Mr. Ho’s Orchestrotica swizzles space-age vibes Sunday

Mr. Ho’s Orchestrotica could probably get by rehashing Martin Denny and Les Baxter tunes, but the Boston quintet, led by Brian O’Neill, takes the goes well beyond cocktail lounge and exotica to make music that sounds truly global. The ensemble pulls in aspects of jazz and chamber pop and combines them with a quiver of international influences, with a result that feels witty, sharp and unbounded.

Mr. Ho’s is coming to Lawrence, courtesy of Kansas Public Radio’s Retro Cocktail Hour, so I called bandleader O’Neill to ask about the Orchestrotica’s unique sonic vision.

The Pitch: The Orchestrotica is impressive, in that it has the quintet — which is coming to Lawrence — but also can expand into a 10-piece big band.

Brian O’Neill: Twenty-two, actually.

Seriously? How do you change arrangements for a song like that?

Yeah, it’s insane. They’re actually entirely separate programs. Part of the idea of the Orchestrotica for me was that, eventually, there would be lots of different formations or programs or ensembles. Right now, there’s just the two: the big band, and the quintet. They don’t necessarily play the same music — actually, they don’t at all play the same music. The big band is a specialty project that only performs the music of Esquivel, this crazy pioneer of space-age pop music. We’re the only band that plays his music live; his scores were lost back in the ’70s, and this project originally started out as me transcribing his music so people could enjoy it in a live setting — specifically, his large ensemble music from the late ’50s and early ’60s.

The quintet is really more of an original music project, although we do arrangements of classical music works and solo piano repertoire: from Gershwin, and just kind of a hodgepodge of classical and jazz and just kind of global sounds all mixed together. We’ve got a really great selection of players. They’re all pretty much professional musicians from around Boston and New York and are just really versatile.

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Part of the quintet’s sound is that it’s exotic, but it’s not as if you’re aiming for tropes, right?

That’s completely accurate. Lots of people assume that, because of the Esquivel connection, the quintet is just a five-piece lounge ensemble playing new versions of Martin Denny. We used to cover a couple of tunes back when we first started out, but you hit the nail on the head: It’s not an homage group. It’s more exotica in the mindset. You want the same end result, but through the music that’s played. That’s what I really liked about all that stuff: it’s just that fantasy and escapism that came with that music. I think that people want to tune out from reality once in a while, and we try to find a way, but with modern flavors — instead of vintage flavors — to do that.

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How do you tie the two eras together?

There’s a bit of a nod and wink to the instrumentation. The vibraphone was central to Martin Denny and Arthur Lyman and those ensembles back then. It’s not a vibraphone quintet, though. It’s just a quintet with a lot of instruments. Bass flute, which was used a lot in Equivel’s music. In exotica, the low-end flutes were quite popular, because of that sultry kind of sound. I like the pairing with the vibraphone quite a bit.

What’s specifically unique about Mr. Ho’s take?

There wasn’t a lot of string, guitar stuff — plectrum instruments — or any of that, and [band member] Tev Stevig, a lot of what he plays, like an Ottoman lute instrument called the tanbur, or the oud, which is an Arabic lute, and a resonator guitar or dobro. That [the dobro] is more associated with the Delta blues, but we don’t play it with the bottle slide. It’s more of, like, a textural, finger-styled instrument. Those are definitely not typical “exotica” sounds.

It seems, though, that the instrumentation speaks to the whole exotica idea, which is that pairing sounds that by all rights shouldn’t exist side-by-side: pairing East Asian string instruments with Latin percussion, for instance.

That’s kind of the idea. We can get really academic about it. We have a doctoral candidate in the group, and we can get really nerdy about it. It’s really, like, a white 1950s perspective when you use words like “exotic” to describe what is just a normal folk instrument in other countries. It’s from that dated, Western perspective.

But I feel like there’s room for a little bit of fun in instrumental music. Jazz and classical music, I feel like it’s often put on this pedestal. I mean, I play those styles of music — that’s what I was raised playing — but there’s always this gap between the music and the listener. I feel like exotica is almost like a bridge for that. It kind of brings it down a notch more than if I called it “global ensemble jazz.” People feel the need to escape every now and then, and that’s not really a new idea. We find our fans really appreciate the disconnect that this style of music brings.

Mr. Ho’s Orchestrotica

2 p.m. Sunday, February 26, at the Lied Center Pavilion; tickets $25, $14 (students)