Table tennis room by day, live music stage by night—on most weekends, Comet Ping Pong is the only place in D.C. filling that niche. Last Saturday was different. 

To celebrate the release of his new single, “Speak to Me,” local artist Jack Bobley spent the afternoon of July 1 working with family, friends, and fellow musicians to transform Washington D.C. Table Tennis—a sports training warehouse tucked into a business park on Chillum Place NW—into an impromptu music venue. Audio cables crisscrossed the red, rubbery floor where the tables usually stand. Christmas lights decked the bleacher-lined cinder-block walls. At the far end from the door, behind the rows of PA speakers and guitar amps, sat the small stage—a carpeted riser with four wooden legs, built by Bobley himself, with help from his dad.

“We kinda kicked out some people playing ping-pong when we got here,” Bobley told City Paper.

For the space, it was unprecedented, but for Bobley, it was all part of an annual tradition. The 20-year-old singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist started organizing his own shows—at his parents’ house or local arts spaces such as The Fridge—while attending the vocal program at Duke Ellington School of the Arts. Since he graduated high school and moved to New York for college, Bobley has kept at it, putting on a show whenever he’s home for summer and reuniting old friends in the process. Saturday night’s eight-act bill was just the latest example.

“Everybody on the lineup went to high school together, or made it together through various pathways,” said Robert Hackett, aka RobbeyRob, a local rapper, Ellington theater alum, and member of the show’s 13-person co-organizer group text chat. “We all try to come together and keep each other working.”

ONLē Vibez, the venue that hosted the friend group’s 2022 show, recently moved from College Park to Baltimore, which inspired Bobley to look for a site closer to home. Hence the ping-pong club, where he used to play as a kid (and where he happened to meet pro table tennis player Khaleel Asgarali, who later bought the club in 2020). Renting and preparing a nontraditional space for a concert takes more money and more work, but it also offers the chance to throw a nontraditional show. With its extensive lineup, plus a few visual artists selling prints and two tattoo artists working on private tables off to the side of the performance space, Saturday’s event looked less like a single release party and more like a miniature DIY festival.

“Especially in New York, there’s this big culture of, ‘Oh, you gotta play a real venue,’” Bobley explains. “You got an opener, and then you see the headliner, and then you go home. If it’s the gray area—like, ‘Is it a party? Is it a festival?’—you can just kinda hang out. I’ve always tried to make it a more inviting environment.”

Sure enough, the show maintained a loose, friendly atmosphere even while blowing through a seven-act showcase of local talent in under three hours. One artist, Jru Anthony, had to cancel his set at the last minute, but all the others went on, with MC Makael Exum (a local comedian and, that’s right, Ellington alum) ushering them on one after another. R&B singer Charli Dahni kicked off the lineup, followed by rapper Drowzzy, and rock band Freddy Gang. After their set, several members of Freddy Gang stayed put and backed up the next four acts: singer and guitarist Nico Zaca, rapper Che AM, RobbeyRob, and finally Bobley, who—when he wasn’t monitoring the soundboard—also played guitar for Zaca and keys for Che AM and RobbeyRob.

About 100 people came and went throughout the night, most of them family, friends, or friends of friends, by the sound of it. The whole mass would cheer as each artist took to the homemade stage, but you could also hear different pockets of the room get excited when their favorite songs came up. Early in his set, Bobley turned toward the man who’d taken up his spot by the soundboard and asked: “Did you like that song, grandpa?”

Driven by the communal spirit surrounding the event, the performers decided to divide the cost of renting the space among themselves and donate the show’s proceeds to a local organization. 

“We would’ve ended up splitting the profits, like, 13 ways anyway,” Bobley says. “Should we all walk away with $25, or should we pool it and do something that can actually help somebody? We just decided to do that.”

Hackett chose the community development nonprofit Lydia’s House as the show’s beneficiary. He stressed the importance of the organization’s work in resisting gentrification in the District, but the decision was also personal: They helped his own sister become a homeowner.

“It’s something that was really close to me, ’cause it helped my sister accomplish something that not a lot of us have,” says Hackett. “I’m a D.C. resident, and I want to help the families that gave the city that identity that it has … Let’s preserve our community and make sure we can still live there.”

By the end of the night, combining ticket sales and donations from the vendors, the show raised a total of $1,031. Just as impressive, everything went off without any show-stopping technical issues.

“It’s cathartic, in a way,” said Che AM—real name Che Moorhead, a childhood friend of Bobley’s and the owner of at least some of the Christmas lights in the room—as the crowd started to dissipate. “I was really lucky to be a part of a group of wonderful musicians and very gifted creatives. Through everyone’s joint efforts, ingenuity, and creative spirit, everything just comes together.”

“It’s amazing,” Bobley echoes. “This is just an idea that I had, and an idea that consumed a lot of my time, frantically texting and DMing people for months, and now it’s over. It’s just amazing to see all these people come together.”

As Moorhead points out, though, Saturday night’s show represents the culmination of a much longer arc. In one day, they turned a sports facility into a music venue, but over the years, they also turned a small group of friends into an artistic community.

“Being able to see the evolution from doing this in Jack’s living room to now, doing something so big on this scale, has been a privilege of my life,” says Moorhead. “Nights like this remind me of how great what he built is.”