The way it is Versatile performer Hornsby remains active on the musical range

Mention the name Bruce Hornsby to most music fans and the response will be something along the line of “Oh yeah, I remember him. Whatever happened to him anyway?”

A lot has happened to him since his debut album, “The Way It Is,” landed him three Top-20 singles and won him a Grammy Award for best new artist in 1987.

The artist best known for the hits he and his band The Range recorded for that album such as “The Way It Is” (his only No. 1 single), “Mandolin Rain and Every Little Kiss” may have ducked under the pop culture-mainstream music radar the past few years, but he hasn’t been resting on his laurels.

Hornsby will kick off a 20-city, late summer tour with an 8 p.m. concert Friday at the State Theatre in Portland.

In spite of the fact that most casual listeners still know him best for his early albums, he has gone to great lengths to avoid being compartmentalized and lumped into the Top-40 genre. The disbanding of Bruce Hornsby and The Range in 1991 after three albums is an example of those lengths.

As attendees of his concert will likely find out firsthand, Hornsby is constantly trying to push his personal creativity envelope. Just a quick glance at Hornsby’s impressive musical resume bears that fact out. He has reworked a hit song (“The Valley Road”) from the “Scenes from the Southside” album with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and won another Grammy for best bluegrass recording (1990), written a Grammy-winning hit song (“The End of the Innocence”) for Don Henley of solo and Eagles’ fame, become a member of the Grateful Dead (1991), had a song sampled by Tupac Shakur, and recorded a cover of “Darlin’ Corey” last year for “Big Mon,” a tribute to bluegrass founder Bill Monroe produced by Ricky Skaggs.

He has played and worked with musical luminaries and names such as Bob Dylan, Huey Lewis and the News, Branford Marsalis, Pat Metheny, Leon Russell and Squeeze. He has also written and performed songs for movie soundtracks such as “Backdraft,” “Tin Cup” and Spike Lee’s “Bamboozled.”

Hornsby’s latest and seventh album is “Here Come the Noisemakers,” a live, two-disc set released in October 2000. The 18-song collection was taken from concerts in 1998 and 1999, including the Woodstock festival and tapings of “Austin City Limits” and “Jazz Central.” Hornsby called “Noisemakers” spontaneous and “the truest representation of what we do,” in recent interviews.

“I really feel that what I do is not what people think I do,” said Hornsby in an April interview for the Florida Times-Union. “[‘Noisemakers’] is exactly what I do, and so it’s an important record to me.”

Friday, he’ll be doing what he does and making noise in Portland.

Tickets for Hornsby’s concert, which will be opened by The Samples, are available at $29.50 each by calling TicketMaster at 775-3331 or on the Internet at www.ticketmaster.com. For more information, call the State Theater, 609 Congress St., at 780-8265.