The World Series might be over, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be people wandering around wearing only one glove.

That’s because Who’s Bad: The Ultimate Michael Jackson Experience, a tribute band for the gloved, much beloved King of Pop, is coming to town to perform with the Hawai‘i Symphony Orchestra. It is the world’s original Michael Jackson tribute band and the only one formed while Jackson was still alive.

Jackson, who won 13 Grammys, including a posthumous lifetime achievement award, died in 2009 of a prescription drug overdose.

Vamsi Tadepalli, a saxophonist who grew up in North Carolina, started Who’s Bad in 2003, giving its first performance in 2004. He now manages the group, which consists of a Michael Jackson impersonator and a small band of musicians who play his hit tunes and dance in synch with snappy, funky moves.

Tadepalli has seen how Jackson’s music and dancing have had a lasting impact on pop culture.

“Going back to when he passed away, what we’ve noticed is that he created an entire new generation of fans,” he said in a phone call. “Instead of (controversies) prior to his death, it became about his music again. It reminded people how timeless everything is. He just wants to make you want to move.

“He had that global appeal. I mean, you’re talking about someone who was world famous before the internet.”

Even though he’s now dedicated his last 14 years to Who’s Bad, Tadepalli did not start out as a fanatical follower of Jackson. His motivation came from nearing college graduation, wanting to move to New York and be a jazz musician and yet “having no money.”

“I thought maybe I’d start a funk band with a horn section and we could start playing bars, clubs, weddings, whatever,” he said. “I started putting a set list together, and I just kept gravitating towards Michael Jackson. And all of a sudden it was, ‘Why don’t we just do all Michael?’ At the time there were plenty of impersonators, but there wasn’t any band that committed to playing his music.”

Tadepalli faced several obstacles to his plan. Jackson did not write down his compositions, leaving much of that to arrangers. Tadepalli, however, had begun transcribing tunes as a youngster for fun and later received formal music training. He wrote out the charts for Jackson’s music himself.

“I guess I took more of a classical jazz approach,” he said. “When we started it was mostly jazz musicians in the horn and rhythm sections, and I wanted to show that I was at the top of my game, that I knew the music inside and out.”

From among his fellow students, Tadepalli knew many instrumentalists interested in Jackson’s music, but no impersonators or even anyone who could sing like him. “We had a band before we even had a Michael,” he said. “In the beginning it was so focused on the music that I didn’t even think of a guy who could pull it off, just because of the range that Michael sings at. If there was somebody who could do that, he’d probably be famous!”

Tadepalli eventually found a talented Jackson impersonator, and there have been several since then, with the group at one point using two because of heavy demand. The group’s current Jackson impersonator is James Times, who has performed with the “MJ Live” show in Las Vegas.

“He came in last October and we were all floored,” said Tadepalli, who’s had his musicians study old films of Jackson concerts to get his moves down right.

When Who’s Bad started, it was not the best time to be a Jackson fan. The reclusive musician, already considered eccentric for his efforts to change his appearance, was facing the second of two child abuse cases. “A lot of people were hating on Michael at the time,” Tadepalli said. “They were like, ‘Why would you do that?’ It kind of fueled me to make it really happen.”

The group has since performed all over the world, from touring China in 2010 — “none of them knew English, but when the songs come on, they knew all the lyrics,” Tadepalli said — to the O2 Arena in London, where Jackson was planning to end his “This Is It” tour. They’ve shared the stage with Aretha Franklin, the Backstreet Boys, the Four Tops and Boyz II Men. Tadepalli said one of their concerts was attended by Jackson’s manager Frank DiLeo, who offered praise and support.

Who’s Bad will feature all the great Jackson hits, from “Thriller” to “Billie Jean,” but also reaches back to some of his earlier material as well as tunes released after his death.

“We dig a little bit into the older stuff,” Tadepalli said. “There’s some stuff from the Jackson Five and his first album (for Epic Records), ‘Off the Wall.’ … We do a couple that are more for the music nerds.”

The performances here in Hawaii will be something relatively new for Who’s Bad. Almost all of its previous performances have featured a small ensemble: drummer (Archie Logan), bass guitar (Quinton Moore), trumpet (Ray McCall), saxophone (Aaron McCoy) and lead singer Times, along with dancers Malcolm Little and Daniel Rychlec. Recorded tracks filled out the sound of strings and other instruments, but Tadepalli has now transcribed those parts too. The Hawai‘i Symphony Orchestra will be only the second group to perform the fully orchestrated version.

“We’ve just been shopping around for the right opportunity to do it, and Hawaii seemed perfect,” he said. “It’s going to be kind of epic.”