Daily through Sunday: Awa Sal Secka’s Ladies of Jazz at Signature Theatre 

Inside Signature Theatre, the songs of Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, and Sarah Vaughan are being channeled and echoed through the voice of Awa Sal Secka. The performer and playwright, who was born in New York and raised in a Gambian household, has been performing locally since she moved to the area in 2005—her first show at Signature was roughly seven years ago, when she played an apostle in Jesus Christ Superstar. Today, She and her powerhouse vocals that span two-and-a-half octaves are paying homage to the women who defined jazz. Secka opens the show with “Take the ‘A’ Train,” which was written by Billy Strayhorn and performed by Vaughan alongside other jazz greats, including Duke Ellington. Another classic Secka performs is “I Put a Spell On You,” along with other songs from Simone’s discography filled with anthems for the Civil Rights Movement. That includes “Mississippi Goddam,” which was originally written in response to two 1963 events: the murder of Medgar Evers in Mississippi and the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama; many of the lyrics were censored upon its initial release. Secka will also sing from the repertoire of Nancy Wilson, whose musical career spanned five decades. The 16-song set highlights some of jazz’s most prominent and prolific musicians over the past century. Awa Sal Secka’s Summertime: Ladies of Jazz runs July 31 through Aug. 4 at Signature Theatre, 4200 Campbell Ave., Arlington. sigtheatre.org. $46. — Heidi Perez-Moreno

Saturday and Sunday: The Latinx Movement Festival at Dance Place 

People of the Latine diaspora tell their stories from infinite angles, which is exactly what Mexican American movement artist and choreographer Gabriel Mata hopes to champion with his inaugural Latinx Movement Festival. The two-day event features performances from six dance collectives and movement artists, including Carne Viva Dance Theatre, Xochipilli Dance Company, and Latina Jewish interdisciplinary artist Amelia Rose Estrada. These performances tell stories of identity, the restless feeling of being displaced in unfamiliar environments, and seeking connection to one’s history and culture. Mata, who moved to the D.C. area seven years ago and has since graduated with a master’s in fine arts from the University of Maryland, will perform a duet with Estrada that the two choreographed with the hope of reclaiming their bodies and identities as queer people and immigrants. Another performance, titled “Nepantla: Magia Ancestral,” looks at Mexican folklore’s connection to nature, but also bodily expression and magic, while also examining how it relates to the present day. Choreographers Julio Medina and Salome Nieto, performing as a duo, seek to tell a larger story of what it’s like to feel displaced as people of Mexican descent living in the United States. There will also be free community workshops led by some of the performers teaching bachata, butoh, and sabor, which will take place Friday, before the festival officially starts. It took a year and a half for Mata to bring his vision of creating a safe space to celebrate the diversity of the local Latine dance artistry to life. Such spaces, he says, are rare in the D.C. area. Being in its first year, Mata hopes to see momentum from the festival create support, feedback, and guidance for the next one. He’s also open to feedback and discussion around using the term “Latinx”—a source of sociopolitical and cultural tension—in their name. The Latinx Movement Festival runs Aug. 3 through 4 at Dance Place, 3225 8th St. NE. danceplace.org. $30. —Heidi Perez-Moreno

Sunday: The Mountain Goats and New Pornographers at Wolf Trap

Every year Wolf Trap manages to bring together a unique pairing that audiences didn’t know they needed. A highlight of this season is the one-night-only co-headlining show featuring North Carolina’s the Mountain Goats and Vancouver, BC’s the New Pornographers. The two bands take different approaches to what falls under the large umbrella of indie rock. The Mountain Goats’ erudite bent comes from prolific singer-songwriter John Darnielle’s high-concept riffs on underexplored subcultural corners. What type of person is into collecting knives? How does it feel to be an old professional wrestler? They’ve got an album for just about any tangent. The New Pornographers, however, take a much more straightforward approach, layering their saccharine pop hooks on top of wry, complicated sentimentality. Together, the evening can be seen as a coronation of the mid-’00s indie-rock boom that finds itself continuing to thrive and settling nicely into the green manicured pastures of the amphitheater establishment. The Mountain Goats and the New Pornographers play at 7 p.m. on Aug. 4 at Wolf Trap, 1551 Wolf Trap Rd., Vienna. wolftrap.org. $43–$133. —Matt Siblo

Sunday: Donnell Floyd at MGM National Harbor 

When Donnell Floyd officially retired from go-go at the end of 2019, his farewell show exceeded all expectations. Along with an array of local stars, Stevie Wonder and rapper Doug E. Fresh joined Floyd on stage to celebrate his 40 years of contributions to go-go culture. During his 18 years with Rare Essence, Floyd rapped on and co-wrote the band’s biggest hits of the ’90s: “Lock It,” “Work the Walls,” and “Overnight Scenario.” Initially a saxophone player for the band, Floyd also became Rare Essence’s second mic rapper. Dubbed “The King of the Go-Go Beat” after another Rare Essence hit, Floyd went on to lead 911 and other popular go-go groups. In 2017, he took his band Team Familiar to Nigeria to perform for the Yoruba king known as the Ooni of Ife. While his retirement from go-go felt inconceivable to longtime fans, for Floyd, it was inevitable, mostly due to his aggressive vocal style. But even after Floyd debuted his well-received R&B band, Push Play, occasional returns to go-go have also been inevitable. In 2022, Floyd joined Rare Essence at the MGM National Harbor for a 45th-anniversary reunion show. On Sunday, Floyd returns to go-go one more time for a night billed as “King of the Go-Go Beat: One Night in All White” featuring the fabulous Ms. Kim, Rappa Dude, Frank “Scooby” Marshall, Jasen “O” Holland, Darrin “X” Frazier, Michael Arnold, Marcus “dotcom” Young, Sean Geason, and Darryl “Blue-Eye” Arrington. Driving the beat will be Eric “Bojack” Butcher on drums and Milton “Go–Go Mickey” Freeman. According to Floyd, he has received nearly 50 solid offers from area promoters eager to put together a go-go concert. He chose Tricky, Inc.’s Mark Pendergrast due to his interest in an elaborate production. “I wanted to have a great state-of-the-art production,” says Floyd. “I saw this as an opportunity to increase my legacy while putting together an incredible show for people.” One Night in All White starts at 6 p.m. on Aug. 4 at MGM Grand Ballroom, 101 MGM National Ave, Oxon Hill. markpendergrastevents.com. $65-125. —Alona Wartofsky

Ongoing: Isabella Whitfield’s Best Regards at Hamiltonian Artists

There’s an uncanny quality to the works of D.C.-based artist Isabella Whitfield, currently displayed in a delicately balanced arrangement at Hamiltonian Artists. Many of the sculptures depict commonplace objects rendered in incongruous materials, often paper. Subtly surprising, her works come across as sleight of hand or pulling one over on the viewer: a paper life vest seems to actually be inflated, and a sea of papercast utility signs in pastel Tupperware hues looks as sturdy as the real thing. Call it pulp fiction. Whitfield is also a papermaking associate at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center and seems to delight in inverting expectations, creating objects that are harder or softer than their real-life counterparts and making permanent things temporary (or vice versa). One piece is particularly unexpected; it’s easy to miss if you’re not cross-referencing with the image list. Tucked tight into a corner up in the ceiling, “How to stop a cycle” is a tiny cutout of scrap metal showing a horse and a pegasus facing off. It begs for a closer look, but it’s tantalizingly out of grasp. All the works in the show warrant closer inspection, both to figure out how they’re constructed, and to pick up on some of the finer details of their presentation. The show’s title, Best Regards, is a nod to a commonly used email sign off that can be genuine or passive-aggressive, used to express actual goodwill, annoyance, or thinly veiled disgust. Getting such a salutation can be destabilizing—does this person hate me or are they just professional?—and similarly, Whitfield’s works leave the viewer turning over the seemingly simple things. Best Regards runs through August 10 at Hamiltonian Artists, 1353 U St. NW. Thursday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. hamiltonianartists.org. Free. —Stephanie Rudig

Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon knew the power of song. She learned it singing in her childhood Baptist church. Later, as an activist in the civil rights movement, her songs helped to change the world.

“Song was a way of giving people courage,” says Karen Spellman, who first met Reagon in Atlanta in 1967 and remained a lifelong friend. “That was Bernice’s tradition from the beginning. And I believe she carried that and remembered that throughout all of the work that she did … whether it was in civil rights or the women’s movement, the social justice movement … [or] the pan-Africanist movement. Her prime motivational factor was to get people to do something.”

Reagon, who died July 16 at the age of 81, was widely admired as one of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee Freedom Singers, who performed at the historic 1963 March on Washington and at countless other events that rallied activists and support for the civil rights movement. She went on to found and lead the acclaimed Washington-based Black women’s activist a cappella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock. In 1974, Reagon created and led the National Museum of American History’s program in African American culture, where she played a crucial role in reshaping the Smithsonian’s institutional approach to documenting and presenting Black American history and culture. 

For Secretary of the Smithsonian Lonnie Bunch, also the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Reagon’s contributions in multiple realms were immeasurable. “We have lost a lighthouse. … We’ve lost someone who challenged us to understand culture, challenged us to make America better, and challenged us to understand race and gender,” Bunch says. “Bernice is that kind of figure, a lens to understanding the last 50 years … to understand how young people stood up to demand freedom during the civil rights movement. She’s a lens to understand the role of music, both as a bulwark during the civil rights movement, but also a way to communicate African American culture.”

Throughout her life, Reagon was driven by a sense of purpose that informed her work as a singer and composer, a scholar and cultural historian, and as an educator, activist, and curator. Her list of accomplishments and achievements seem endless; over the years, she amassed countless recognitions, including the MacArthur Foundation Genius Award and the Presidential Medal for Contribution to Public Understanding of the Humanities. Reagan also received the Peabody Award for her visionary work on the National Public Radio/Smithsonian Folkways “Wade in the Water” series and 4-CD boxed set of African American sacred music. 

Richard Harrington, a former Washington Post music critic, profiled Reagon in 1987. He  remembers her “remarkable impact,” telling City Paper, “I cannot emphasize what a towering figure she was. She was a giant of her time. Wherever she went, in whatever context, she was a creator and a catalyst and a historian who was … a galvanizer for racial and social justice.

“Bernice kept her eyes on the prize, and the prize was freedom, the prize was equality, opportunity,” Harrington says. “For that, we are so blessed to have had her as part of the heart and soul of Washington for so long.”

Reagon grew up just outside Albany in Southwest Georgia, where her father served as a preacher. In the family’s Baptist church, there was no piano or organ; instead, parishioners sang a cappella. The rhythm section was the congregation’s hands and feet and, occasionally, a tambourine. 

Her activism started at a young age. Reagon was 16 when she began her undergraduate studies at Albany State College, where she helped form a chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She also became a field secretary for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, a youth-led organization that coordinated grassroots campaigns against segregation. In 1962, after being arrested for her role in civil rights protests, Reagon was expelled from Albany State. That year, she became a founding member of the SNCC Freedom Singers, performing alongside Cordell Reagon, who she would later marry. 

With the Freedom Singers, Reagon deepened her understanding of music’s power in the fight for racial justice. “Her method of organizing in the civil rights movement became that of singing, using her song tradition that had been developed over the years,” says Spellman. “Bernice took those methods into the Freedom Singers, and they evolved into a really important organization as national spokespersons for the movement in the north.” 

During most of the 1960s, the Freedom Singers sang traditional and well-known gospel songs, frequently revising the lyrics to create what they called “freedom songs.” Whether participating in civil rights marches or warehoused in southern jails, activists who were already familiar with the songs could easily sing along. 

“Song was used to motivate people into community action, into going down to the register to vote in places where they couldn’t register before, or get in a march that was going to surely turn into a violent situation because the police were not going to let them march,” says Spellman.

Reagon moved to Washington in 1973 to earn her doctoral degree at Howard University. She also became the vocal director of the D.C. Black Repertory Company, organizing vocal workshops that inspired her to create Sweet Honey in the Rock. Reagon led the group, which received great acclaim, until her retirement in 2003. For longtime local gospel singer Yasmeen Williams, who first saw Sweet Honey perform at the 1975 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, joining the ensemble in 1976 felt like coming home. “They were singing together on a makeshift front porch, and I looked at them and I saw myself,” she says. “There’s no money, no gold, that can touch that.”

In 1974, after years of collaboration with Folklife Festival co-founder Ralph Rinzler and others, Reagon founded and directed the National Museum of American History’s Program in Black Culture. She also co-curated the Folklife Festival’s African Diaspora Program, and produced and performed on numerous Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. 

James Early, who formerly worked at the Smithsonian Folklife Center as both the assistant secretary for education and public service and director of cultural heritage policy, first met Reagon in 1967 when he was studying at Morehouse College and she was at Spelman College following her expulsion from Albany State. They both received five-year Ford Foundation doctoral fellowships to study at Howard University. Later, at the Smithsonian, Early watched Reagon bring her methodology to an institution that historically had not always valued the cultural contributions of Black Americans. 

“The major impact that she had on the Smithsonian was bringing community in as colleagues. [This] impacted the basic mandate of the Smithsonian, which is increasing diffusion of knowledge, which meant new scholars, both from community and those who had formal training. It meant new research, it meant new collections based on their research out of which new exhibitions and new interpretive perspectives could be bought,” says Early.

Bunch, who continued to work with Reagon over the years, credits her for supporting and challenging him, especially as he worked to create the National Museum of African American History and Culture. “She continued to play that role for me as someone who was a voice of what was possible, who was demanding that excellence, but who by her very nature made us better by the questions she asked,” he says. 

Former acting director of Smithsonian Folkways and longtime arts activist Amy Horowitz worked and traveled with Reagon and Sweet Honey from 1977 to 1994 and remained a lifelong friend. Horowitz collaborated with Reagon to reissue several of the singer’s early albums. In 1978, Horowitz and Reagon formed Roadwork, a multiracial women’s arts coalition. In addition to coordinating tours for Sweet Honey and Reagon, Roadwork created Sisterfire, a local women’s festival held annually from 1982 to 1989. Sisterfire foregrounded women of color, many of them queer, at a time when LGBTQIA Black and brown women were not always welcome in mainstream arts venues. 

In 2018, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival hosted a Sisterfire reunion. Curated by Reagon’s daughter Toshi Reagon, a highly regarded artist in her own right, the reunion showcased past artists as well as a new generation of artist-activists. The Bernice Johnson Reagon Songbook set was its centerpiece. 

Last year, Horowitz and Early wrote an essay for the Journal of American Folklore that called for further academic study of Reagon’s scholarly and activist work. “For me, writing this article with James was a way to stay true to something that Bernice had always said to me,” says Horowitz, before quoting Reagon: “‘If you feel something is missing, it’s probably the sound of your own voice.’ [The essay] was a way to invite in future generations of artists, activists, and scholars to further her ongoing legacy. In this way, the essay calls and responds to her congregational teaching.” 

For many DMV residents who encountered Reagon in her role as a history professor at American University, via her various capacities at the Smithsonian, or as a member of Sweet Honey’s sprawling congregation—her local presence was a gift. Bunch cherished the impromptu conversations he would have with Reagon whenever he would bump into her at various Howard events or at Politics and Prose. “Her generosity of sharing ideas and the importance of history—people benefited from that all the time,” he says. 

Writer and literary activist E. Ethelbert Miller contributed liner notes for the 1997 reissue of Reagon’s 1975 album, Give Your Hands to Struggle: The Evolution of a Freedom Fighter. Reagon returned the favor by writing a blurb for his 1994 poetry collection, First Light: New and Selected Poems. Years ago, Miller heard Reagon sing at the funeral of a close friend at First Congregational Church. “Bernice sang a song that I had heard at a Sweet Honey in the Rock concert, but now I’m listening to her sing this song in a church. She is singing to that family, and I realized that she is taking this song and she is healing that family with her voice,” he recalls. “Now maybe what I’m experiencing is what those folks who were in the civil rights protests, and they’re locked up in a jail with Bernice, and Bernice is singing in that jail cell [experienced].

“All I know is that I heard this woman singing at a funeral, and I realized that even if I’ve heard those songs before, something is happening. This woman is a medium. This woman is tied into something much larger,” Miller continues. “This is not just a performance. This is where that song and her voice call you to do something. You get moved, and you realize how powerful music can be.”

Niani Kilkenny formerly served as director of the Museum of American History’s program in African American Culture and has also been a longtime member of In Process, a community offshoot of Sweet Honey in the Rock. As she mourns the loss of her friend, she, like many others, finds herself using Reagon’s language of love and resilience. “Now that she has transitioned. I don’t have words, I have to rely on hers when she sings, ‘I remember, that’s why I believe,’” says Kilkenny, referring to Reagon’s song “I Remember, I Believe.”

“Remembering is what she did,” Kilkenny says. “She was a historian remembering and connecting the past with the present for the future, and she did in a way that grounded truth and history, and memory and metaphor, into a profound call that made people listen and made people stand, and made people move, and made people march. Everyone who knew her or heard her understood why we needed to keep on moving, keep walking, keep on breathing, keep on singing, keep on marching. How many people could do that? I don’t know anyone else who could or did what Bernice did. She did it lovingly, she did it magnificently, and profoundly.”

Throughout his life, Reuben Jackson listened to the music he loved—jazz, of course, but also Jimi Hendrix, Prince, John Prine, and Claude Debussy. As a jazz scholar, Jackson’s understanding of music was profound, and his knowledge vast. As a poet, he listened closely to the people around him, savoring each word’s timbre, musicality, and resonance. Jackson’s gifts as a poet were immense, but poetry was only one aspect of his creativity and contributions. A well-loved teacher, radio host, music critic, curator, and archivist, Jackson effortlessly moved through multiple cultural spheres. To each, he brought his tremendous intellect as well as abiding empathy and love.

When Jackson, 67, died on Feb. 16 due to complications following a stroke, he left behind a legion of friends, admirers, students, and poets who he had mentored and supported. Having lived in the District for much of his life with the exception of two periods he spent in Vermont, Jackson developed close relationships within the arts community. Countless listeners were sustained by his presence as the alternate week host of WPFW’s Sound of Surprise, which airs Sunday afternoons. 

“Gil Scott–Heron talked about pieces of a man. There’s so many pieces to Reuben Jackson, the jazz, the poetry, the curator—that’s the breadth of his life. Now that he’s gone, we see how many people held him dearly and loved him,” says writer and literary activist E. Ethelbert Miller. “There are people who gravitate to the center of things …Reuben had a really beautiful voice on the radio, and having that voice, that’s very important, because he’s taking that knowledge and sharing it with the community. He becomes the voice of the community.”

Jackson’s various roles complemented each other while serving to deepen the impact of his work. His profound musical knowledge, for example, enhanced both his poetry and his radio programming. “Reuben having that knowledge, then you become very important to your community because you are the keeper of what might be the essence of Blackness if you know jazz music, if you know the blues,” says Miller.

Over the course of his multifaceted career, Jackson served as an archivist and curator for the Smithsonian Institution’s Duke Ellington Collection, and for the last six years before his death, he archived for the Felix E. Grant Jazz Archives at the University of the District of Columbia. He read poems all over the city at venues large and small including d.c. space, the Institute for Policy Studies, the Writer’s Center, Folger Shakespeare Library, Planet Word, 8Rock, and Busboys and Poets. Jackson wrote music reviews for City Paper from the late ’80s to the mid-’90s (and occasionally into the early aughts), as well as for the Unicorn Times, the Washington Post, and Jazz Times. He was also a beloved radio host on both Vermont Public Radio’s Friday Night Jazz show, from 2012 until 2018, and locally on WPFW, where he began reading poems on the air during the early 1980s. Jackson published two poetry collections, Fingering the Keys, published by the Maryland-based Gut Punch Press in 1990, and 2019’s Scattered Clouds (Maryland’s Alan Squire Publishing). Additionally, his poems have been featured in more than 50 anthologies, including, most recently, This Is the Honey, edited by bestselling author Kwame Alexander.  

In 1991, Alexander had just moved to the District and was trying to find his voice as a writer when he attended a poetry reading by Jackson. “He sounded like jazz. The melody, the vibrato, the kind, gentle power in his voice,” Alexander tells City Paper via voice message. Alexander bought Fingering the Keys and marveled at Jackson’s economy of style. “He had 30 words on one page, or 10 on the next, or 20 on the next, and he said so much. He packed so much; he packed an opera, a symphony, just a beautiful sort of snapshot of jazz, and I knew I could do something like that,” he continues. “And so he became my teacher, even though I didn’t know him … over the years, I would get to know him and discover that he was as kind and gentle and as rhythmic and improvisational. You know, he was jazz.”

***

Born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1956, Jackson was still a toddler when his family relocated to the District, where his mother taught school. In his poetry and recollections of his childhood, Jackson described himself as the awkward and introspective son of Pierce and Mary Jackson, who never quite fit in around his Brightwood neighborhood due to his unabashed love for classical music and Emily Dickinson. He earned a bachelor’s in English literature at Goddard College in Vermont. There, he began his work in radio with a show combining music and talk on the college’s WGDR station. He maintained close ties with both radio and Vermont throughout his life.

After graduating, Jackson became part of a local poetry community—one described by poet Grace Cavalieri as “a great beautiful explosion of voices”—that developed here in D.C. in the early to mid-’80s. By that time, Jackson was reading his poems on WPFW, which served as an important platform for the area’s Black creatives. Cavalieri hosted Jackson’s poetry readings multiple times on the radio station and around the DMV. “Music was his real great love, and it was his companion in his poetry,” says Cavalieri. “He was like the antihero who’s caught listening to music in the basement. Gradually, he became this huge presence in the music world, but for me, he was always the poet.”

When many of Jackson’s peers discuss his poetry, they continually reference its musical influences. “If jazz could exist as literature, it would be Reuben’s poetry,” says writer and longtime District resident Lisa Pegram. “It is musical, it is economic, it has form and abstraction. Reuben’s work is immaculate … it’s so tight, and succinct, distilled. I always find his work … so effective in delivering whatever message it wants to deliver, it will often take my breath away.”

One of so many poets mentored by Jackson, Abdul Ali later wrote the introduction to his second collection, Scattered Clouds. “Reuben was a legend and a literary giant, and he was one of the most unassuming, modest giants I have ever met,” says Ali. “I would situate Reuben as kind of like an Amiri Baraka. He was so attuned to Black music and all kinds of music, and it just spilled over into his literary art, and then into his activism as an archivist. There’s something to be said about saying that this music matters and we need to preserve it. This is our culture, this is American history.”

Jackson’s deep love for music also impacted the way he heard others’ poetry. After one of her mid-’80s poetry readings, Jackson asked Rose Solari, editor and co-founder of Alan Squire Publishing, whether she liked Miles Davis. “I said, ‘Oh, I love Miles Davis. I listen to him often when I’m writing.’ And he said, ‘I can hear it in your writing, in your phrasing.’ And I thought, ‘how did you hear that?’ … I was so flattered and so honored, but also just amazed at the depth of what he could hear,” Solari says. 

Jackson’s poetry is accessible, but also layered and complex. Much of it expresses his deep love for jazz—referencing Duke Ellington, of course, as well as Johnny Hodges, Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, Thelonious Monk, and many others. 

Poems such as his early 1980s “Sunday Brunch”—which reads in its entirety: 

And where
Do your parents
Summer?
She asked him.

The front porch,
He replied

—referenced the vast differences between the haves and have-nots in a largely stratified city.

Another prevalent theme in his work was the enduring impacts of racism, which defined poems such as “Shankman’s Market,” “Thinking of Emmett Till,” and his wrenching 2015 piece “For Trayvon Martin,” his best-known work.

Instead of sleeping—
I walk with him from the store.
No Skittles, thank you.

We do not talk much—
Sneakers crossing the courtyard.
Humid Southern night.

We shake hands and hug—
Ancient, stoic tenderness.
I nod to the moon.

I’m so old school—
I hang till the latch clicks like.
An unloaded gun.

“There’s a million poems about Trayvon Martin and George Floyd,” says Jackson’s longtime friend, poet Kenny Carroll. “His was a great poem. Period. It’s so fucking amazing, and it’s so fucking simple.” 

Carroll continues, “Reuben’s poetry reminds me of my father’s description of Joe Louis’ six-inch punch: You almost never saw it coming, but the impact was immense,” adds Carroll. “[Reuben] admired all the Black Arts poets, the radical poets, but his style was just different … If the world hadn’t been so terrible, he would have been fine writing poetry about unrequited love and clouds and good music, period.”

As a teacher in more formal settings and as a friend, Jackson both inspired and mentored countless young poets. Joel Dias–Porter, also known as DJ Renegade, recalls chasing Jackson in Union Station during the early ’90s. “I recognized him from his photograph in Fingering the Keys,” says Dias-Porter. “When I ran up on him, I was like, ‘You’re Reuben Jackson … You wrote one of my favorite poems. He was looking at me like I was out of my mind, then I reached into my backpack and pulled out Fingering the Keys. After he signed my book, I just started fanboying in the most cringy manner imaginable.”

For Dias-Porter, the vulnerability and multifaceted, nuanced masculinity of Jackson’s poetry helped him develop his voice as a poet. “I came out of the hip-hop world where it’s bravado, machismo, and the primary poetic mode is braggin’ and shit like that,” he says. “Reuben’s work was very different from that. I feel the same way about Prince. Their willingness to be vulnerable made space for me to do that and allowed me to be my whole self.”

Over the years, Jackson taught poetry at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, as part of the DC WritersCorps at Shaw’s Garnet-Patterson Middle School, and as a high school English teacher in Burlington, Vermont. “He took so much joy in being around young people,” says Pegram, who served as DC WritersCorps’ poetry director. “He was so proud of his students, he would weep openly when they read their work.”

***

After earning a master’s in library and information science at UDC in 1985, Jackson worked several jobs in educational and museum settings before joining the Duke Ellington Collection in 1989. His longtime friend Nancy Seeger described the position as “his dream job.” 

“He could use his love of the music,” she says. “He especially loved sharing it with the public, the scholars and musicians who came to use the collection.” 

In 2012, after retiring from the Smithsonian, Jackson temporarily relocated to Montpelier, Vermont, where he taught school and hosted a popular radio show. He received stacks of fan mail, and a Montpelier restaurant honored him by adding the Jackson surname to its Reuben sandwich. Jackson returned to Washington six years later, and throughout his time here, he was an ever-present and essential part of D.C.’s creative community. “He would be one of the few writers that I would bump into in the street,” says Miller. “You can go back to Langston Hughes walking on your street, you can go back to Sterling Brown at his house or at Howard … that is the tradition that Reuben has upheld.”

Since returning to the District in 2018, Jackson spent almost every Saturday at Brookland’s American Poetry Museum, which he often compared to a Black barbershop for its ability to bring people together. There, in the years following the deaths of his parents and older brother, Jackson found a new family. According to poet and teacher Sami Miranda, who chairs the museum’s board, Jackson quickly became the organization’s top attraction. “This one couple came in, and he talked to them, and then they came in every Saturday and visited with him,” says Miranda. “When they got married, he read a poem at their wedding.”

At poetry readings, Jackson was generous with encouraging amens and hallelujahs, and he effectively used humor when teaching. “He’d tell people, ‘You give me a line that’s really good, I’m gonna come around and jack that line,’” says Miranda. “And he’d put his finger in their back.”

Poet Brandon D. Johnson regularly joined Jackson at the museum. “When I go to the American Poetry Museum, I go hoping to see him,” says Johnson. “The history that was made in D.C. whether it was political, cultural, musical, or literary, he was filled by this place, and this place was filled by him.”

Every other Sunday afternoon was reserved for WPFW, where Jackson put a great deal of thought into the Sound of Surprise show. “His passion, coupled with his vast, musical acumen, made him a superb host. Reuben on and off the mic had a sincerity and a humbleness about him that melted your heart,” says WPFW Program Director Katea Stitt. “He also had a very sly wit, and could have you in stitches.” 

Jackson’s wide-ranging musical tastes were an essential part of his identity as the awkward child grew into an adult who seemed both flattered and bemused by all the adulation. “The whole range of music that he loved filled a lot of empty spaces for kind of an introverted young writer,” says Carroll. “The music provided him comfort and solace. And he felt like it also allowed him to speak to an audience who would accept his eclecticism … I think that Reuben was a person trying to find space for himself and he was open to just experiencing and loving people and letting people love him.”

Carroll continues, “Just as Reuben’s early poetry was informed by his feelings of isolation and estrangement, his poetry of the past decade was also informed by the loss of all the members of his immediate family. He began wryly describing himself as ‘the orphan,’ and his poetry talked of the influence of his parents and brother on the music he came to love and the poetry he came to write.”

At the time of his death, Jackson was working on his next book, a collection of poems for the Vermont-based Rootstock Publishing. On Feb. 1, just a few days before he suffered a stroke, he participated in a gathering of poets celebrating the anthology of Black poets: This Is the Honey. Friends say that he was thrilled to be included in the collection. That night, immersed in a reciprocal exchange of love, he gave his final poetry reading. “He was just a man who was loved, that’s all,” says Miranda. “He was a man who was loved because he gave love all the time.” 

Jackson is survived by his fiancee, Jenae Michelle, who he had met on the Metro on June 1, 2022 (they exchanged phone numbers at Fort Totten). For information on an upcoming tribute to Jackson, follow the American Poetry Museum on Instagram.

At various times between the early 1980s and early 2010s, nearly every Black neighborhood in the District had its own fledgling go-go band. Early on, these bands were made up of children and teenagers who learned music in the public schools and honed their skills in summer recreation programs. In many cases, the best of them went on to join or form some of the DMV’s most beloved go-go bands, including Rare Essence, Trouble Funk, and Experience Unlimited. But over time, as funding for DCPS’s music education decreased, fewer new go-go and even bouncebeat bands appeared around the DMV. 

With the new Mobile Go-Go Museum, longtime community activist Ron Moten will once again bring go-go to the city’s neighborhoods with educational interactive exhibits within the bus and performances by go-go bands on its rooftop hydraulic stage. 

Last Wednesday, Nov. 16, Moten celebrated a symbolic groundbreaking for his ambitious Go-Go Museum in Anacostia, at 1920 Martin Luther King Jr. Ave SE, along with an unveiling and ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Mobile Go-Go Museum. While the museum building, which is projected to open in spring of 2024, will document and celebrate go-go’s remarkable history, the Mobile Go-Go Museum will bring the go-go beat back to the city’s streets.

“Because it’s mobile, it’ll be able to come to all the hoods,” said DJ Flexx, a veteran in the local go-go scene, as he surveyed the Mobile Go-Go Museum bus on Wednesday. “This is historic because it’s been a long time trying to get our music recognized the way it should be in our city. … This is a critical time for go-go, because it’s time to pass the torch, and we gotta make sure that we lay the foundation the correct way so that go-go is enshrined forever.”

The mood at the groundbreaking, held in the outdoor Secret Garden behind the Go-Go Museum building, was celebratory. Attendees included multiple city officials as well as go-go artists and fans. Even film director Spike Lee was on hand, as Mayor Muriel Bowser declared Nov. 16 “Spike Lee Day” in recognition of his role in elevating go-go culture. Lee featured EU performing “Da Butt” in his 1988 film, School Daze, and that single rose to No. 1 on the Billboard R&B singles chart that April, vaulting EU into international stardom. As Bowser praised Lee in her remarks, Lee nudged EU bandleader Greogory “Sugar Bear” Elliott, who was sitting next to him and responded with his trademark “Owww!” 

Philip Pannell, executive director of the Anacostia Coordinating Council, brought both religious fervor and rhymes, saying, “Good afternoon, my go-go sisters and brothers. Today’s historic day is the day that the Lord and Chuck Brown have made. May we be glad and rejoice in it.” Later in his speech, Pannell explained some of the benefits of the go-go beat: “New York may have Broadway, Los Angeles may have Hollywood, New Orleans may have jazz, but D.C. has go-go … and go-go is definitely guaranteed to put more dip in your hips, more cut in your strut, and more glide in your stride.” 

Other speakers reminded the audience about the vast wealth discrepancy between the District’s Black and White residents. D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton used her comments to address our continuing lack of voting rights. “Hometown D.C. has always had a vibrant musical and cultural life, but the overbearing presence of official Washington, and I’m part of both, often smothered the identity of hometown Washington, as much as it trampled our rights as American citizens,” she said.

As the speeches continued, the overflow crowd of go-go luminaries and their fans were crammed on the sidewalk in front of the building, where the Mobile Museum was parked. One exterior side of the bus is decorated with various go-go chants depicted in a style reminiscent of the colorful posters made by Baltimore’s Globe Printing Corporation that have long advertised go-go concerts. The other sides feature images of multiple go-go stars, including genre founder Chuck Brown, Sugar Bear, Backyard Band leader Anwan “Big G” Glover, vocalist Kimberly “Ms. Kim” Graham, and Be’la Dona’s “Sweet” Cherie Mitchell, the only woman musician to play go-go with Brown.

In between hugs and selfies with countless fans, Big G explained the importance of bringing go-go back to neighborhoods where young people lack opportunities. “Once upon a time, every neighborhood had a go-go band and the violence wasn’t that high. Now the kids, nobody don’t have nothin’ to do. They don’t have no guidance or nothing, so you got a lot of violence erupting throughout the city,” he said.

Big G will serve as the Go-Go Museum’s Music Director, working to bring young artists into the museum to learn music production as well as other career options within the creative arts. “The music been taken out of the schools, and we gotta put it back,” he said. “But this is a start today with the ribbon cutting right here at the Go-Go Museum, and we gotta keep pushing. We have to keep everything going in our community and keep the future of go-go going. The future is bright.”

The ribbon cutting was accompanied by the go-go chant “Southeast! South-Southeast!” originated by Rare Essence and later popularized by DJ Flexx in his “South East Anthem.” As a DJ played “Da Butt,” the members of Backyard climbed the ladder to the Mobile Museum’s roof for a brief performance of their popular hits.

Moten first publicly announced his desire to create a museum celebrating D.C.’s homegrown funk at the 2009 Go-Go Awards at the Washington Convention Center. Since then, much has happened in the culture. Brown died in 2012, countless new bands formed, and in 2019, the Don’t Mute DC and Long Live Go-Go movements formed after Shaw’s Central Communications, better known as the Metro PCS store, was forced to temporarily shut down the speakers that played go-go outside the shop for decades. The silencing of the music was the last straw for a community that has seen its music ignored and suppressed for decades. Then, in Feb. 2020, the city passed legislation designating go-go the official music of Washington, D.C., which crystallized a path forward for the museum to seek funding.

According to Moten, the mobile museum, which cost $300,000, and the building, which will cost an estimated $2 million, will be funded by public and private sources, including a $200,000 gift from an anonymous corporate donor as well as funding from Events DC and the Office of Cable Television, Film, Music and Entertainment. The Mobile Museum’s hydraulic stage cost more than the entire bus, he said, describing its sound system as compact but “world class.” Longtime EU engineer Bobby Marshall helped develop the system, and Brian Rashad, husband of the late “First Lady of Go-Go” Maiesha Rashad, will be running the sound.

The interior of the Mobile Go-Go Museum, which was designed by the Creative JunkFood multimedia studio, features interactive digital exhibits covering musical elements including a hologram of Big G answering basic questions on the culture, such as “What is go-go?” and “What is the pocket?” Another section explores the relationship between go-go and hip-hop, as many rap classics were constructed with samples. (Trouble Funk, for example, have been sampled more than 200 times.)

Securing Big G’s involvement was crucial. “He’s a fixture in go-go that young people and older people can relate to,” explained Moten. “Wouldn’t be no movement in go-go without Big G’s advocacy and the crank of the Backyard Band. He’s a prime example that you can fall down and get back up, and that’s what our children and community need to see right now.”

For years, nightly go-go events, including teen nightclubs, kept young people off the streets. Still, at various points, particularly during the mid-1980s and again in the mid-1990s, violence found its way to go-go concerts, which to this day can attract hundreds, even thousands of fans. Inevitably, go-go took the blame. “Go-go was criminalized, and they shut down all the nightclubs and took go-go out to the schools, so young people weren’t exposed to it,” said Moten. “That’s one of the most important things about this museum. We want to teach young people go-go again and help them create.”

Like many others in the go-go community, Moten remains convinced that engaging young people with go-go can reduce violence across the city. “We need to give young people a positive platform to get attention,” he said. “It used to be cool to be in a go-go band … Now we have 12-year-olds robbing people thinking that’s cool. We got to change that.” 

TOB’s “Lil” Chris Proctor, who has become one of the culture’s most outspoken advocates in recent years, has often said that go-go literally saved his life. “I was on the wrong path at one point in time, but starting the band got me on the right track,” Proctor told City Paper at the event. “You can’t save every kid, but you can break through to some of them through music. … With the Mobile Go-Go Museum, we can bring the go-go to them. Today is a marvelous day for go-go. Go-go for the win.”

Go-go artist Charles “Shorty Corleone” Garris, who recently put together a go-go musical at Georgetown University, Making the Go-Go Band, explained to City Paper that new ways of presenting go-go are crucial. “Taking a mobile go-go museum to the people versus waiting for the people to come is genius,” he said. “This helps educate the young people and inspires the next generation of creatives to visualize themselves having an opportunity to be a part of the culture.”

The Museum will be located in the building that has long been occupied by Moten’s Check It Enterprises, a social enterprise run by former gang members. Since the pandemic, the space has been hosting go-go concerts in the Secret Garden. Currently, Moten is aiming for an opening date of April 8, 2024, which marks the fifth anniversary of Don’tMuteDC. (His partner in DontMuteDC, American University professor Natalie Hopkinson, will serve as the museum’s chief curator.)

Moten has been organizing mobile go-go concerts on flatbed trucks since the early 2010s, and now he will continue the tradition with the Mobile Go-Go Museum, which, just days after its unveiling featured a rooftop performance by TOB at Saturday’s celebration of the renaming of Good Hope Road to Marion Barry Avenue SE. 

He plans to apply for grants and explore other revenue sources that will fund the Mobile Go-Go Museum visits to area schools and various cultural events. “From the very beginning, it was a lot of people that made this happen. It was a whole beehive,” said Moten. “This is the one time that I will say our elected officials came together as one to make some good happen.

“This is definitely one of my proudest moments,” he added. “I’ve never had anything in my life harder than this, but nothing worth having comes easy.”  

The first time Glen E. Friedman listened to a Minor Threat record—the band’s 1981 self-titled debut—he wasn’t particularly impressed. 

“There was something about the production and the [eight] songs being on the seven-inch, it was really cool,” Friedman recalls. “But I just didn’t get it. It just didn’t click with me.”

Months later, when Friedman listened to the band’s subsequent release, In My Eyes, he changed his mind. “The second record … actually made a profound impression on me, and it forced me to go back and listen to the first one. And I was like, ‘Wow, I’m really an idiot. I missed this the first time for some reason. It’s so cool, and it’s so good and melodic,’” he recalls. “It’s just, like, really great, unique punk rock.”

At the time, Friedman was in his late teens and had already made a name for himself in skateboarding circles by becoming, at age 14, the youngest contributing staff photographer for SkateBoarder magazine. In the decades that followed, he would become a renowned photographer admired for his iconic images from the holy trinity of outsider cultures: skateboarding, punk rock, and early hip-hop. Now his photographs are in the collections of multiple museums, including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. He has also published between eight and 12 books, depending on how you count various editions, including Fuck You Heroes, consisting of photographs from 1976 to 1991, and Fuck You Too: Extras + More Scrapbook, with additional music and skating photographs through 2004. In 2019, Friedman published Together Forever, pairing images of Run–D.M.C. with the Beastie Boys. His other books include the career-spanning My Rules collection published by Rizzoli International, and a book of Fugazi photographs. His new collection, Just a Minor Threat: The Minor Threat Photographs of Glen E. Friedman, from Brooklyn-based independent publisher Akashic Books, came out Oct. 3.

The new collection features 140 images shot over the course of 13 months, a significant portion of Minor Threat’s two brief incarnations. Soon after the band debuted in 1980, it became one of the most popular acts in the local “harDCore” scene. For Friedman and countless young people in and around D.C.—and across the country—vocalist Ian MacKaye and the rest of Minor Threat would be elevated to punk demigods. In his introduction to Just a Minor Threat, Friedman describes the band’s records as “important, life-affirming, authentic, and inspiring.” Of the band’s live shows, Friedman says that they were “a hydrogen bomb of excitement on the stage and in the crowd.” He writes: “I wanted to be a part of what they were doing. I wanted to help spread the word.”

Friedman began working on this new book in the fall of 2022 at the urging of Rage Against the Machine frontman Zack de la Rocha. A longtime Minor Threat fan, de la Rocha contributed a heartfelt essay to the book that connects the dots between his love of both Minor Threat and Friedman’s artistry. Of Freidman, de la Rocha writes: “Calling him a photographer or simply a documentarian doesn’t encompass what’s involved here. The line between witness and participant isn’t just blurred, it’s burned and left in ruins.” Friedman returns the adulation, telling City Paper, “Here’s a guy who sells out Madison Square Garden five nights in a row and is a wonderful political activist. And a man of integrity has written these words about how Minor Threat and my work has affected him.”

As Friedman sifted through the decades-old photographs, he found that the passage of time had altered how he perceived their purpose. When he originally shot the images in the early ’80s, he was very intentional about how he wanted to portray the band. “As years go on, there’s a greater understanding of the culture on many levels, so you don’t have to be the punch in the face; you don’t have to have the perfect image to tell the story,” he says. “I am now sharing more culturally interesting aspects of those moments and maybe not the perfect compositions. But there’s still interesting shit going on, and why should those images that I made back then just sit in a folder and not be seen if they’re presentable?”

In our current smartphone era, anyone who owns one can easily take hundreds of photographs in a day. “You could walk around the city and take 200 pictures on your phone,” says Friedman. “I only pressed the shutter 200 times with Minor Threat in front of it.”

Of those 200 images, 140 are included in the new book, and most of them have not previously appeared elsewhere. All of them capture an era when, explains Friedman, time simultaneously moved quickly and slowly. “In all three things that I covered—in punk rock, skateboarding, and hip-hop—those golden eras, it’s like a week was a month, a month was a year, two months was like five years,” he says. “So much evolution happened in the creativity … all of these records came out, and those are all the foundation.”

Friedman first shot Minor Threat performing live at The Barn at Alpine Village in Torrance, California, on July 3, 1982. The final time was on Aug. 2, 1983, at Dischord House in Arlington. That day yielded the famous front porch photograph that would serve as the cover for Minor Threat’s 1985 7-inch EP, Salad Days, which was released two years after the band broke up. Since then, that image has become a celebrated distillation of the band’s everypunk ethos. 

“I don’t even know why that picture became the iconic punk rock picture that it seems to be now,” says Friedman, though he concedes that “it’s a beautiful composition.”

The new book includes every shot from the half roll that Friedman took on the front porch, yard, and inside the house that day. Some of them feature a lawn mower and a skateboard with an image of Cynthia Connolly’s black sheep from Minor Threat’s seminal 1983 song “Out of Step.” “I just wanted to make a cool picture on the porch because I loved hanging out there,” Friedman says. For him, the one that became famous was the perfect image. Friedman has always considered Minor Threat to be different from Black Flag’s Henry Rollins and all of the other “Fuck You” heroes that he celebrated in his photographs. “Minor Threat were like—they were us. They were our friends. They were approachable,” he says. “They were the everyman group.” 

In recent years, people have doctored that photograph for comic effect, sharing new images on social media that substitute the seated members of Minor Threat with characters from The Simpsons, as well as the Beatles and Black Sabbath. “I love them all. I think they’re all hilarious and great, and it’s an honor,” says Friedman. “But some of them don’t really speak to me.” Unsurprisingly, he is less enthralled with the one depicting television’s Golden Girls on the Dischord House front porch.

***

Friedman, 61, spent his childhood in New Jersey, New York City, and California. He acquired his first skateboard, the old-fashioned type with clay wheels, when he first moved to California with his mother in the early 1970s. His interest in baseball was soon replaced by skateboarding. His peers were into motocross, Evel Knievel, and other daredevil pursuits. 

“Skateboarding was the next step in that,” he says. “It was thrilling. And it was something you did on your own without any parents involved, something that we had to discover and figure out on our own. When you’re doing Little League, or football, or soccer, parents have to drive you to the field or sign you up. Skateboarding and punk rock, there was no signing up, you just did it yourself.”

Like most American kids during the ’70s, Friedman was not closely supervised by his parents. “I think that’s kind of what made these things happen for me,” he says.

Other life experiences, including the bicoastal upbringing that resulted from his parents’ divorce, may have shaped Friedman’s affinity for outsider cultures. “I was a bit of an outsider, because I didn’t grow up where I was living … A bit of a loner, or not super social. I never fit in perfectly in either place,” he says.

Another distinctive aspect of his work is the masculinity of his subjects. “Skateboarding and punk rock, they were both very aggressive. And I was a male teenager at the time, and that’s kind of what you do: aggressive, rowdy things,” he says. “You do what the fuck you want. And you don’t care [about] the ramifications.”

In his early teens, Friedman received a “D” in a photography class because he didn’t follow the assignments and eschewed the required 35mm camera for a plastic pocket Instamatic, a more practical choice for an active skateboarder. He first visited the area during the late 1970s for a skateboarding photo session. Later, when he first met MacKaye and his brother Alec, the three bonded over their shared love for skateboarding, and he was struck by the friendliness of the local punk scene. “They actually recognized me from SkateBoarder magazine, and my photographs inspired them in different ways before they were punks,” Friedman says. “We all loved the same music. We were listening to Black Flag and we were at a Bad Brains show. And it was just great that this brotherhood of skateboarding and skateboarders could extend to a new brotherhood of punk rock.”

The friendship quickly deepened through shared musical passions and idealism. “We all had very high ideals on making culture and society better. And if you listen to lyrics that 18, 19-year-old Ian MacKaye wrote, he’s talking about personal problems, serious issues in his life [that] so much of us could relate to.” Friedman continues, “There were other bands that had talked about social issues that were very valid and great and psychological, personal issues. But the music that Minor Threat created was really fantastic.”

Friedman returned to D.C. in August 1982 to shoot a Minor Threat performance at 9:30 Club; later that year, he shot the band live at New York’s CBGB. When photographing skateboarders, Friedman often used wide angle lenses. “You’d like to get as close to the action as possible, the intensity of the moment while still showing the environment that it’s happening in,” he explains. When he was shooting the chaos of Minor Threat and other punk bands on stage, his skateboarding background was invaluable. “My sense of timing coming from skateboarding was able to capture those peak moments, and be really close to stuff without being scared and being right in the mix,” he says. “Because I was a skateboarder, I took great skateboard photos. Because I was a punk rocker. I took good punk photos … Both of those things meant everything to me, helping me survive [my] teenage years.”

The progressivism and activism he picked up along the way shaped his understanding of what makes a contemporary hero, as evidenced by his 1994 Fuck You Heroes collection. “It wasn’t saying ‘fuck you’ to heroes. These people were heroes because they said ‘fuck you’ … to common bullshit, to everyday society, to everything that was going on around them and made their own existence powerful and inspiring,” Friedman says. 

His current heroes include anti-gun activist X González, as well as U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez. Friedman has been trying to photograph AOC for four years, but despite his considerable efforts and celebrity, he has so far been unsuccessful. “She’s just next-level amazing,” he says. “She speaks truth to power every fucking day.”

Along with de la Rocha and other musicians, Just a Minor Threat also includes texts by local music heroes Alec MacKaye, Guy Picciotto, and Ian Svenonius. All of them help put Friedman’s photographs—and everything that Minor Threat meant to its fans—in perspective. 

For Friedman, Minor Threat and all of his other “Fuck You” heroes made an indelible mark on American culture. “They set a fucking foundation in place for progressive ideas and ideals in youth to understand that there’s really a different way of thinking than what your parents are telling you … Some people had great parents, of course, and they were progressive; they were radical too. But these foundations gave you the confidence to think that your own ideals were good enough. And that’s what makes you a Minor Threat.”

Just a Minor Threat: The Minor Threat Photographs of Glen E. Friedman is out now; Friedman will discuss the book with Ian MacKaye at 2 p.m. on Oct. 8 at Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library. dclibrary.org. Free; registration required.

This article has been updated.

Ongoing: Death Comes to Tudor Place 

There’s only so much spook one can pack into the 31 short days of October. Thankfully, Tudor Place understands the season’s conundrum: For the entire month, the historic house and museum will offer visitors a tour that adds a haunted layer of depth to its existing offerings. The Georgetown estate’s specialty exhibition and guided tour spotlights the natural spooky traditions of Tudor Place and similar upper-class households of the 1800s. The Death Comes to Tudor Place tours will examine how funeral customs and burial practices evolved at the house across nearly two centuries. Visitors will learn “why clocks are stopped, mirrors are draped in black fabric, and why most funerals were held at home.” In addition, estate artifacts “not traditionally on display, will show how members of the family memorialized their deceased relatives,” the press release explains. The tour will also dive into the funerary customs of enslaved and free domestic laborers of Tudor Place, which reflect the inherited customs and values these workers collected from their own communities of the time. “Grief has always been a part of the human condition,” Rob DeHart, curator at Tudor Place, explains in the exhibition’s announcement. “This installation reveals how people have historically expressed their grief and how factors such as class and race come into play.” Death Comes to Tudor Place runs through Nov. 5 at Tudor Place Historic House & Garden, 1644 31st St. NW. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 a.m to 4 p.m. tudorplace.org. $10. —Camila Bailey

Saturday: New Works Inspired by Fahrenheit 451 at RE4CH Creative

Fans of Fahrenheit 451 know that it takes the concept of banned books to an extreme. So what better work to close out Banned Books Week? On Oct. 7, the DC Bushwick Book Club will host a multidisciplinary event based around Ray Bradbury’s classic. This club originated in 2009, when Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Susan Hwang decided to prepare a musical performance inspired by literature. The group has since expanded its reach worldwide, merging books and indie art in a number of locations. For each show, participating artists read a selected story and respond with their own creative works. “I’m always excited to see what people come up with and what pieces of the book inspire people,” says D.C.’s event organizer and musical artist, Sea Griffin. “It really is like a book club discussion only through art and performance.” The local chapter of the Bushwick Book Club formed a year ago and has previously spotlighted authors such as authors Kurt Vonnegut and Octavia Butler. The Fahrenheit 451 show will be its fifth event and will feature various artists including Ari Voxx, Safety Bear, and filmmakers Kerri Sheehan and Paris Preston. DC Bushwick Book Club: New Works Inspired by Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 starts at 7:30 p.m. on Oct. 7 at RE4CH Creative, 1023 15th St. NW. eventbrite.com. $10.45. —Dora Segall

Closes Sunday: Progression at Multiple Exposures Gallery

Every so often, Multiple Exposures Gallery holds a collaborative photography exhibition involving its members. Over roughly six weeks, photographers—14 of them this year—contribute images in sequence, always thematically playing off the previous image with either a photograph they’ve already taken or with a new one. The new image may mirror the previous one’s subject matter, composition, or color. The 2023 exhibit includes 56 images, hung in order as if they were one long game of telephone. While I was flummoxed by three or four of the proposed connections, most can be seen clearly. The participating photographers over-use windows as a transitional element, and sometimes the connections are overly literal, such as the presence of folding chairs. More subtle, and compelling, are transitions based on the receding angle of a surface (as in one pairing by Alan Sislen and Clara Young Kim and another trio by Sandy LeBrun–Evans, Sarah Hood Salomon, and Soomin Ham), small protrusions from wall (as in images by Ham and Tim Hyde), or echoed geometries, as with Francine B. Livaditis’ rusted circular fan and Fred Zafran’s spreading ripples along the surface of a pond. While the connections between photographs are the exhibit’s lifeblood, a number of images are notable on their own, including Van Pulley’s photograph of an abandoned building out west with a sky whose rays echo the pattern of the flag of Arizona; Livaditis’ bold, elemental portrayal of a marble pyramidion in New Orleans; and LeBrun-Evans’ image of an isolated house under swirling, long-exposure stars and adjacent to artfully curving sand dunes. Each can be seen as part of an evolution, but also on their own. Progression runs through Oct. 8 at Multiple Exposures Gallery at the Torpedo Factory Art Center, 105 N. Union St., Alexandria. Daily, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. multipleexposuresgallery.com. Free. — Louis Jacobson

Wednesday: Cure at Freer Gallery of Art

It’s a cinematic injustice that we don’t talk more about one of the most frightening villains ever committed to film, Kunio Mamiya from Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure (1997). This malevolent character, a master of hypnosis, doesn’t rely on physical prowess or brute force; instead, he relies on his ability to compel unwitting individuals to commit unspeakable acts of violence. Sharing a space with this seemingly unthreatening, lanky figure might not initially scream danger, however, authorities swiftly discover that the words that escape his lips transform into potent weapons aimed at the hidden, uncomfortable depths of the human psyche. While Cure may not have spawned more popular American remakes like its Japanese horror counterparts, The Ring and Ju-On: The Grudge, it remains elusive from Western hands due to its deliberate, methodical, and almost sterile portrayal of violence. The film follows Detective Takabe as he investigates the grisly murders plaguing Tokyo, each victim marked by a sinister X carved into their necks. At the center of it all is Masato Hagiwara’s Mamiya, who is nothing short of disquieting in the role as he continually taunts law enforcement and preys upon the vulnerabilities of ordinary people. It comments on the intricate web of despair and alienation that plagued contemporary Japan during the late ’90s, drawing us into a world where the line between sanity and insanity blur. It also has one of my favorite jumpscares ever, revealed through a silent cut and a small flash of light. Watch out for the corners of each room. Cure screens at 2 p.m. on Oct. 11 at the Freer Gallery of Art, 1050 Independence Ave. SW. asia.si.edu. Free. —Ryan Oquiza

Monday: The TOB Experience celebrate Lil Chris’ birthday at THRōW Social

“Lil” Chris Proctor was still in middle school when the Take Ova Band, better known as TOB, played its debut show on Christmas 2004 at the now-defunct Club Levels in Northeast. Since then, Lil Chris has evolved from being an affable and engaging lead talker of one of the city’s top bouncebeat bands into something more: In recent years, he has emerged as one of the true leaders of go-go, mentoring young musicians and contributing to anti-violence efforts. No less important, TOB has performed in countless musical demonstrations protesting gentrification, systemic racism, voter suppression, Trumpism, and the disenfranchisement of communities east of the river. More recently, Lil Chris appeared in Lovail Long’s theatrical production Grease With a Side of Mumbo Sauce at the Lincoln Theatre, portraying legendary D.C. rapper Fat Rodney. On Oct. 9, The TOB Experience performs an Official Birthday Celebration for Lil Chris with special guests Anwan “Big G” Glover, lead talker of Backyard Band, and Frank “Scooby” Sirius of Sirius Company and The Chuck Brown Band. Established in 2020, the TOB Experience is a TOB offshoot that meshes the band’s stripped down bouncebeat with a more traditional go-go sound, complete with horn section, congas, cowbell, and tambourine. Band management describes the evening as “a nostalgic moment” that will celebrate Lil Chris’ birthday with various styles of go-go. The TOB Experience play at 8:30 p.m. on Oct. 9 at THRōW Social, 1401 Okie St. NE. throwsocial.com. $35–$300. —Alona Wartofsky

Next Thursday: Emo Orchestra featuring Hawthorne Heights at Warner Theatre

When Hawthorne Heights frontperson JT Woodruff first heard his friend and booking agent Ben Mench–Thurlow’s concept for Emo Orchestra, he thought Mench-Thurlow was insane. Arranging some of the greatest emo songs ever written for an orchestra to play would not only be nontraditional but a lot of work with many moving parts. Woodruff was up for the challenge though. “As a musician who’s been doing this for 20 years, if you can’t find a way to thrive in chaos, you’re just not going to last,” he tells City Paper. The hardest part was picking the set list, which consists largely of songs by Hawthorne Heights’ friends and contemporaries—songs like “MakeDamnSure” by Taking Back Sunday and “Misery Business” by Paramore—that work with Woodruff’s vocals and the band’s tunings. While it might be hard to believe, Hawthorne Heights hadn’t played another band’s song live before the inaugural Emo Orchestra tour began earlier this fall. “We want to do them how Hawthorne Heights would do them,” Woodruff says. “We’re not trying to cover them.” Yes, Hawthorne Heights will also play its own classic hits “Ohio Is for Lovers” and “Niki FM,” as well as a lesser-known acoustic song “Decembers” and new track “The Storm.” The songs themselves were arranged by 26-year-old British conductor Evan Rogers, which was a tall order given emo music’s characteristic distorted guitars, loud drums, and screaming vocals. Finding the road orchestra to play them was yet another feat. Will Deely from the band Beartooth is serving as auxiliary guitarist so Woodruff can function as lead singer, another first for him. Punk rockers count to four and play, but the more clinical, precise orchestral world relies on timed sequences. “You feel like you’re doing a surgical procedure, instead of playing rock songs to your fans,” Woodruff says. “That’s been the only stress-inducing thing for us, but it’s all part of it; it’s all great.” While trading the nightclubs and concert venues Hawthorne Heights usually plays for a theater experience might not be as conducive to crowd surfing or moshing (at least no one had tried either, as of their second performance), there’s something magical about seeing faces light up when they recognize a favorite song being brought to life by an orchestra, Woodruff says, adding: “I would just say, buckle up.” Emo Orchestra featuring Hawthorne Heights plays at 7 p.m. on Oct. 12 at Warner Theatre, 513 13th St. NW. emo-orchestra.com. $35–$116. —Dave Nyczepir

Go-go artist Michelle Blackwell first started working on her new album, Go-go-Ish (1st Set), in the fall of 2019. She had written seven songs when COVID abruptly shut down the local music scene, as well as nearly every other aspect of her life. For the first time in 19 years, she stopped performing live, and her concerns about safety prevented her from bringing musicians into the studio to record.

The next few years would be challenging both personally and professionally for Blackwell. By the end of April 2020, she had not only lost the stage, but also her beloved grandmother, Dr. Alyce McLendon Chenault Gullattee. The former head of Howard University’s Institute on Drug Abuse and Addiction, Gullattee was a respected social activist. While mourning her loss, Blackwell began a new job as a program manager for the National Association for the Advancement of Returning Citizens. Working for the District’s Cure the Streets initiative against gun violence, Blackwell knew the work was important, but it was also deeply distressing. “My son is a gun violence survivor, and I’ve lost many friends to violence, so it was extremely triggering,” she says. “At the same time, COVID was everywhere, and I’m watching people die all over the country.”

Eventually, she found a second job, working as an operations manager for the Black Coalition Against COVID. Again, the work was challenging. “The amount of gaslighting and misinformation, it was like a train wreck,” she says. 

Moreover, Blackwell found herself feeling less connected to her community of fans; by her own estimate, she lost approximately 1,000 of her 20,000 combined followers during the pandemic. She is convinced this was due to her continued efforts to keep her fans alive. “I was relentless,” she says. “The only thing I was feeding them was COVID safety protocols and not music, so I understand why many left. But I wouldn’t change anything. I have a platform, and I had a responsibility to do what I felt was the right thing.”

When Blackwell finally returned to her album in May 2021, much of it no longer seemed relevant. “I’m looking at these songs, and I’m just like, ‘This is not what I’m feeling right now. This does not represent what I’m trying to say, how I feel creatively,’” she recalls.

For months, she struggled to find creative inspiration. Not surprisingly, she found her way forward through an album by one of her favorite contemporary artists.

“Honestly, I didn’t have a lightbulb moment until Beyoncé’s Renaissance came out the summer of ’22. That was what turned things around for me creatively,” she says. “Her album is basically an homage to disco, an homage to ’70s music, a homage to ballroom culture. The mood of the album was very much ‘I’m going to live my life and enjoy it, unapologetically loving, unapologetically dancing, unapologetically living.’ … It was almost like she was rebelling by celebrating life anyway. We’re gonna celebrate life the way that we can and be unapologetic about it.”  

The 10 tracks on Go-go-Ish (1st Set) open with “Welcome Back,” a sequel to the “Intro (The Cranktrix)” that appeared on her 2018 album, Body of Work. “Welcome Back” greets those returning from what she calls “the Go-Go 101 course last semester” and introduces “general crank theory” that educates listeners on what go-go fans mean when they say that the music “cranks.” Like Blackwell’s previous album, Go-go-Ish is a deeply personal collection that reflects her love for her community and culture. Her new original song “Diaspora Wars” dissects the social media trend of cross-cultural debates around the African diaspora; in it, Blackwell asks, “How can we afford to fight with each other across the diaspora when we’re still in survival mode? Make it make sense.”

The remainder of the album includes “That’s on Life” and “IYKYK,” which showcases Blackwell’s vocal gifts over a lush slow groove. She describes the former as “an honest assessment of my gratitude for my life experiences,” adding, “I know that this life has meaning. And there’s beauty everywhere, you just have to zero in and appreciate it.” Another track, “The Water Bearer,” was inspired by her son. “It’s kind of light but still cautioning people to use their mind and their voice,” she explains. The final track, “Happy Birthday / Birthday Bounce,” showcases a socket, breakbeat, and bouncebeat—three beats that represent various styles of go-go.

A D.C. native, Blackwell has impeccable go-go credentials. She joined her first go-go band, Suttle Thoughts, in 2000 and later performed as a member of Northeast Groovers for two years before joining and managing What?! Band, where she remained for more than 15 years. Within the go-go community, she is admired as a versatile vocalist who can sing a gorgeous ballad and hype the audience as a lead talker. She often describes her musical sound as “urban go-go soul,” and in a field dominated by male performers, she has easily established herself as equally talented as the men surrounding her on stage. While recording her new album, she has advanced her abilities in the studio.

With Go-go-Ish (1st Set), Blackwell redefined her approach to her art. She produced all but two of the album’s tracks, and found a way to express herself after everything she has been through in recent years. “I just need to write and have fun because whatever you do can inspire and uplift people,” she says. “I can do an album that makes people smile, and that’s one of the benefits of go-go—it makes you forget your problems and have a good time.”

But Beyoncé was not Blackwell’s only inspiration; she also found a way forward after spending time in Ghana. DNA tests revealed that her ancestors had come from that region of West Africa, and Blackwell began researching the possibility of dual citizenship. She traveled to Ghana in December of last year, arriving just in time for what’s known as “Detty December” and the AfroFuture Music Festival (formerly known as Afrocella). While in the capital city of Accra, Blackwell was introduced to Ghanaian dancehall and highlife artist Epixode by a mutual friend. They instantly clicked. Epixode appears on Go-go-Ish’s Afrobeats-flavored “Do You Know” and its go-go remix. “Our creative energy matched,” says Blackwell. “We’re touching the surface of the complexity of the relationship between the Black diaspora and continental Africans. A conversation needs to be had, and out of those conversations, the main goal is love, understanding, and unity.” 

For Epixode, collaborating with Blackwell was revelatory and it has been instructive for him to compare go-go with Ghanaian music. “If I hadn’t met Michelle, I wouldn’t even know what go-go is,” he says. “Our sound is deep rooted in a folk music called Kpanlogo, which is drums and congas, so I think we have something in common.”

While the influences and melodies may differ from go-go, he explains, there are crucial connections. “Go-go for me is the heartbeat, and that’s just like what we do here…. One thing I like about go-go is the transitions, the way you guys are able to use just the drums as transitions from one song to the other,” he says. “It’s amazing, and I’ve already started incorporating that in some of my performances.”

“Meeting her is also like a learning process for me as an artist,” he adds. “I felt like this is somebody who is my sister, this is my mother. This is somebody who has the same mindset, the same goals, the same ideas.”

Blackwell and Epixode’s collaboration is the beginning of what they hope will be a long and fruitful relationship. Initially, they spent hours talking about their respective musical cultures and where they intersect. Epixode was fascinated by go-go. “We talked about how similar it is to highlife, which is Ghana’s form of go-go, their indigenous music,” says Blackwell. “Dancehall and Afrobeats are very popular in Ghana, but their indigenous music is like ours. Their live band indigenous genre is highlife. Our song is a fusion of both the Afrobeats sound and the go-go sound together.” The original version of “Do You Know” will be released in Ghana with an accompanying visual later this fall. 

Now Blackwell and Epixode are continuing the cultural introduction that started with Backyard Band and Black Alley’s previous performances in Ghana by opening up a rehearsal and recording studio in Accra. “In general, go-go has this connection with Ghana in particular, but we haven’t had musical representation of that until now,” Blackwell says. “Something radical needs to happen for go-go to continue to evolve and push forward. This connection with Epixode and our plans will be a part of that, and I can’t wait to see what this turns into.”

Michelle Blackwell’s Go-go-Ish (1st Set) was released in June. Blackwell performs BWell Under the Stars, her first live concert since March 2020, at 9 p.m. on Sept. 30, outside in Northeast D.C. instagram.com.

Editor’s note: This post has been updated to clarify Michelle Blackwell’s role within the District’s Cure the Streets initiative.

Longtime local photographer and musician Charles Steck, who died on June 14 at 66 due to complications following back surgery, was deeply admired as a bassist in multiple area bands. A gifted photographer who documented the city’s avant garde music and arts culture, he was a frequent contributor to City Paper; his work also appeared in publications including the Washington Post and Architectural Digest. In both the local music and photography communities, Steck was loved as someone who was low-key, steady, and deeply talented. 

During the late 1980s, Steck became an unofficial photographer for the downtown club d.c. space, where his wife, Dot Steck, served as a cook and popular bartender. Dot used her calligraphy skills to create flyers listing d.c. space’s jam-packed performance schedule filled with an array of local, edgy musicians, poets, filmmakers, and dancers. Steck photographed many of those artists as they performed on stage and in his studio above the club. 

A distinctive aspect of Steck’s photography was his gift for using dark tones in black and white images. “He wasn’t afraid of darkness, and his images are rich with it,” says Brian Tate, who collaborated with Steck on various projects during the 1980s, including three citywide film festivals and a band that changed its name with every gig. “The work pulled you in, and Charles made it seem natural…There was a very specific artistry and vision to his photography that if you saw one of those images, you knew it was his. Charles had a way of capturing the soulfulness of the music he played and the people he shot.”

Tate describes Steck as a “sought-after bassist who was also a phenomenal photographer.” He says there was an inextricable link between Steck’s visual and musical endeavors. “Some of the best photographers and bass players have an ability to not call attention to themselves while they’re doing incredible work,” he says.

Steck was best known in local music circles for playing bass in many area punk and rock bands, including the Velvet Monkeys in the early ’80s and High Back Chairs in the late ’80s to early ’90s. Over the years, he continued to perform and record, with idiosyncratic rock singer-songwriter Lida Husik in the mid-to-late ’90s, and with Rambling Shadows on and off from the late 1990s through 2019.

He was born in Queens, New York, and, because his father served in the U.S. Army, the family moved frequently. As a child, Steck lived in France, Arizona, and Brooklyn before his family settled in Potomac. During his senior year at Winston Churchill High School, he met Dorothy “Dot” Thomas, then a junior. Dot’s older brother played in a cover band with Steck. After graduating high school in 1974, Steck went on to study photography at Montgomery College and the Maine Photographic Workshop. Shortly after he and Dot married in 1982, they moved to Dupont Circle. 

Dot started working at d.c. space in 1988, and it was there that the artistic couple found their community of fellow creatives. “Charles was a central figure …. in the D.C. artist community for decades,” says performer and poet Silvana Straw. “If it wasn’t for Charles, we wouldn’t have a treasure trove of images from the ’80s underground scene and the highly creative, wild, and sacred times we lived together…..What a gift he was to us, and what a gift he has left us.”

Former d.c. space owner Bill Warrell recalls that, in 1989, Steck was one of the first artists who approached him about renting studio space on the building’s third floor. The Stecks paid $35 per month for the tiny room with a low ceiling, where Charles set up a salon for shooting portraits and Dot painted cityscapes. “Charles would invite people downstairs to come up for a portrait,” recalls Warrell. “He was documenting a scene that turned out to be pretty wonderful.”

Warrell tapped Steck to shoot many of the events he produced for District Curators, the nonprofit production company that brought an array of avant-garde artists to the District between 1978 and 2003. He is particularly fond of Steck’s portrait of jazz artist Sun Ra, shot at the Atlantic Building, home of the original 9:30 Club. “That portrait was absolutely amazing,” Warrell says. “You were looking right into his eyes, into his soul. It was like there was a galaxy floating around Sun Ra’s head. It’s one of the best portraits of Sun Ra I’ve seen—and one of the best photographs I’ve ever seen.”

Moonlighting as a waiter at d.c. space, dancer and performance artist Ajax Joe Drayton participated in several photo sessions with Steck. “He was shooting photographs for a lot of artists working at that time: Essex Hemphill and Wayson Jones, Larry Duckette, Michelle Parkerson. The punk rock scene, the Black gay poets, R&B singers, Sun Ra, Lester Bowie,” says Drayton. 

“Charles, in my opinion, was at least a half-giant walking among the wizards of Washington D.C., sort of like Hagrid, but with more power,” Drayton adds. “In the middle of wild performance people, he was always this unassuming person, quietly contributing his art.”

Steck shot album covers for numerous area bands, including Shudder to Think and Crippled Pilgrims. Some of his images appear in Sam Knee’s new book, A Scene In Between USA, which features photographs from the indie and underground scene spanning 1982 to ’88. Steck’s photo of sound engineer Don Zientara graces the cover of the recently released book, The Inner Ear of Don Zientara: A Half Century of Recording in One of America’s Most Innovative Studios, Through the Voices of Musicians. Online, some of his photographic work can be found living on an archival site that captures images from d.c. space’s heyday. 

Poet and music archivist Reuben Jackson, who frequently appeared at d.c. space’s open mic poetry events, was one of Steck’s early subjects. “As an archivist and history nerd I’m grateful that he documented a vibrant and crucial time in this city’s history,” Jackson says. “You look at those old flyers, and you think, ‘Damn. All those people played here when downtown closed at 6 p.m.’ We have it on record, and I think that is important.” 

Jackson still remembers the first time he encountered the Stecks sometime in the mid-1980s. “Charles was playing guitar and Dot was playing the flute, and they were playing an old song by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, ‘Whispering.’ Even now, you probably couldn’t find 10 people who knew Paul Whiteman, let alone that song,” he says. “I heard their arrangement of this song, and I thought, ‘this is unusual.’ Punk was the thing, so this was radical in its own way.”

In 1982, Steck joined psychedelic garage punk band the Velvet Monkeys as a bassist; he remained with the group for around two years. “As a bass player, Charles didn’t just follow what we played on guitar,” says band leader Don Fleming. “He would make up parts that were his own arrangements that worked within the song. He was a very musical person who thought on the levels that only the great players do. He was one of those great bass players in D.C., and he would have been one of those great bass players anywhere else, too.”

From 1989 until they broke up in 1993, Steck played bass for the High Back Chairs, which released one album and several singles on the local Dischord label. Band leader Peter Hayes first met Steck when he shot photos of Hayes’ previous band, Mourning Glories, in 1985. “Charles documented the hell out of High Back Chairs’ brief existence,” says Hayes. “One of my favorite images is on the back of our LP, where three of us have our arms around drummer Jeff Nelson, pretending to help him squeeze a shutter release.” The Highback Chairs reunited once in 2002 for the seventh birthday party of Stecks’ son, Avery. 

The High Back Chairs’ melodic approach represented a departure for the hardcore-rooted Dischord. Band guitarist Jim Spellman, best known for a later stint with Velocity Girl, describes the band’s two tours as “somewhat doomed,” but Steck kept everyone in good spirits. Spellman recalls that Steck maintained a sense of humor and took funny pictures of Nelson with various objects on his head. Spellman is one of many friends who praise Steck’s gentle demeanor. “His calmness drew people to him,” Spellman says. “He was a connector.” 

D.C.-raised vocalist Husik used Steck’s bass playing on two of her albums, 1995’s Joyride and 1997’s Fly Stereophonic. “Like his pictures, his bass playing and composition were full of heart and soul,” Husik writes in an email. “That soulfulness combined with technical precision creates perfection.”   

Musician Scott Wingo was a close friend who played alongside Steck in Rambling Shadows, with Husik, and in the band that changed its name for each one of its six gigs (the One-Nighters, the Two-Timers, Strike Three, Four–Letter Words, High Five, and Deep Six). “Over the course of 40 years, we performed everywhere from the 9:30 Club to the Coney Island Fun House,” Wingo says. According to Wingo, there was no ego in Steck’s musical approach during the inevitable conflicts about artistic direction. “He was an excellent musician…just there to serve the music, standing back in puzzled amusement amid the typical intra-band squabbles…Through it all, he was a constant source of steady calm and reason.”

Steck’s old bandmate Nelson, who is co-owner of Dischord, recalls Steck always carrying a heavy bag with cameras and different lenses in a time before digital photography. Dischord regularly used Steck’s candid photos in its advertising, and he shot many of the label’s publicity photos. “He routinely took photos for free or cheap for those who had no money, such as aspiring bands, or for those people or organizations whom he wanted to help,” Nelson says. 

For City Paper, Steck took photos of politicians, musicians, and street scenes for roughly two decades. WCP also published his images of his children, Avery, Brody, and Chloe, at various points in their lives. Former City Paper art director Jandos Rothstein describes Steck as someone who could reliably return from ordinary events such as D.C. Council meetings “and come back with a captivating image.”

From 2009 until his recent surgery, Steck worked at Foggy Bottom’s Pro Photo camera store, where he was popular with customers of varying abilities. “He would restore memories for families and show people how to use cameras that they found in their grandparents’ attic,” says store manager Sally Baghdassarian. “When it came to digital, he was able to out-navigate most photographers with their own camera, showing them where all the settings were and getting them on their way.”

In recent years, the Stecks’ three children have continued the family’s artistic leaning. Avery, 27, plays drums, fiddle, and banjo with the bluegrass band Muddy Branch Boys. Brody, 24, is a singer and guitarist for the local indie rock band Makeup Girl. And Chloe, 22, is a vocalist who occasionally sings backup for Makeup Girl.

Fleming last saw Steck for a 2014 Velvet Monkeys reunion at the annual ShakeMore festival put together by former members of area art punk band Half Japanese in Westminster, Maryland. “The last time I saw Charles, we were playing Velvet Monkeys songs together,” says Fleming. “I’m really happy we were able to do that.” 

A memorial service for Charles Steck takes place Aug. 26 at Joe’s Movement Emporium in Mount Rainier. An after-party at the nearby Red Dirt Studio is scheduled to follow. A GoFundMe has been set up to help his family, gofund.me.

Thursday, Saturday, Sunday: Marsha Gordon Book Tour in the DMV

Can women have it all? This comment, disguised as a question, is not only fraught with judgment and condescension, it’s ultimately pointless, as there is no answer that pleases everyone (or anyone). Even worse, those women who do try to answer it with candor or self-awareness are more likely to be redacted from the historical record than elevated as a prophet of modernity. Case in point: Ursula Parrott, the subject of Marsha Gordon’s Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life and Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott (University of California Press, 2023). The life and works of novelist and essayist Parrott (1899–1957) provide a glimpse into the eras that shaped her: the Victorian, the flapper, and the postwar. Best known as the foremost American expert on divorce, Parrott also wrote about reproductive rights, extramarital affairs, and single motherhood, all subjects she knew intimately. On paper, she might sound like a feminist “ahead of her time,” but in fact, she disavowed the feminist movement for tricking women into giving away their security for a set of false freedoms. Sex and the single girl? More like sex and the single paycheck. Right or wrong, Parrott led a scandalous, glamorous, sometimes lonely life in the public eye, and Gordon, professor and director of the film studies program at North Carolina State University, has done the world a great service by bringing her back into the spotlight. For the next few days, the author will be in the D.C. area for various events, including this afternoon’s lecture at the University of Maryland, College Park. On April 27, Gordon introduces the 1936 film Next Time We Love, based on a Parrott story and gives a post-screening discussion at 7 p.m. at the Old Greenbelt Theatre, 129 Centerway, Greenbelt. greenbelttheatre.org. Free. On April 29, Gordon hosts a book talk and introduces the 1956 film There’s Always Tomorrow at 2 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art, 4th Street and Constitution Avenue NW. nga.gov. Free. On April 30, Gordon hosts a book signing and introduces a double bill of There’s Always Tomorrow and The Divorcee (1930) at 1 p.m. at AFI Silver Theatre, 8633 Colesville Rd., Silver Spring. silver.afi.com. $13. —Annie Berke

Friday through Sunday: The Giz at the Lincoln Theatre

When Lovial Long and Salahuddin Mahdi debuted The Giz in 2018, their achievement was truly remarkable. Both had been incarcerated in a Georgia prison—Long on drug trafficking charges, Mahdi on aggravated assault—when they originally conceived a go-go adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz four years earlier. The premiere at MGM National Harbor featured multiple stars in a new musical celebrating go-go culture with a distinctly DMV feel. Young Dottie, who lives in North Carolina and yearns to attend Howard University, is whisked away by a tornado and lands in Landover. There, she and her traveling companions seek a Chocolate City—not an emerald one. And Dottie’s glittering red sneakers that the Wicked Witch of Waldorf wants so badly? New Balance, of course. With an abundance of humor, The Giz relays the go-go community’s struggle for acknowledgment and support; at the same time, the displacement of Black families who have lived in D.C. for generations is a crucial theme. This weekend, Long, who has been awarded an honorary doctorate for his work in the community, presents a weekend-long revival of The Giz, performed for the first time within the District, at the Lincoln Theatre. For this production, the cast is led by Duke Ellington School of the Arts alumni Hilary Daniels and Rayshun LaMarr, familiar for his stint on television’s The Voice. Fox 5 anchor Marissa Mitchell plays herself, appearing on the station’s real-life LION Lunch Hour. As with the original production, several go-go stars join the cast: Ms. Kim makes a cameo appearance as her glamorous self, and other artists include TOB’s “Lil” Chris Proctor, ABM’s RoZae, and Kimmise Lee, best known for Suttle Thoughts and Vybe Band. Pulling it all together is music director Frank “Scooby” Marshall, whose Sirius Company serves as the production’s house band. Expect to hear some classic go-go hits, including Rare Essence’s “King of the Go-Go Beat” and Backyard Band’s “O-Cup,” as well as new originals by Scooby, RoZae, and Scooby’s son, the talented Jru Anthony. The Giz plays April 28, 29, and 30 at 7 p.m. at the Lincoln Theatre, 1215 U St. NW. dcblackbroadway.com. $60–$125. —Alona Wartofsky

Saturday and Sunday: I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky at Atlas Performing Arts Center

Ripped from the headlines is not a phrase often associated with opera, but it applies to many of those written by John Adams. Adams—the contemporary American composer, not the second president—has rendered in vocal musical form U.S.-China diplomacy (Nixon in China), the Achille Lauro hijacking (The Death of Klinghoffer), the Manhattan Project (Doctor Atomic), and 9/11 (On the Transmigration of Souls), among other events. He is prolific enough that some of his works can fall through the cracks. This is the case with I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, his third, little-performed opera about the 1994 Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles. One could attribute its obscurity to faded memories of the event itself, which killed 60 people, or to Adams’ peculiar score—he deemed it a “songspiel,” not an opera, and it incorporates elements of rock, R&B, gospel, and blues, instrumentalized for an ensemble with non-opera-traditional instruments such as electric bass and saxophone. June Jordan’s libretto for Ceiling/Sky, as it’s commonly abbreviated, follows seven Angelinos who, over 22 musical numbers, perceive the earthquake as part of a self-discovery voyage. Were it a Paul Haggis movie and not a John Adams songspiel, it would be Hollywood Oscar bait. But it’s not, and that’s probably for the best. IN Series presents I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky at 7:30 p.m. on April 29 and 3 p.m. on April 30 at Atlas Performing Arts Center, 1333 H St. NE. atlasarts.org. $35–$55. —Mike Paarlberg

Sunday: Fresh Talk at Planet Word 

On Sunday, the National Museum of Women in the Arts’ Women, Arts, and Social Change initiative hosts another one of its signature Fresh Talk events. These talks, which happen throughout the year, are discussions between leading artists, designers, activists, and social innovators. April’s program will explore the power of art and language to express emotion and ideas. Through conversations with muralists, mixed-media artists, graffiti artists, and filmmakers, the event will explore how art can communicate complex ideas and how it can be a driver for social change. Artists featured include the local, independent art director and muralist Cita Sadeli (aka MISS CHELOVE), visual artist and filmmaker Michelle Angela Ortiz, and mixed-media artist Nekisha Durrett. According to Melani Douglass, director of NMWA’s public programs, the talks seek to be an “inspiring and empowering conversation with leading women muralists as they share their stories of breaking barriers in a field traditionally dominated by men.” The museum is specifically bringing together several women who work internationally but are based right here in the District. “These women in the area are making waves in the art world and have gained the support of large companies and foundations to do phenomenal work,” Douglass tells City Paper. Fresh Talk starts at 4:30 p.m. on April 30 at Planet Word, 925 13th St. NW. nmwa.org. $20–$25. —Hannah Docter-Loeb

Monday: May Day Festival and March at Malcolm X Park

The DC May Day Committee hosts its annual May Day Festival and March in celebration of the accomplishments of the global working class. The May 1 holiday is recognized internationally as Labor Day, and this year’s event puts a special focus on supporting the unionization of Amazon and Starbucks workers. “We wanted to center working people in the DMV and really just put that front and center,” says committee member Chase Zaslannya. “We’re signaling support for workers rights and workers.” The event recognizes what the global working class has achieved, while looking for ways to continue the push for change and the construction of more positive communities. The DC May Day Committee is made up of local unions, student groups, mutual aid groups, and other justice organizations. Its makeup has shifted over the past 50 years, but the committee has maintained its collaborative approach to organizing. In the past decade, Zaslannya says, there has been a greater push to make May Day a community event. Prior to the march, attendees can enjoy the festival in Malcolm X Park. Participating organizations will have speakers and information booths for people interested, and musical acts will perform before the group marches to the White House. Zaslannya says the goal is to ultimately create a space for people to “come out and meet others in the community. It’s a chance for different people involved in labor, housing, and justice work to get together to talk about what we want to accomplish.” DC May Day Festival and March begins at 4 p.m. on May 1 at Malcolm X Park, 16th & W Streets NW. eventbrite.com. Free. —Camila Bailey

Tuesday and Wednesday: Io and Léandre et Héro at the Kennedy Center

Ballet is one of the most complex artistic (and athletic) systems in the world. So it might be hard to believe that, centuries ago, ballet was not a stand-alone art form—at least not as we understand it today. King Louis XIV popularized ballet in the 16th-century French courts; these dances were political, building up a mythology around the monarch. Italian operas came to France in the 17th century and merged with Louis’ ballet system, with dance taking the supporting role. The result? Opera-ballets, multifaceted productions that brought together singing, dancing, and orchestral music. By the 19th century, ballet had begun developing into its own form. This spring, however, the Kennedy Center will honor the intertwined history of opera-ballets with Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Io and Marquis de Brassac’s Léandre et Héro; the latter premiered back in 1750. Opera Lafayette is bringing the singers, with baroque soprano Emmanuelle de Negri and tenor Maxime Melnik in the title roles; the dancers hail from the New York Baroque Dance Company and the Sean Curran Company. This double bill of opera-ballets starts at 7:30 p.m. on May 2 and May 3 at the Kennedy Center, 2700 F St. NW. kennedy-center.org. $30–$105. —Mary Scott Manning

In 2015, Malachai Johns, a former guitarist for the Northeast Groovers and the mastermind behind the band Mambo Sauce, moved to Los Angeles. But he wasn’t done with go-go.

Since then, Johns has made considerable efforts to help the District’s homegrown music find a wider audience. His Allive Agency handles bookings for a variety of go-go artists, his 7070 Sound label releases go-go singles, and his GoGoTix.Co website lists upcoming go-go shows and runs brief news stories about the genre.

Last week, Johns pulled off another achievement for the culture, this one at the annual South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, by organizing SXSW A GO-GO, a concert billed as “A Celebration of the Official Music of Washington DC.” While this was not the first time a go-go act has played SXSW—both Rare Essence and Black Alley have previously performed at the festival—this show was remarkable for its presentation of multiple go-go stars from different bands, all backed by a single band of rotating musicians dubbed Crank Caviar.

While D.C.’s homegrown funk genre continues to flourish in and around the District despite decades of gentrification and discrimination, the music has struggled to maintain a consistent presence beyond the Beltway. Through the SXSW showcase, Johns sought to introduce the live go-go experience to music fans from all over the world. “My philosophy is to try turning people into evangelists of go-go,” Johns says. “South by Southwest has a hundred shows going on in the same street. People walk up and down the street, and if you hear something cool, you go in. So my thought process was that people who may be from Chicago or China or wherever would come in and be like, ‘This is amazing!’ and start telling their friends about go-go.”

In recent months, Johns has been releasing Crank Caviar videos in which ad hoc collections of go-go artists from various bands perform covers of well-known songs such as Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is” and Usher’s “U Remind Me.” Johns used that same approach while planning SXSW A GO-GO to showcase an array of go-go artists, 18 in all. Holding it all together was Larry “Stomp Dogg” Atwater, a revered go-go drummer who has long played with and managed the Northeast Groovers and has also been a member of multiple go-go bands including What?! Band, CCB, and UCB. Currently, Stomp Dogg’s ATEAM producers group backs many touring R&B and rap artists stopping through the DMV, and he also plays with R&B heartthrob Raheem DeVaughn’s go-go band, the Crank Crusaders. 

With its lineup of musicians and vocalists from a variety of groups, the showcase didn’t focus on specific go-go bands; instead, it presented go-go as a genre. As he devised a playlist featuring some of go-go’s greatest classics, Stomp Dogg split the show into three sections and came up with a set list spotlighting some of go-go’s greatest hits. 

“My plan was to create a show for people who might not know what go-go is, so my mindset was to go back and study all of the bands in the city and take the most popular classic hits from the majority of the bands,” Stomp Dogg says. 

Frank “Scooby” Sirius led the first set, performing early go-go classics with some help from Still Familiar’s Steve Roy. Their set included “Bustin’ Loose” and “Run Joe,” go-go creator Chuck Brown’s 1970s and 1980s hits that Scooby regularly performs with the Chuck Brown Band. Their set also included four of Rare Essence’s greatest hits, one by Anthony “Little Benny” Harley, and Experience Unlimited’s “Da Butt,” which became go-go’s biggest success to date after director Spike Lee featured the band performing it in his 1988 film School Daze. 

“The playlist was incredible. It touched on a lot of different sounds and eras of go-go,” Scooby says. 

Christian “Rapper Dude” Black (aka “Rappa”), a go-go icon for his history with both Northeast Groovers and What?! Band, anchored the second set along with Roy, Mambo Sauce’s Alfred “Black Boo” Duncan, and the young vocalist J’TA. Their set featured Pure Elegance’s “One Leg Up,” Northeast Groovers classics “The Water” and “Booty Call,” and Mambo Sauce’s anthem “Welcome to D.C.” Rare Essence’s Samuel “Smoke” Dews closed out the set with a conga solo. 

“Me and Smoke have a certain chemistry and a certain lock, and until somebody dethrones him, he’s the king of the congas,” says Stomp Dogg, referring to Smoke’s victory at the 2013 King of the Congas battle.

Holding down the final set was Backyard Band’s lead talker Anwan “Big G” Glover and vocalist Leroy “Weensey” Brandon along with TOB’s “Lil Chris” Proctor, the showcase’s only bouncebeat artist. “I knew the assignment. I knew how important it was for me to be there and represent bouncebeat,” Lil Chris says. “This all-star go-go band was all about unity in go-go. It’s a blueprint we all need to use in the future to bring go-go to other areas and other countries.”

Lil Chris’ presence was an imperative, Stomp Dogg says. “He is the mecca of the bouncebeat and the future of this go-go stuff,” he says. “He gets it and respects what came before him.” 

Lil Chris had performed with Big G and Weensey on stage with Backyard Band several times in the past, but as he joined them for “Skillet” at the SXSW showcase, he realized it never loses its thrill. “To perform alongside two people I idolized when I was young, that’s kind of amazing,” he says. 

Similarly, Weensey was honored to sing “Sardines” by Junkyard Band, whose members weren’t present. “We just played some of their hits so the people can get a chance to hear live and know that we’re fans of their music, too,” Weensey says. “We had a whole gumbo of talent coming together for this show, and that’s what go-go need right now.”

As the final set came to an end, the musicians were reluctant to leave the stage. In what Johns describes as an “iconic moment,” everyone gathered for an encore, a staple in other genres that is a rarity in go-go. They performed an impromptu rendition of Raphael Saadiq’s “Still Ray,” which has become a signature song for Weensey, so much so that when Saadiq performed at the 9:30 Club in 2020, he interrupted the song to bring Weensey and Big G on stage. “Let’s do this the right way,” Saadiq said.

During “Still Ray,” J’TA, a D.C. native and current Howard University student, who is one of go-go’s newer vocalists, stepped in to improvise Beyoncé’s “Cuff It,” much to Stomp Dogg’s delight. “She is making me fall in love with go-go all over again,” he says. “I haven’t seen nobody of her magnitude since Michelle Blackwell. She’s so rounded: She can sing, rap, lead talk, and run the band.” J’TA, for her part, says she was thrilled to be there. “It was definitely an honor to not only represent women, but also the young people who are … just trying to keep go-go alive,” she says.

Montu Mitchell, whose Mitchcraft clothing line of Love DC GoGo shirts and sweatshirts continue to increase in popularity, embarked on what he describes as “a 23-hour sprint marathon” to sell the culture’s merch in Austin. “When go-go leaves D.C., it usually becomes a little more watered down,” he says. “In this case, you had a very pure version of go-go, and people were really getting their go-go moment in. We sold a lot of shirts to people who didn’t know a lot about go-go.”

Mitchell livestreamed all three sets from his Facebook account for the fans back home, and now he’s selling three versions of shirts commemorating the showcase on his website. “The go-go that I enjoy five nights a week was able to translate to a stage that didn’t have a D.C., Maryland, or Virginia liquor license,” he says. “That was a huge accomplishment and shows promise.”

Johns is convinced that go-go can help drive tourism in the District, and he hopes that some of the agencies promoting the city as a tourist destination can support tours for go-go artists. The Lafayette Convention and Visitors Commission in Louisiana uses a similar approach in sponsoring touring cajun and zydeco artists as a means to drive local tourism. Johns notes that it’s difficult to schedule go-go tours because the bands do so well at home. “They’re not willing to give up their Friday and Saturday nights, when they make their money, to get in a van and eat ramen noodles,” he says. 

Johns and Stomp Dogg are already planning to revive SXSW A GO-GO next year, and Johns will release the next Crank Caviar video next month. For now, the artists featured in the showcase are back in the DMV, performing at their usual venues and reflecting on a job well done. 

“South by Southwest shows that there is an interest for this music outside of the DMV. We can actually tour this,” says Black Boo of Mambo Sauce. “It shows that it can happen for us collectively.” 

“We let people see what the fuss and the hype is all about [with] the D.C. go-go….The audience loved us,” Stomp Dogg adds. “They partied during each set. They partied.”