Bringing funk to the masses is hard work.

Just ask Tayo Branston, drummer, vocalist and bandleader for Vancouver, Canada, eight-piece Five Alarm Funk. For the last 15 years, the band has trekked back and forth across its native country, often driving upward of 10 hours through sparsely populated areas to get from gig to gig.

“We just finished a five-day stretch that took us through Quebec out to Toronto two nights ago,” Branston said from Sarnia, Ontario, while on the road to the next show. “One of those days, we played till midnight, loaded out all the gear — that was probably about 1:30 in the morning when we got out of there — woke up at 6 a.m., drove, took a ferry, drove another four hours, played a concert then drove another five hours just so we could make it to Toronto. So everything is pretty crazy, it’s pretty spread out, but that’s the life.”

And being in a band with eight members can create even more problems out of everyday touring mishaps.

“Right now, our bus — we blew our transmission a week before the tour,” Branston said. “We were 600 kilometers — what is that, 350 miles — from our home in Vancouver, so it sat in the shop for so long. It was there for two weeks, and they diagnosed it and we towed it back to Vancouver. So right now, we’re driving in two minivans that we rented in Winnipeg.”

But the constant touring is paying off in spades for Five Alarm Funk. Last year, the band began pushing further into the U.S. on the strength of its sixth album, “Sweat,” a 12-track set that emphasizes tight songwriting and musicianship while showcasing a mix of hard funk grooves, rock ’n’ roll swagger, Afrobeat and Latin influence.

The album scored the band its second Juno Award nomination for Instrumental Album of the Year and attracted the attention of funk pioneer Bootsy Collins, who guested on a new version of the album track “Capital City.”

The group, which played its first show in Bend late last year, will return to Central Oregon on Sunday as part of the lineup for the sixth annual Newberry Event Music & Arts Festival to Defeat MS. The music festival and fundraiser for the Oregon chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society returns Friday through Sunday at DiamondStone Guest Lodges.

After welcoming headliner Lukas Nelson and Promise of the Real last year, the Newberry Event has continued to ramp up its musical offerings this year with long-running Boston funk/jam band Lettuce headlining Saturday. Pimps of Joytime, guitarist Jeff Pevar (Rickie Lee Jones; Crosby, Stills & Nash), Shook Twins, John Craigie, Pat Simmons Jr. (son of The Doobie Brothers guitarist Patrick Simmons) and more also will perform on two alternating stages throughout the event.

“We’re like Les Schwab Amphitheater down here, and finally people are realizing it, but it’s taken them a while,” said Gloria Watt, festival co-founder and DiamondStone co-owner (with husband Doug Watt). “We’re bringing national, touring acts. We’ve got people from San Francisco and Vancouver, British Columbia, and Los Angeles and Nashville.”

The festival’s fundraising mission holds significance for Gloria, 58, who first developed symptoms of multiple sclerosis — a disease that causes swelling in the central nervous system, leading to pain and paralysis — at 19 and was diagnosed at 24. More than 2.3 million worldwide are thought to have MS, including more than 8,000 in Oregon, according to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society’s website (nationalmssociety.org). The Newberry Event has raised close to $10,000 for the society over its five-year existence, Gloria said, though the Watts’ goal is to raise $10,000 every year.

Five Alarm Funk fits with the younger atmosphere the festival has leaned into in the last few years under promoter Action Deniro Productions. The band grew out of an impromptu jam session featuring Branston, guitarist Gabe Boothroyd (still with the group) and former bassist Neil Towers at a house party in Vancouver in 2003.

“From that one single instance, we were like, ‘Wow, this sounds really great; everybody at this party loved it,’” Branston said. “And then we started playing more together. We started jamming out in the garage and just having fun with it. I think it took about six months or something of just having fun and just enjoying music to throw our first show. … I think from that instance, that’s when we realized we were onto something. It’s a fun-loving group — it really embodies happiness and peace and the spirit of funk, man.”

The band continued to evolve organically — at one point it featured 12 members, including two trombone players, Branston said. That evolution came to a head on “Sweat,” which Branston calls “the best record we’ve ever produced.” But there are even bigger things lined up, including a seventh album to be recorded in winter and more collaborations following the group’s team-up with Collins.

“We were chilling in the bus — we were coming back from a long haul in Canada somewhere — and we were thinking about how to get a little bit of variation in our sound and get a little bit of difference in our recorded material,” Branston said of hooking up with Collins. “We started thinking of collaborations, and Bootsy was the first name that we could even think of — I mean, he’s like the father of funk, he lays it down hard, he still tours like a madman. … We just got our management to reach out, fire him an email with the track in it. We said, ‘Hey, do you want to funk on this with us?’ And he was down from the get-go.”