THE EITHER/ORCHESTRA
With special guest
MULATU ASTATKE
Saturday, February 2, Historic Sweets Ballroom, Oakland
OAKLAND CA – Ethiopian Arts Forum presents the Either/Orchestra, led by Russ Gershon, with special guest Mulatu Astatke on Saturday, February 2, 9:30 pm at Historic Sweets Ballroom, 1933 Broadway, Oakland CA. Tickets are $20, $30 for VIP area.. Tickets are sold “At The Door”.
The concert unites the Massachusetts-based ten piece Either/Orchestra (E/O) with composer/vibraphonist/percussionist Mulatu Astatke, the inventor of Ethio-jazz. This is Mr. Astatke’s first ever appearance on the West Coast, and the first time the E/O has appeared in the Bay Area since 1994. Mr. Astatke has been collaborating with the E/O since 2004, including concerts in Boston, New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Stockholm and Helsinki.
The concert will bring together the Ethio-jazz of Mr. Astatke with other Ethiopian material arranged by the E/O, plus originals by Gershon and other E/O members. The strong influence of Latin music in the E/O by way of Dominican conguero Vicente Lebron and Venezuelan drummer Pablo Bencid combines with the percussion and vibes of Mulatu’s Ethio-jazz to guarantee hot rhythms. The show is rooted in the sounds of Africa as transplanted to North and South America, reflected back to Ethiopia and back again to the US.
Mulatu Astatke was born in Jimma, Ethiopia in 1943. In the 1950s he was sent abroad for extensive musical study, first to London, then to New York, and eventually to Boston to attend The Schillinger House of Music, now known as Berklee College of Music. At Berklee, where he was the school’s very first African student, Astatke became a student of jazz, focusing on the vibraphone. After finishing at Berklee, Astatke moved to New York and recorded two albums with this band, The Ethiopian Quintet. With this group, Astatke gave birth to “Ethio-jazz,” a genre that features the sonic cocktail of traditional Ethiopian melodies and modes mixed with the sounds of modern jazz and Latin music. In the late 1960s, Astatke returned to Ethiopia, bringing with him his new sound and new (to Ethiopia) instruments, congas, Hammond organ and the vibraphone among them.
A cultural ambassador and musical icon in Ethiopia and among super-hip club DJ’s around the world, Astatke has an international fan base which grew in 2005 when three of his songs were included on the soundtrack to Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers, starring Bill Murray. In 2004, one of his songs was used in The Sopranos, during Tony’s climactic dream sequence. At home in Addis, Mr. Astatke is known as a radio disc jockey, a television presenter, the proprietor of a jazz club / jazz school and music researcher. He is probably Ethioipia’s best-known non singing musician, and Ethiopians of his generation see their popular music and being hugely influenced by his work as a composer and arranger. During the 2007-08 academic year, Mr. Astatke is in residence at Harvard University as a Radcliffe Fellow, working on an opera based on Ethiopian church music, a book, and various other projects.
The ten-piece Either/Orchestra was formed in 1985 by saxophonist/composer Gershon. Gershon brings a unique ear to the large jazz ensemble, producing a sound larger and more orchestrated than a jazz combo, but more streamlined and improvisation-oriented than most big-bands. The band has earned a Grammy nomination and perennial victories in the Down Beat International Critics Poll (“Rising Star Big Band”). They have released ten albums and a DVD, and have played in 34 states and nine foreign countries.
Over the past decade, the Either/Orchestra has become perhaps the world’s leading non-Ethiopian exponent of that country’s exotic melodies and scales. Bandleader Gershon’s deep interest in the music led the group onto a trail that led to the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa in 2004, where they absorbed the local sounds and collaborated on a concert with five Ethiopian musicians, including Mr. Astatke. The concert recording has been released in the prestigious Ethiopiques series by Buda Musique of Paris. The E/O has continued its collaboration with Mulatu and other top Ethiopian performers, including superstar singer Mahmoud Ahmed. In August 2007, a DVD documentary of the E/O-meets-Mahmoud concert in Paris was released by Buda Musique.
In 1993 Gershon’s friend, the late Mark Sandman of Boston rock group Morphine, brought back from France an album entitled, Ethiopian Groove: the Golden 70s. The album reflected Ethiopia’s long and unique musical history, specifically the surprising influence of American jazz, soul and Latin music, much of this by way of Mr. Astatke.
The sound of Western band instruments first caught the imagination of Emperor Haile Selassie I in 1924 on a visit to Jerusalem. There he was impressed by a military band composed of Armenian orphans, and brought the children back to Ethiopia to be the country’s imperial brass band. The emperor’s interest in military bands supported musicians learning trumpets, trombones, clarinets and saxophones, and by the mid-1950’s a variety of big-band had become popular in the clubs and theaters of Addis Ababa, merging Western influences and instruments with the powerful tradition of Ethiopian singing.
Gershon, captivated by the music and its undeniable jazz influences, began arranging Ethiopian songs for theEither/Orchestra in 1997. Several of these arrangements were included on the orchestra’s 2000 release, More Beautiful Than Death (Accurate) and caught the attention of Francis Falceto, the producer of Ethiopian Groove: the Golden 70s. Falceto’s engineered an invitation for the E/O to the third Ethiopian Music Festival in Addis Ababa in 2004, making the E/O the first American big band to visit Ethiopia since Duke Ellington’s in 1973. The E/O’s historic performance was recorded and released as a live album, Ethiopiques 20: Live in Addis, in September, 2005 on Buda Musique. The album features many guests, including the renowned Ethiopian musician and father of the “Ethio-Jazz” movement, Mulatu Astatke.