Everyone loves Scott Amendola’s first symphony, with the possible exception of his married friends.

Fade to Orange was commissioned by California’s Oakland East Bay Symphony, but it’s dedicated to Amendola’s wife, Ari. That’s something the accomplished drummer is not shy to exploit.

“Sometimes I’m like, ‘Hey, I wrote you a symphony! Come on!’ ” he says with a laugh, reached at home in Berkeley. “The other funny thing is that sometimes people I know who are in relationships are like, ‘You wrote your wife a symphony? Ah, thanks. I got my partner flowers.’ ”

Amendola jokes that it was simply Ari’s turn to be honoured: he’d already written music dedicated to their two kids, and she was tired of waiting for her present. But the commission actually grew out of an Oakland East Bay Symphony (OEBS) initiative called New Visions/New Vistas, aimed at generating homegrown repertoire for the Bay Area orchestra. Amendola was a left-field choice: known primarily for his work with the Nels Cline Singers and other avant-jazz bands, he’d played orchestral music but had never written it. Learning this new craft took some effort, but the hardest part of the commission, he says, was determining what to leave out.

“I don’t know if I’ll ever get to write anything like this again, but the last thing I wanted to do was throw the kitchen sink at it,” Amendola says of his alternately turbulent and transcendental score. “I feel like I was really true to that, in letting it move in a direction that felt really organic to me—and I’m really happy with how it came out.”

He’s also pleased with what he’s been doing for the past few weeks: revising Fade to Orange so that it can be performed by his touring quintet, which includes guitarists Nels Cline and Jeff Parker (of Wilco and Tortoise fame, respectively), violinist Jenny Scheinman (who regularly partners with Bruce Cockburn and Bill Frisell), and bassist John Shifflett (who’s played with everyone from Frankie Avalon to John Zorn). The task was simplified by the fact that Fade to Orange was written as much for Cline as for Ari or the OEBS; he was the soloist when the work premiered and is also featured on the recorded version of the score. Still, compressing several dozen instruments into five presented its own challenges.

“What I did was I went through the entire piece and wrote very specific notes as to what I wanted the five of us to do,” Amendola says. “Arranging it for the quintet, it was really about letting these melodies come out, letting certain parts come out. And also there’s not going to be a conductor, so one of the things I thought about was how to get the music to really flow.”

And flow it should, especially by the time Amendola and band have most of their tour under their belts.

“The cool thing about Vancouver is that you’re going to get the last show, after six nights of us playing it and exploring the possibilities and seeing what we can open up,” the drummer explains. “When you’re dealing with Nels Cline and Jeff Parker and Jenny Scheinman and John Shifflett and myself you have five really strong personalities, and I want those people to put their personalities into their playing. They’re going to have to play the notes, but I want them to be able to do their thing within it—and it’s going to be very interesting to see what that means!”

The Scott Amendola Band plays Studio Records at 7 p.m. on Sunday (November 15).