E-Mail This Article to a Friend 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’s 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." In case you need reminding, players of "that instrument" include Johnny Hodges, Charlie Parker, Cannonball Adderley, and Ornette Coleman.

Hobbs’s résumé puts him squarely in the camp of followers of original new music. Rather than teach, like a lot of Boston’s 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, the Beat Circus, 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 trumpeter 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 "Billybillybilly." 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 the Creatures" and the title track. The closing "Farewell," with its Tex-Mex ballad melody, is one of Hobbs’s 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’s throat-shredding annunciations 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’s improvising "a mastery of spontaneous composition."

What Getchell and other players also point to is Hobbs’s 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’s technical prowess is especially evident in his control of multiphonics — playing two or more pitches simultaneously. Brian Carpenter of the Beat Circus 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’s 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 and flexibility of that sound that threw me for a loop."

What Getchell and Carpenter are getting at is that, even given Hobbs’s 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’s playing "soul music."

It hardly does the band members justice to say that they fulfill Hobbs’s 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’s solos by echoing a rhythmic idea but with contrasting attacks and effects. The unity of conception owes a lot to Hobbs’s 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."