Don’t call Hobbs the Band a blues band.

Guitarist Hobbs Magarét insists this so quietly it’s almost lost to the din of his four bandmates as they sit in their practice space, a building in Sisters’ warehouse district affectionately dubbed the Blue Keep.

Hobbs’s comment came after keyboardist and saxophonist Jim Goodwin, a veteran of Santa Cruz, California, band The Call, shared how he joined the band in September of last year, and his concern that a saxophone wouldn’t fit in a blues band.

“We started out as a blues band,” Magarét offered.

“We’re kind of still a blues band,” Goodwin countered back. “It’s progressive. That is the key word: progressive blues.”

Blues is an obvious starting point to describe the now five-piece Hobbs the Band, which made its debut as a power trio at the Sisters Folk Festival 3½ years ago. It’s there in the band’s lengthy, groove-oriented jams and in Magarét’s shredding guitar parts, which bear the mark of influences Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughn and Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour.

But the band is expanding from its beginnings, beefing up its sound with Goodwin and organist/pianist Aaron Miller. Steady live performances over the years in Sisters, Bend and beyond have honed the group’s songs into near-orchestral pieces with winding parts that rarely stick to the typical rock verse-chorus-verse formula for long. The band plays next at the Music in the Canyon series at American Legion Park in Redmond on Wednesday.

“Well, we write parts. We definitely have our fill of gratuitous, bourgeois soloing, but we also make sure we write parts and make sure everything has a place,” Magarét said. “I come from a — I was a big band nerd, so I have a really big orchestral background as well, and so I have a strong desire to make sure it’s very regal and intelligent, what we play.”

The original three-piece — Magarét, bassist Patrick Pearsall and drummer Kaleb Kelleher — has toured outside the local area, playing a few times in Portland, and released a self-titled album in 2013.

Magarét grew up in the Texas Panhandle, where he learned to play guitar at an early age from his grandfather. He arrived in Sisters after graduating college in 2009, and for a while worked as manager of the Sisters airport.

Pearsall first played with Magarét at the Americana Song Academy camp for youth at the Caldera Arts Center west of Sisters; he in turn brought in Kelleher, whom he was playing with in another band at the time.

“Hobbs had asked me (to play), and at the time I was just way too busy with three other bands or whatever, and it was summertime, and I was like, sorry, man,” Kelleher said. “And then a couple, few months went by, and then Patrick met Hobbs and then I saw Patrick. … So Patrick corralled me.”

The eight songs on the first record were recorded mostly live, but showcased the band’s already burgeoning progressive elements.

“The last album that we did with the three of us, it was just totally — it was like an Amish barn raising,” Magarét said. “Everybody showed up with all their equipment, we threw it together, and — all right, run through the songs, all right, that was great, take the best (stuff) and then lay your vocals on top of it.”

Since that album and the addition of Goodwin and Miller, the band has amassed at least 11 more songs for inclusion on the next album, which will be released through Goodwin’s Label Records. Magarét is still the band’s primary songwriter, though the band takes ideas from recorded jams at rehearsals and even live shows.

“There was like a funny thing where I played something in a sax solo that I had no memory of playing, and Hobbs remembered it and he started playing it,” Goodwin said. “And I said, ‘What’s that?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know, you came up with it.’”

New songs such as “What You Think” and “New Religion” find the band incorporating the new instrumentation into longer arrangements that jump around between musical set pieces, all anchored by Magarét’s guitar playing. For recording, which is once again happening at the Blue Keep, the band is experimenting even further — at one point, Magarét showed off the studio’s thunder sheet, a thin sheet of metal that creates thunder-like sound effects when struck with a mallet.

“Jim is a synth meister, and really great piano player as well; A-Ron (Miller) is also a very good piano player, that’s why he’s our piano player,” Magarét said. “I play guitar and I can also play trombone and trumpet, so we have a lot of opportunity to arrange and just stack a lot of cool (stuff) on top of each other. So it’s been really lucky. It’s been a harmonic resonance or a clashing together of a lot of different energies at the right time for this to happen.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7814, bmcelhiney@bendbulletin.com