going to be the emperor soon. He was not quite emperor then. So he adopted all the members of the band and sent them to Ethiopia with this guy, Nalbandian, as their leader.
A few years later, Nalbandian’s nephew moved to Ethiopia to help train musicians. His name was Nerses Nalbandian, and he became Haile Selassie’s favorite musician. And when Haile Selassie built this beautiful theater in the '50s, Nerses was made head of music there. So the national, Ethiopian band at this theater was a big band, like a jazz type ensemble that was playing a weird mix of Ethiopian songs and Nerses’s personal tastes. He was kind of an eclectic guy himself. I asked his son, “Who were his favorite musicians?” He said Xavier Cugat and Ray Charles. And so this man, this Armenian refugee living in Ethiopia in the 1950s who loved Ray Charles and Xavier Cugat created this strange music for the National Theater Orchestra. And then in 1973, there was a revolution and everything changed. But slowly people have been rediscovering the music from that era, from the pre-revolution era.
Mr. Nalbandian’s children heard the Either/Orchestra play on our first visit to Ethiopia and said, “Aha, this band can play our father’s music, which nobody has played for decades!” and so they convinced me to do all this research, look at the scores, listen to the recordings and reconstruct the music so that it could be played. And we went back years later and played in the same theater where he was the head of music, this beautiful big theater in Ethiopia, and we did some live concert there of his old music. And that’s what this album is. We played with some of the old time singers that were with the band in the old days and some new younger people. It doesn’t really sound like anything else i’ve ever heard. But it was really fun to do. And I feel like we’ve helped bring back to life an important little missing link in the history of Ethiopian music.
Va Lynda Robinson: My last question: I’ve read reviews of you all talking about “saluting the past while embracing the future.” Now, that is very interesting.
Russ Gershon: Well, isn’t that what we all want to do? We want to be aware of what came before us, but we don’t want to be mired in it. And that’s always been my feeling about music. You have to know what the people did before you. We stand on their shoulders.
The Either Orchestra celebrating 40 years on December 17th at the Regattabar. Their new album (out December 5) is called “Nalbandian, the Ethiopian”.
