One of the coolest musical event of the year, the Switchboard Festival, was founded by Jeff Anderle, Jon Russell, and Ryan Brown in 2007. This marathon of unorthodox, modern, exciting, eclectic bands happened this year on March 24 from 2-10 pm at the Brava Theater in the Mission. Jeff, Jon, and Ryan curate a list of performers every year that do not easily fall into another musical category or concert series.

This year, the list includes the ZOFO piano duet, who were nominated for two Grammys this year, who performed with the Sqwonk bass clarinet duo (one half of ZOFO, Keisuke Nakagoshi, will perform with the SF Symphony in April, if the orchestra's strike is over by then); Rob Reich, the accordionist of Tin Hat, performed new material with his quintet; Build, a band made of up of conservatory-trained players on orchestra instruments; and Ignition, a new duo formed by two recent grads of the guitar program at the Conservatory.

The line-up also included Subharmonic, a new brass-rock-groove band headed up by Adam Theis of the Jazz Mafia. Adam founded the Jazz Mafia collective, and has played his trombone in many bands, including backing up Carlos Santana. He teaches at SF Jazz and compose large scale orchestral music, for which he won the prestigious Gerbode-Hewlett Foundation “Emerging Composers” grant. The result of which you can see here. We called Adam to discuss his new band and the Switchboard Festival.