Undersung Hero
Jim Hobbs makes a mighty noise with the Fully Celebrated Orchestra.
by Jon Garelick

Is alto player Jim Hobbs the best saxophonist in Boston? The 37-year-old native of Fort Wayne, Indiana, has been here since 1986, when he began to attend Berklee College of Music on a full scholarship. Not long after that, he began working with a nucleus of like-minded musicians who would become the paradoxically named small ensemble the Fully Celebrated Orchestra. The FCO release their latest album, Lapis Exilis, on the German Skycap label this Tuesday, and they’ll celebrate with a show at the Lizard Lounge on March 10 as part of a Club d’Elf bill. Ask around town, at least among the avant-garde set, and Hobbs’ name is evoked with near-reverence. Guitarist Joe Morris summed it up best in a radio interview a few years ago: “He’s as good as anyone who’s ever played that instrument.” Incase you need reminding, players of “that instrument” include Johnny Hodges, Charlie Parker, Cannonball Adderley, and Ornette Coleman.

Hobbs’ résumé puts him squarely in the camp of followers of original new music. Rather than teach, like a lot of Boston’ long-term resident musicians, he holds down a day job at Rayburn Music. Apart from his own bands, he shows up as a sideman in only a select few projects, gigs with Morris, the Jazz Composers Alliance Orchestra, “circus music” specialist the Beat Science, and guitarist Jim Platz among them.

The new album shows off Hobbs at his best, as player and composer, with his long-time rhythm mates, bassist Timo Shanko (who’s been with Hobbs almost since the very beginning of his Boston sojourn) and drummer Django Carranza, and with cornet player Taylor Ho Bynum. Hobbs long ago absorbed Ornette Coleman’s language, and at times he and Bynum are a serendipitous reincarnation of the Coleman/Don Cherry partnership, especially on the flowing free bop of “Billylillylillybilly.” His taste for Indian music (he identifies the shenai player Bismillah Khan as a special musical hero) informs several of the pieces, including the opening “Lord of Creatures” and the title track. The closing “Farewell,” with its Tex-Mex ballad melody, in one of Hobbs’ homages to another hero, Willie Nelson; “Ol’ Lady Who? (the title from a particularly bad knock-knock joke) is a cowboy waltz in which Hobbs says he was trying to get that “high lonesome” sound of country music’s famous “brother” acts (the Stanleys, the Louvins). “Throne of Osiris” is more typically avant-garde, with its fragmentary start-stop theme of leaping angular intervals; “The Mackie Burnette” begins with one of Hobbs’ throat-shredding annunciation before settling into a funk groove.

What makes his playing so special? It’s a combination of total mastery of his instrument and his imagination as an improviser. “He can play inside or outside — it doesn’t matter,” says Bynum. “He can skronk wildly and then go into these incredibly articulated 16th notes at the drop of a hat. The only other saxophonist I’ve worked with at that level is Anthony Braxton.” (Bynum is a regular member of Braxton’s current band.) Scott Getchell, who plays trumpet with Hobbs in Platz’s Bright Light Group (and is also a cartoonist who contributes to this newspaper and other publications), calls Hobbs’ improvising “a mastery of spontaneous composition.”

What Getchell and other players also point to is Hobbs’ ability to develop and sustain an original conception through an entire solo. “With other players, you can hear them kind of losing it,” Getchell says, “that they’re falling back on a technical thing, a lick, or you can say, ‘Oh, he’s falling back on his Coltrane thing.’ In the case of Hobbs, I don’t hear that. You expect it to fall off at some point, and it doesn’t.”

Hobbs’ technical prowess is especially evident in his control of multiphonics — playing two or more pitches simultaneously. Brain Carpenter of the Beat Science in an e-mail recalls a date at Tonic in New York City where Hobbs “ ‘clicked’ into this growl/cry multiphonic thing” — two saxophone pitches plus Hobbs’ voice singing through the horn — “and then he was able to sustain that multiphonic (through some combination of voice, breathing, embouchure, and throat control) and use this new voice for an entire five-minute improvisation, using the voice in different timbres and volumes and playing very melodically with it and in different patterns. It wasn’t so much the sound that he created that was so shocking, it was the ease of use an flexibility of that sound that threw me for a loop.”

What Getchell and Carpenter are getting at is that, even given Hobbs’ broad technique, he never gives in to empty virtuosity — the emotional content is always right there. Listen to the patient way he builds his solo on “Lord of Creatures” from short phrases, creating a new melody, and cresting with an aching, syncopated three-note cry. Morris calls Hobbs’ playing “soul music.”

it hardly does the band members justice to say that they fulfill Hobbs’ intentions. Shanko’s solo in “Lord of Creatures” flows smoothly, inflected with the bends of Indian vocal and string music and complemented by Carranza’s cymbal colorations. Bynum follows Hobbs’ solos by echoing a rhythmic idea but with contrasting attacks and effects. The unity of conception owes a lot to Hobbs’ pieces — in fact, he’s been more recognized as a composer than as a player, with a grant from Chamber Music America. Bynum says, “You can’t play one of Jim’s tunes and just play free. Each tune has an intervallic concept or melodic concept that you have to deal with. It’s very Monk-like in that way. Monk will write a blues, but you can’t just play a blues over it. Jim is just a master at that. The material is so strong that it gives you so much to improvise off of.”

When I sit down with Hobbs during his lunch break, he recalls his formative years, and it’s the classic portrait of the artist as precocious problem child. After taking an aptitude test, he was encouraged to study an instrument early — fourth grade — but “it had to be a stringed instrument. So I picked viola, thinking I could switch to guitar later. I hated it. It was me and two other kids with this ancient old lady teaching us. And they were both violinists and had already been playing. So I’m screeching and squeaking and they’re playing these melodies and I’m playing whole notes.” A recital ended it. “I guess I was making some kind of face — the concentration face — so all my aunts and everybody made fun of that, so I realized that I needed an instrument I could put in my mouth so I wouldn’t be able to make those faces.” A friend played saxophone and that clinched the deal. “The saxophone came with a neck strap — like an accessory. That made it more appealing to me.”

At first, music lessons were just a way to get out of another hour of classes. But Hobbs was soon listing his ambition as “musician” in elementary-school career reports. By high school, he was a regular band kid, even though he remembers being a “total hoodlum” whose deportment brought down the wrath of the band teachers who were especially frustrated because of his obvious skill. In freshman year, playing in the high-school concert band, “I was demoted from last-chair alto saxophone to first-chair baritone sax. Which was cool with me — it was fun to play bari.”

But then Hobbs began to observe the system of “challenges” in the high-school band — any player could challenge another player’s position. The players would be judged from behind a screen by the rest of the band. He found the judging generally inept at best, unfair at worst. The winner was “whoever played the loudest.” But he began to enter the challenges just for the fun of it — and that required him to practice. “You didn’t want to play it loud and wrong.” Later, entering a state-wide band competition, he won an “outstanding soloist” award — and his full scholarship to Berklee.

In Boston, always looking for new sounds, Hobbs hooked up with drummer Ray Anthony, then Shanko, and the trio would play Harvard Square regularly. “We endeavored to do our thing and not really do popular music or anything — it was to be avant-garde. But at the same time, we wanted to attract a crowd.” They would play off people walking by and get into feuds with neighboring jugglers and magicians, and they developed this kind of cult following that stuck with them as they worked into the clubs.

If Hobbs’ skills as a composer have won him wider recognition, they’ve also helped the Fully Celebrated Orchestra find and keep that audience. The FCO mix up not only the melodies of various world musics but also the rhythms — the straight swing time and walking bass of “Billylillylillybilly” are more the exception than the rule. And they’re always sensitive to form. “We want to give the feel of harmonic motion, of chord changes,” Hobbs says, “but without having to play the same jazz mantra over and over again every 24 bars. But let it go off on tangents, let it be more orchestral; there’s a theme, there’s development, maybe there’s three bars here, there’s 10 bars there.” In a band without a chording instrument like guitar or piano, “there’s so much sort of pivoting available, because Timo’s note and my note together, that harmony could be any number of different chords at any given moment, depending on where you just came from and what we both play next. So you’re always listening for that tension and release.”

Of his soloing, Hobbs says, “You hear athletes talk about how they had a certain great night, they were ‘in the zone.’ It’s similar to that. You’re trying to find that zone, where you’re safe from your own ability to doubt yourself. Where you don’t have to think about any of the rules or right notes or something as simple as trying to play good. You don’t have to think about that. You get to that certain zone and it is what it is. Good or bad — if I polled everybody in the audience, it would be 50-50. So I can’t care about that, you know? That’s not my problem. My problem is being true to that zone. And I guess in some ways it’s like being an actor, giving fully to the emotion of the moment rather than dazzling licks or any of that.”