There is a moment in every great go-go set when the band pulls back, the horns go quiet, and the leader turns to the rhythm section and calls out the oldest instruction in the music. Give the drummer some. It is permission and it is praise at the same time. It says the groove you have been riding all night was built by hands you have not been watching closely enough. At Roots Picnic this year, as Baller Alert and Front Porch marked 50 Years of Go-Go on one stage, that instruction felt less like a cue and more like the whole point.
The set was a celebration of a sound Washington built and the world borrowed. But a celebration is only as good as the people holding the pocket, and the band we put together for it was not a pickup group. It was a room full of legends, the kind of musicians whose names live in liner notes and whose hands you have heard your entire life without knowing it. So before the recap, before the headliners and the moments that traveled, we want to give this band some.
Start with the trombone. Greg Boyer came out of Bryans Road, Maryland, joined Parliament-Funkadelic at nineteen years old in 1978, and stayed nearly two decades, arranging the horns that gave P-Funk its bite. Between tours with George Clinton he played with Chuck Brown, the Godfather of Go-Go himself. Later came Maceo Parker, and then a call from Prince to anchor and arrange the horns in the New Power Generation, a gig he got because Maceo vouched for him. This past January the go-go community handed Boyer the 2026 Go-Go Award for horn and bass, and he is still holding it down in the Chuck Brown Band. When a man with that résumé agrees to play your set, you have already done something right.
Then there is the man they simply call the GOAT. Milton “Go-Go Mickey” Freeman spent 26 years as the sonic anchor of Rare Essence, the band fans crowned the Wickedest Band Alive, and his lightning hands have earned a wall of Wammies and a place in the Washington Area Music Association Hall of Fame. He cut his own instrumental album, “It Gets No Rougher,” and the title read less like a boast than a weather report. He has played behind The Roots, Doug E. Fresh, Heavy D, and Raheem DeVaughn. The four conga style that defines the entire genre lives in the form we know it largely because of how he plays it.
Leading the whole operation was Big Bob Terry, who served as music director for the set after Jerry Vines called on him to run it. Big Bob is the kind of musician who has done a little of everything. He holds down the guitar in Backyard Band, the most widely known go-go outfit Washington ever produced, the one fronted by Anwan “Big G” Glover who you know as Slim Charles from The Wire. He has also played behind Ginuwine, Aaliyah, and Raheem DeVaughn, and built a name as a producer in his own right. Pulling a band of this caliber together and keeping it tight is exactly the job he was built for.
Out of that same Backyard engine room came Nathaniel “Nate” Fields on bass and Paul “Buggy” Edwards on drums, two men who have held the BYB pocket for decades. Last summer they backed Amerie at her NPR Tiny Desk and reintroduced the whole country to the go-go bounce living underneath her catalog.
Eugene Chapman brought the saxophone. He has played with go-go bands all over the city, and if you need a horn that already knows the pocket, he is who you call.
On trumpet we had Marlon Winder, and on keys Chris Davis, both out of DC Vybe, the band that since 2002 has layered grown and sexy R&B over the go-go pocket and built its own lane doing it, the style the streets call Pocket Jazz. Leroy “Scooter” Taylor added a second pair of hands at the keyboards, carrying a history that runs through Rare Essence and the Frankie Beverly tradition of soul.
And on percussion, Curtis “Kirky” Rice, who came up through Northeast Groovers and DC Vybe and who, just this past January, was named the 2026 Go-Go Award winner on timbales. He is exactly the kind of player the title of this piece was written for.
Stack them all together and you have a rhythm section that could carry any stage in America. Buggy on the drums, Mickey on the congas, Kirky on the timbales, the heartbeat of a genre that has always been built from the drum up. That is what go-go is and always has been. Fifty years in, the pocket has not loosened a single inch. So when the horns drop out and somebody calls for it, we already know exactly what to say. Give the drummer some.
