The Everyone Orchestra

Today I’m going to highlight the Everyone Orchestra, a unique act that will play Bear Creek Music and Art Festival’s Purple Hat tent Saturday night at 8:45 pm .

Matt Butler of the excellent Hot Buttered Rum band puts together this ad-hoc group of musicians, and it’s a different mix every time. At Bear Creek, the Everyone Orchestra will include Kai Eckhardt and Fareed Haque from Garaj Mahal, Joel Cummins from Umphrey's McGee, Jeff Mosier of Blueground Undergrass, Jen Hartswick from T.A.B. , Jan's Ingber of the Motet plus Justin Perkins, Luke Quaranta and Teal Brown from Toubab Krewe. During the show they will be taking donations to support the festival’s recycling and new composting program.

THE EVERYONE ORCHESTRA, according to their web site, “is a celebratory, interactive, improvisational experiment orchestrated by a mad scientist conductor!

The list of Everyone Orchestra participants is an increasingly wide and intercontinental group including members of The Grateful Dead, Phish, moe., String Cheese Incident, The Flecktones, Club d'Elf, ALO, Tea Leaf Green and Adrian Belew, Taj Mahal, Maria Muldaur, Tuvan throat singers, live painters, dancers, chanters, choirs, hula hoopers, firespinners, jugglers, stiltwalkers, storytellers, a presidential candidate and hundreds of others among a growing legion of other performers.

Butler’s version of breaking down the barriers between musician and audience derives in part from desert art festival Burning Man’s ‘no spectators, only participants’ ethic and is undoubtedly influenced by his old friend and mentor Ken Kesey, the king of the Merry Pranksters.”

The Everyone Orchestra is dedicated to working for good and has performed numerous concerts for non-profit organizations, coordinated donation drives for the needy, and has brought their brand of participatory performance to student groups, schools, hospitals, an orphanage and more.

In an excellent interview with Jambase, Butler explained his approach to EO:.

"I don’t think about how I want it to sound. I think about who I have as players and that ultimately dictates what happens. I try to be in touch with all the players, just be in communication with them and make sure that everyone’s comfortable on stage, that they can hear well and that they’re fed and happy, so that they’re going to have a clear path to musical discovery.

And then I have this thing of getting everybody to agree to be on the same page of not knowing what’s going to happen and just going for it. And that’s part of my job, different people need different counseling before we get on stage to get into that state of mind in a comfortable way.

…I feel really blessed that for the most part I think the musicians have a fun and interesting time in EO and sometimes they’re very surprised: “That was insane, I loved that.” Sometimes we’ll have that perfect mix of craziness, a perfect moment of almost pop song beauty that we came up with on the spot and some high energy dance music and it’s all just perfect.

...it’s a departure of having expectations either within the band or as an audience member, in that literally anything can happen in EO for better and worse. That’s one thing that Ken Kesey taught me and the Grateful Dead taught me, that the mystery of the unknown is what’s interesting and in those moment of searching musically you won’t always land on the golden nugget but when you do it really really shines.

Like at one point in a song if the chorus is repeating I’ll hold up a sign that says repeat the chorus and I’ll have them keep on repeating it and have the audience singing it. Then I might take the band out so that just the audience is singing and then take it a little bit higher and then throw it back into the song. I’ll do little tiny moves like that and then sit down for 10 minutes. It’s an interesting application of the conductor role. I’m working on a couple pitches for other bands to do this in a larger setting because those are some of the most fun shows I’ve done."