Name an acoustic instrument, and chances are someone in The Trail Band plays it onstage.

Banjo, trombone, tuba, hammer dulcimer, pennywhistle, fiddle, reed contrabass and more find their way into the eight-piece band’s shows on a regular basis. At a recent show, band members Phil and Gayle Neuman counted up all the instruments onstage.

“I think it was like 35 or something,” Marv Ross said during a joint phone interview with his wife and fellow Trail Band co-founder Rindy Ross from their home in Portland.

“Yeah, I think that’s what they said, that there’s 35 instruments onstage including Swiss alphorns,” Rindy Ross said, laughing. “So it’s pretty fun.”

The list has only grown since the Rosses, best known for Quarterflash and its hit, “Harden My Heart,” formed the band in 1991 after being commissioned by the Oregon Trail Council to commemorate the trail’s 150th anniversary.

“The band has always had a reputation even from the very beginning of — people would always say, ‘My God, you guys play so many different instruments and you switch styles so quickly. How do you do that?’” Marv said. “We are unusual; I don’t know of any other band that does what we do, where you have somebody that switches from a banjo to a trombone or from a fiddle to a tuba.”

Formed with the intention of creating the “most amazing folk-brass band that ever existed,” The Trail Band now touches on everything from Dixieland to klezmer to baroque in its shows. Marv said he tries to push the other musicians in the band to incorporate the unexpected.

“My job as the producer is, I’m thinking like a coach who has some really good, hot players. You go, how can I put them in the best position for them to succeed?” Marv said. “If I know that Phil can play a really bizarre instrument like the reed contrabass, which sounds like a, I don’t know, a combination of a train and an electronic fart — I mean, it’s just the most amazing sounding, ancient instrument that nobody else in the world plays — then I’m gonna put him in that position to show that he can actually play that thing.”

The genre-blending comes to the fore during the band’s holiday shows, an annual tradition for most of its quarter-century history. The show heads to the Tower Theatre on Saturday for two performances, one at 3 p.m. and one at 7 p.m.

The band last brought this show — one of four themed performances it is known for — to Bend in 2013. But the Rosses have deep ties to the area. The couple moved to the area in the ’70s after graduating from Western Oregon University in 1973, and spent three years teaching here — Rindy at John Tuck Elementary in Redmond, Marv at Cascade Junior High School — while living in the bunk house at Hollinshead Ranch (now a museum at Hollinshead Park).

The Rosses still regularly perform here with The Trail Band and Quarterflash, which reformed around the time The Trail Band started. Marv and Rindy both consider Central Oregon shows — especially shows at the Tower — to be homecomings.

“When I think of Bend, I think of, that was where Rindy and I sort of — our lives started there together, our first jobs, our first real band that played there in Bend,” Marv said. “And then just hanging around Dean and Lily (Hollinshead) and all the other people we got to meet in there. So we have lifelong friends who still live in Bend, and we’ll definitely see them at the show. And so for us to walk out onstage, and feel like, oh, we’re here. This is a theater where we saw movies at; it was a long time ago now. So we have a lot of emotional stuff for us to go back and play in that room.”

By 1980, the couple relocated to Portland and scored a local hit with “Harden My Heart.” The song caught the attention of Geffen Records, and the Rosses re-recorded “Harden My Heart” for the label with their new band Quarterflash. The band released three albums before being dropped by the label in 1985 and breaking up, but reformed in 1990 and have continued to tour and record ever since (the band’s sixth album, “Love is a Road,” released in 2013).

But The Trail Band — also featuring the Neumans, hammer dulcimer player Mick Doherty, violinist and trumpeter Eddie Parente, musical director Cal Scott and percussionist Dan Stueber — has been the Rosses’ primary focus since 1991. And the holiday show is what helped keep the band going after the Oregon Trail sesquicentennial celebration in 1993.

“We did three years pretty much as sort of a band that re-created music from the Oregon Trail era, and we toured all over the Northwest. And then when we were done with that, we had such a great time and everybody was digging what we were doing; we thought, what else could we do with this band?” Marv said. “For years I had thought about doing a Christmas show … because there didn’t seem to be anything in town that really I related to to go to as an annual Christmas show. I thought there was something missing for our age group, and for — a show that you could take your parents to that would work for your whole family. So many shows at Christmas are oriented towards kids … and we wanted something that was just sort of the opposite.”

Parents, rest assured: Kids are welcome at The Trail Band’s holiday shows (Marv suggested ages 8 and older). For 22 years the band has hosted the shows at the Aladdin Theater in Portland to benefit Friends of the Children; this year’s run of five shows took place Dec. 11-13, and featured special guest and fellow Portlandian Liz Vice.

Vice won’t be at the Tower, but the show will be very much the same, Marv and Rindy said. By now, The Trail Band has released six (at least) albums of holiday music, out of 13 total — so there’ll be no shortage of both classic and original songs to choose from. Expect a few songs from the band’s latest studio album, this year’s “Joyride,” as well.

“Every year is a challenge because we want to keep what people love, but at the same time it has to be fresh and interesting,” Rindy said. “One of the things that is fun about this band and that people have told us over and over is that it’s pretty quirky, too. We have some kind of funny people in the band, and so we can kind of go from pretty funny and occasionally irreverent to quite poignant.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7814, bmcelhiney@bendbulletin.com