Chicago pop/soul band Eli Jones has come a long way from its humble beginnings as two Carleton College alumni sitting in an apartment and talking about music.

Helping the group along has been a hearty dose of hard work, an unbreakable faith in the power of a funky backbeat and a whole lot of musicians from NIU.

The band is set to release its debut album, “Make It Right,” at a CD release party this Thursday at The Hideout in Chicago. The eclectic disc features 10 songs that range from tender existential balladry (“Afraid Not To Die”) to pop/jazz/samba fusion (“Bring Your Love To Me”) and much more.

“As a finished record, it doesn’t sound incredibly cohesive in terms of genre,” guitar player, vocalist and songwriter Brendan O’Connell said.

O’Connell wrote the band’s first song, “Give It Up,” in a bamboo hut in Thailand while traveling in Southeast Asia.

Ever since finding the perfect bassist in Jeremy Schmidt, NIU music education major, the Chicago-based band has consistently looked to DeKalb for musical talent.

“[Jeremy] introduced us to the NIU music community and that has been the highlight of my life for the past year and a half,” O’Connell said with a laugh, adding, “No, it seriously has been great.”

Schmidt soon enlisted NIU percussion performance graduate student Frank Check to be the group’s drummer and started playing gigs all over the Chicago area. They entered the recording studio in early 2007 ready to make an album of road-tested material.

The Eli Jones path, which traveled from Thailand to Chicago to DeKalb and back, wouldn’t stay so straight, however. O’Connell knew the album, and the band, needed more direction.

For once, the catalyst of change was found in the audience of one of their steady gigs at a bar in Chicago’s Belmont neighborhood. Vocalist Stefanie Berecz started sitting in with the guys, singing Aretha Franklin and Joss Stone covers and generally turning heads.

“It was like goose-bump central,” he said.

Berecz is a young singer with an already startling résumé: She won Bar 1’s Big Break contest in 2006, she got past the first rounds of both Making the Band and American Idol and her high school all-girl singing group opened for Mary J. Blige.

The group re-recorded almost all of the original tracks with added vocals by Berecz and recorded three totally new song.

Third-year music education graduate student and trombonist Eric Miller first found out about Eli Jones from Schmidt, who ran into Miller at a Lakeview grocery store and asked him to bring his trombone to an Eli Jones gig that night.

Given the eclectic nature of Eli Jones, if the band’s future is anything like its past, there’s no telling where Eli Jones will end up.