E-Mail This Article to a Friend Undersung hero (continued)

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 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 the kind of cult following that stuck with them as they worked into the clubs.

If Hobbs’s 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 "Billybillybilly" 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 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."

The Fully Celebrated Orchestra play the Lizard Lounge, 1667 Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, on March 10; call (617) 547-0759.