Mix seven parts bass, a weird name, a little Colonel and a dash of Jefferson Airplane.

Presto! Tonight’s Georgia Theater act, the legendary Col. Bruce Hampton.

“We try to stay on the pure side of everything,” said Hampton of the many musical groups he’s performed with over the past 46 years. “I love every bit of it as long as it’s pure.”

Over the past 46 years that Hampton has been making music, he’s been a member of half a dozen bands including Late Bronze Age, Fiji Mariners, and currently, The Quark Alliance.

“I can do about two things good. One of them is naming bands. The rest of it’s a crapshoot,” Hampton said.

The inspiration for the naming of Quark Alliance branched from particle physics, of all things.

“Basically a quark cannot have an alliance. A quark is a subatomic particle moving at [very high] speeds. I’ve always liked subatomic particles.”

Bruce Hampton isn’t just a star of the musical arena; he also has considerable experience acting.

“They were terrible movies, but I’ve done some good ones, too.”

In fact, Hampton played the band manager Morris in Billy Bob Thorton’s “Slingblade.”

“I don’t pursue it very much anymore. I have some good agents that want me to move to California because I’m big and old. They don’t have big and old.”

Hampton said he does “about a movie a year” and is looking for “Outrage” to come out this year.

The decades Hampton has spent with an instrument in his hands have made him somewhat selective about his personal musical tastes.

“The music today is the worst I’ve ever heard it,” he said. “There’s no damned melody anywhere. It’s not pure to me. It’s not in the lineage of African music. That’s where I think great music comes from – the church or folk.”

Hampton will be taking the stage tonight with Moonalice, a band that formed in 2007 with seven bass players, including Jack Casady of Jefferson Airplane.

“I think it’s broadly appealing to a lot of different people,” said G.E. Smith, bassist and vocalist for Moonalice. “We’re kind of lumped into the jam band world, but I wouldn’t call us a jam band at all. We’re a song-based band.”

Moonalice plans to release a self-titled studio album, the first, in April.

“I think people will really like it,” said Smith. “The most interesting thing for me was the first time I heard the finished product, [T. Bone Burnett, producer] had really done stuff to it as far as treating sounds and rearranging.

“Digitally, you can do so much now you couldn’t in the old days. Now you can take the signal that I make with the guitar and make a completely different sound. [T. Bone] did a lot of that.”

Despite initial reservations, Smith has high hopes for the record.

“I really like it, now that I’ve opened up my mind to it,” he said.

Like Hampton, Smith has had his fair share of the limelight as the musical director of Saturday Night Live.

“I was there for 10 years and did well over 200 shows,” he said. “I was a rock ‘n’ roller – always in bands since I was a kid. The people in the house band at SNL, while they definitely had a lot of experience playing popular music, they were classically trained musicians. I wasn’t, so I learned a lot.”

Another musician Smith draws inspiration from is, not surprisingly, his bandmate Jack Casady.

“I’m definitely influenced by [Cassidy],” he said. “When I was growing up, I studied Jack’s playing because he’s so melodic.”

Smith encourages anyone who appreciates a good song to come check out the show.

“People should expect to hear some good playing,” said Smith. “There’s a lot going on.”