Something ahhltogether ahhwesome is about to happen.

This weekend, more than 160 singers from across Oregon, Northern California and Washington will descend on Central Oregon for the inaugural Bend A Cappella Festival.

There’s something different about the vocal performance world, according to Ray Solley, executive director of the Tower Theatre, where the festival begins tonight and continues through Sunday.

“It’s very collegial. It’s very friendly. It’s very hands on,” said Solley. “You don’t see that necessarily when you’re dealing with rock ’n’ roll or some other music styles. You see it a little bit with jazz and a little bit with dance, but there is very much an enthusiastic community feeling that a cappella generates.”

But the high school, college and amateur groups from across the Northwest aren’t just coming for the master classes and critique sessions — the festival also offers them the chance to compete, too. In fact, the festival is modeled on “touring and soccer and baseball tournaments, where (competitors) go from Bend to Boise, stay in hotels and you play three or four games and you network and you eat and you have a good time … and then maybe you win a trophy and you work on your skills,” Solley said. “We applied that model to an a cappella festival, and we realized there was no weekend festival that did those things in the Northwest.”

The fun starts at tonight’s sold-out Sing Off. Fifteen groups will compete for the chance to open Saturday night’s concert by The House Jacks, the weekend’s headliner. The San Francisco quintet, founded in 1991, is known as masters of modern a cappella, and are often described as a rock band without instruments.

“I would say we can imitate any instrument. How good it is really varies,” said Austin Willacy, tenor and the longest tenured member of the group. “It’s pretty hard to make a vocal sound that sounds like a credible piano. But it is easier to do a credible vocal guitar and harmonica.”

Among other accomplishments, The House Jacks were heavily involved in NBC’s “The Sing Off!” doing arrangements, working with vocalists and producing cast albums. Vocal performance has been enjoying a pop-culture moment in recent years, being depicted in the “Pitch Perfect” movies and other shows such as “Glee,” bringing increased attention to the kind of work The House Jacks have been doing for years — and likely more a cappella aspirants as well.

“They absolutely have,” Willacy said. “I think that they bring awareness of, and excitement about, the way music is being made. That’s a credit (to them).”

However, “I think that they also set sort of an unrealistic expectation of how easy it is. If you watch ‘Glee,’ they start out holding the sheet music but not looking at it because they’re looking at the camera, and then by the end the music is on the floor, and they’re dancing around. That’s not really the way that it works,” he said. “It takes a little while to put things together.”

The Tower Theatre Foundation received an $11,000 Cultural Tourism grant for the festival, which will also serve up “Aca-Pops,” free vocal group street performances around the Old Mill from 4 to 6 p.m. Saturday.

In keeping with Solley’s observation of peer collegiality in the vocal performance realm, The House Jacks will serve as judges during the Sing Off. Willacy and another of its members, beatboxer John Pointer, will teach master classes on Saturday, as will other industry professionals, including singer-turned-booking-agent Craig Knudsen, who represents a number of vocal groups.

Willacy leads the master class at 1 p.m. Saturday. What he plans to cover “sort of depends,” he said.

“The nice thing about master classes is that it’s an opportunity to … work with groups where they’re at. If they’re trying to get ready for a competition and they want really targeted feedback about things to tighten up, it can be about that. If they want a tutorial on the finer points of vocal percussion, or they want to work on intonation … there’s an opportunity to do that too. So it’s really wide open in terms of what it can cover.”

Knudsen, too, plans to gauge the level of singers’ aspirations “to see if there are people really hoping to go with a professional level with it,” he said. “There are a lot of groups that are similar to other groups. They’re all good and they’re all at a high level, so you have to find that something that gives you a little something different.”

Solley has a theory as to why the a cappella world — even its stars — lack pretense, offering one another support and camaraderie instead of attitude.

“I think that’s because it’s just people up there just singing,” he said. “They aren’t hiding behind any instrument. They’re not doing something to distract you from their voices. They’re not tap dancing and doing other stuff. They might do choreography, but that’s to support their performance. There really is this amazing sense of ‘We’re going to let it all hang out.’”

— Reporter: 541-383-0349, djasper@bendbulletin.com