Me&Thee regulars, prepare yourselves for a wild night. For your listening and cogitative pleasure, we have two rhythmically & rhetorically provocative groups with three-word names.

All About Buford has been performing their own unique kind of pop and funk music for over four years. Various kinds of music have inspired their repertoire and band members mix and match all kinds of genres (even within the same song): acoustic, jazz, rhythm and blues, pop, and even world music. This band has won a closet-full of awards and recognitions: Boston Regional Harmony Sweepstakes Champion, three A Cappella Community Awards, and other nods of recognition for singing talents or original songs. They have been described as “a band that has helped to change the acoustic music landscape of the Northeast.”

The members of All About Buford are extremely talented and versatile. Taunia Soderquist is greatly influenced by jazz vocalists like Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn as well as soul divas like Aretha Franklin and Chaka Kahn but she cajoles, croons and channels their well-recognized sounds into her very own song stylings. Amy Malkoff sings, writes and plays a mean guitar. She made up one-half of a duo with Ray Gonzalez and founded the group Deadline Poet. She has performed with Ellis Paul, Christine Lavin, Patty Larkin and Dar Williams, among others. Ben Jackson discovered the joy of vocal percussion while singing with the Harvard Callbacks. He sings with pop/rock vocal band Downtown Crossing, as well as with All About Buford. Shah Salmi, originally from Malaysia, is a star in his own right in his native land. He and his sister, Zuria, have recorded albums and appeared in soap operas in Malaysia. Wes Carroll is a singer, songwriter, teacher and multi-instrumentalist best known for his performances in, instruction in, and advocacy of vocal percussion. And in case you’re wondering, Buford is Amy’s Persian cat.

“This is not what people expect a cappella to be,” Malkoff said of the group’s shows. “In fact, we had someone come up to us after a show and say, ‘I never expected to laugh so hard.’ It’s high energy, it’s very diverse — we’re not doing doo-wop, and that’s unfortunately one of a lot of misperceptions that we have to get through.” Their CD “Supercar” contains a collection of tunes from their eclectic catalog. A music critic for the Boston Globe says that “the harmonies created by Malkoff and Sonderquist melt in my ears.”

Sharing the bill at the Me&Thee is Jim’s Big Ego, a Boston trio built around the genius of songwriter-poet Jim Infantino. The band creates a sound that can best be described as “unpop” — not your ordinary top 40 stuff, but infectious, intelligent pop songs that alternate between unabashedly hilarious and unpretentiously moving. Jim’s early days of music were spent on the street and in the subway. Jesse Flack on the upright bass and Dan Cantor on drums make up the rest of the Ego-guys.

As one reviewer says: “It would be difficult to find a better poster child for the principle of open forum than Jim Infantino. Strongly-held beliefs about free expression have marked this singer-songwriter’s career since he burst onto the Boston scene in the early ’90s. With Jim’s Big Ego, the band he founded in 1995, Infantino paired these ideas with cutting-edge technology to reach out with his music ever further and catalyze a response.” All of Jim Big Ego’s CDs contain comic and heartwarming portrayals of life in this crazy mixed-up world. Their latest album, “They’re Everywhere” has been called “out of the box” and that’s a more than excellent characterization of this band’s purpose for being. Another reviewer proclaims that this album is “musical irreverence at its best.” And yet another magazine writer says that the band’s following is “cult-like so the underground word of mouth will further their popularity more than any comparison to some other band. But it takes a perfect melange of sadness and the ability to laugh at that sadness in order to create the secret weapon Jim’s Big Ego makes use of so effortlessly.”

Photo by Liz Linder