Memories of Green Island

So back in a former life my answer to "so what do you do" was "I play in a band," and I was paying rent as a recording engineer and writer for an audio magazine during the day and living in a studio in at the corner of Columbia Road and 18th Street in my hometown of Washington DC.

About a half block away on the strip of bars and restaurants that's kind of DC's packed nightlife nightmare these days there was a restaurant and bar called the Green Island Cafe. Sort of a bizzare place, it had a strangely upscale restaurant vibe and jazz on the weekends. But during the week they'd let freeform jazz fusion guys set up and play upstairs. For New Yorkers it was sort of like Small's used to be -- the kind of place where studio/touring/session musician types would stop in unprompted and call out a few songs, etc.

Except it was never packed. Maybe 15-20 people at any given time. So with that context, we wandered in there on Wednesday night once just for the hell of it, and proceeded to have our heads blown clean off by two guys playing the most disgustingly funky, hyper-technical, incredibly complicated, and profoundly soulful instrumental stuff I'd ever heard. Like superhuman level. The keys player played bass with his left hand on a bass keyboard and his right on whatever was handy, and this guy wearing a soccer jersey would play the most "out" drums I've probably heard.

Random sax players, guitarists, etc, would come for a song or three. Don't know how to describe the music, it was definitely based in progressive jazz, but with all sorts of funk, hip-hop, and especially go-go stuff thrown in (players from E.U. and Chuck Brown's band sat in on percussion on the regular). Mainly it was just players capable of doing whatever the hell they wanted, doing just that.

So anyways... I think we spent the next 20 or so Wednesday nights at Green Island. Got to talking with the guys of course, the keys player was an animated Argentine named Federico Gonzalez Peña and his day job was in Me'shell Ndegeocello's band. And the drummer was named Sean Rickman and he was a session guy, fresh from years playing drums for Steve Coleman and the Five Elements.

What does this have to do with anything? Not much, except I got reminded of it today when my friend Jason emailed me this:



Well how about that. I'd almost forgotten about those Wednesdays. A frenzy of Googling reveals that Sean and Federico are still playing all over (apparently with Sting, Clapton, Valerie Troutt, others) and I spent a few minutes checking out curiosities like this and this.

But I hear Wednesday nights at Green Island are long gone. Ah well...