Adam Theis: A musician of many talents

Adam Theis hasn’t forgotten the early days, learning the art of live jazz in a downtown Santa Rosa sports bar-pool hall in the mid-’90s.

“We would play at Masse’s on Fifth Street. There’s no stage and we’re playing in this corner of a giant cavernous room,” he says. “Looking back it was rough, but when we were doing it, we thought it was the best thing ever. We had regular gigs playing jazz.”

Flash forward to next Saturday, when the 34-year-old Santa Rosa native premieres his suite at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, commissioned by SFJAZZ as part of the San Francisco Jazz Festival. “Beats, Bows and Brass” imagines a 50-piece post-modern orchestra with no borders, where jazz plays call and response with hip-hop, where turntables and electronics mix it up with cellos and violas and all the pretentious baggage that comes with “the symphony” is kicked to the curb.

“It doesn’t really fit into any musical categories really well, but it’s not something that’s just really weird for the sake of being weird,” says Theis, who was awarded the Gerbode-Hewlett Foundation “Emerging Composer” grant, which funded the SFJAZZ commission of his new work. “Sometimes with symphonic music with a lot of acoustic instruments, if you can’t relate it to something it seems like it’s really hard to dig into it musically.”

The two-part concert is the hybrid culmination of everything he’s dreamed, from his early Santa Rosa days with Cannonball to the ongoing revolving projects Shotgun Wedding Quintet and Hip-Hop Symphony, Realistic Orchestra, Brass Mafia and Supertaster.

“We still can’t really believe we’re doing this,” Theis says a few weeks before the show.

Over the past few months, he’s been holed up in his Mission District apartment working eight to 12 hours a day, balancing the organic approach — jamming, demos, making beats, collaborating with vocalists Dublin and Joe Begale — with the note-for-note rigor of composition and sheet music.

“There’s no notation software that’s fun to work with,” he says. “It all sounds like a video game from the ’80s.”

A week ago, on stage with Shotgun Wedding Quintet at Hopmonk Tavern in Sebastopol, Theis held down the bass all night. But four strings weren’t enough. With the bass still strapped on, he repeatedly picked up the trombone and gave it a few pulls, moving on to keyboards for a short spell, playing a blue-collar jazz shiva — if he had more arms, you get the feeling he could play every instrument onstage.

“I feel like I kind of neglect the ’bone a lot,” he lamented earlier in the day. “Even when I write arrangements it’s kind of the last thing I think of — am I giving it props? I feel really awkward if I bring it and I don’t pick it up. It needs to be played.”

During the ’80s, Theis picked up the trombone from SRJC music teacher Ken Winett, who turned him on to more than just jazz, rooting him in the gospel of Take 6 and Jamaican pre-reggae rhythms. Schooling included digging through crates at The Last Record Store, picking up tips from the encyclopedic staff, and “sneaking into the Old Vic” to see sax player Eric Crystal and guitarist Dave McNab.

In the Sonoma State jazz program, the El Molino High grad studied with the late Mel Graves, who taught him how to tap into the cerebral side of music, always a precursor to the jazz idiom, “Learn it to unlearn it.”

“I was late getting into theory,” he remembers. “Most of what I use now, I learned from him.”

After spending most of his time driving around the Bay Area for gigs (and nearly spending a night in Santa Rosa Creek after a wreck on Willowside Road), Theis moved down to 25th and Mission in San Francisco in 1998, quickly finding a sound lab down the street at the hipster hideaway Bruno’s Supper Club, where his various bands and improv acts have played for the past eight years.

Theis has two new albums coming out this month, one with Brass Mafia, the other with Realistic Orchestra.

For the sake of variety, consider a track off each: The Brass Mafia cover of Janet Jackson’s pop classic “Nasty” started with a rough Garageband remix “and then I was like, wow, let’s make it even weirder and play it with a brass band. It turned into a double remix — a remix of a remix.”

On Realistic Orchestra’s “Symphonies From Down the Block,” MC Dublin raps over “The Captain Goes Down With the Ship” for a pendulating free-form cinematic sketch that borrows a one-eyed jack from “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

But Theis, the consummate bandleader with a hand in everything from logos to lodging, hardly has time to think about marketing new CDs before next weekend’s world premiere at the Palace of Fine Arts.

“It’s definitely going to be the most amazing cast of musicians I’ve ever played with — all under one roof. And it might be for a really long time. It’s gonna be the biggest thing I’ve been involved with.”

Over the past month, “we’ve been doing a lot of the logistics and tech stuff on the show and we think we can fit,” he says of the unlikely 50-piece army he’ll be conducting.

It’s something he never had to think about crammed into a corner at Masse’s pool hall.

Then again, “If you don’t do those rough ones,” he says, “I don’t think any musician has the appreciation for playing the real quality venues.”