“[W]e’re trying to take that whole Ethio-jazz concept and move it forward into this century,” trombonist Ben Hall says about the album. “We’re trying to put a spin on the older dance styles that we love, and still have it danceable but with our own twist to it.”

Most of the compositions are instrumentals that were penned by Feedel’s keyboardist and leader, Araya Woldemichael, with two songs from other members. Some have a relaxed feel more appropriate for listening than dancing — “Behelme,” for example, starts off smooth before transforming into a more straight-ahead jazz number.

Other cuts are more vibrant: The title track starts off with a guest playing the Ethiopian masenqo, a one-string violin, and then a rough-edged male voice comes in, using the pentatonic scale identified with Ethiopian church music. Eventually, the song adds psychedelic horn riffs. Album closer “Araya’s Mood” has a repeating James Brown-in-Addis modal structure along with fuzzy, psychedelic guitar lines and clever keyboard fingerwork.

Hall says the six-year-old Feedel Band has wanted to do an album since the beginning but “we weren’t able to finance it till now.” They self-financed the release and Hall says they have bought Facebook ads that have spurred interest in Ethiopia. The band recorded Ethiopian Ocean from May through August at Cue Recording Studios in Falls Church, Virginia, with engineer Blaine Misner, and then sent it to veteran mastering engineer Charlie Pilzer, who put together the finished product at Airshow Mastering in Takoma Park, Maryland.

Friday, the band is scheduled to perform with veteran Ethiopian pianist Girma Beyene at D.C.’s Atlas Performing Arts Center. Beyene — who worked as a gas station attendant in D.C. before moving back to Ethiopia — is best known for his rhythmic jazz standard “Muziqawi Silt,” and playing with legendary group the Walias Band.

“The project with Girma Beyene is to recreate his songs with a Feedel Band sound,” Hall says. “We’ve been transcribing the recordings and rehearsing them to put forward the best product for Girma.”

Feedel Band and Girma Beyene perform Oct. 14 at the Atlas Performing Arts Center.

Their names were Billy Stewart and Van McCoy, and this weekend they’re remembered at a free event called “D.C.’s Unsung Native Sons.” It’s part of a larger remembrance project organized by filmmakers Beverly Lindsay-Johnson and Michelle Jones, who began their work when Jones — whose aunt served as the first president of Billy Stewart’s fan club — shared with Lindsay-Johnson her admiration of the two native Washingtonians and her desire to help preserve their legacies.

A panel of those who knew or studied Stewart and McCoy are expected to shed light on their music and lives at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in downtown Washington Saturday afternoon.

One panelist — who will also sing — is Stewart’s first cousin, Calvin C. Ruffin, Jr. Eleven years younger than Stewart, he was dazzled by the singer’s chops. He used to watch him and his other cousins sing and fight over girls.

“He was my idol,” says Ruffin. “Always has been — even though he was my first cousin.”

A soulman, Stewart first achieved acclaim in the 1950s and reached the charts in the 1960s with his unique, upbeat take on George Gershwin’s “Summertime” and his own suave “Sitting in the Park.”

Stewart came from musicians on both parents’ sides, and he performed in family gospel and secular groups as a kid. These days, Ruffin looks back glowingly on his late cousin’s talents. But he acknowledges that Stewart had personal problems, too.

Discovered by Bo Diddley and signed to Chess Records, Stewart released a song in 1962 called “Fat Boy” that referred to his own large size. When others mocked him for his weight, it was a different matter.

“When I was with Billy he had an entourage, before we had even heard of the term ‘entourage,’” says Ruffin. “If someone called him ‘fat boy,’ he pulled out a gun on them. I was with him at that time. The only reason I know that is the gun’s barrel is about as big as I was. Real long. He would always get an attitude if someone called him that. He had a real complex when it came to his weight, as he was real heavy.”

While Stewart wrestled privately with his health, his fans seemed aware only of his multifaceted vocals. He harmonized with Marvin Gaye as fellow substitute members of The Rainbows, and developed a distinctive variation on jazz scatting, where he repeated words in a powerful yet sweet, church-developed manner.

“If someone called [Billy Stewart] ‘fat boy,’ he pulled out a gun on them.” — Billy Stewart’s cousin Calvin C. Ruffin, Jr.

“Billy did jazz, Billy did blues, he did lots of things that fit his style of music,” Ruffin says. “The thing that excited him most was when he did George Gershwin.” He adds that many people, including record-label executives, failed to understand Stewart’s desire to fit jazz, blues and R&B into his sound.

In January 1970, several months before his 33rd birthday, Stewart and members of his band were killed when their Ford Thunderbird collided with a substructure support of a bridge, then plunged into a river in North Carolina.

Ruffin says that two months before the crash, Stewart told him that, because of his struggles with his weight and with the record industry, he knew he hadn’t treated people as kindly as he once had.

“It was almost like Billy was confessing to me — all the people that he stepped on, all the people that he hurt, and that he was going to change and come back a different person,” Ruffin says. “He was going to help me out and some of my female cousins. He wanted to make amends.”

* * *

Van McCoy is best known for his huge 1975 disco hit “The Hustle,” with its distinctive flute melody. He also wrote and produced R&B songs for many artists throughout the 1960s. Like Stewart, McCoy learned to play the piano when he was young, sang in the church, and later emoted street-corner doo-wop in a high school vocal group. His ensemble was called The Starlighters.

McCoy later enrolled at Howard University, but after two years, music beckoned and he moved to Philadelphia where he started his own record label.

The D.C. native’s songwriting skills caught the ears of songwriter/producer greats Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who hired him as a staff writer and arranger. McCoy was soon writing songs for Jackie Wilson, Gladys Knight and The Pips and Barbara Lewis. For the latter, he penned the hit “Baby I’m Yours,” later featured on the Bridges of Madison County soundtrack.

McCoy also worked with D.C. R&B artists such as Peaches and Herb and The Choice 4 before he scored his biggest hit with “The Hustle,” which he co-wrote in New York City after checking out the disco scene there.

Four years after “The Hustle” made it big, McCoy died suddenly of a heart attack at age 39.

Mark Puryear of the Smithsonian Folklore Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, who will be moderating Saturday’s panel, describes McCoy as “very focused.” He “directed and mastered his craft,” arranging strings, horns, an orchestra and a rhythm section. Production-wise, Puryear says, “there was nothing he couldn’t do.”

“Billy Stewart and Van McCoy: D.C.’s Unsung Native Sons” takes place June 25 from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library.

In the video for Rare Essence’s 1992 hit single, he’s front and center in a white Norfolk State sweatshirt, commanding you to “Work the Walls.” In the video for “Lock It,” released the same year, he’s in denim shorts, leading a ferocious front line. He’s Donnell “D” Floyd, the go-go talker and saxophonist who fronted Essence for nearly 20 years, and now leads Team Familiar.

Floyd helped write Rare Essence’s most enduring songs: “Body Snatchers,” “Uh Oh (Heads Up)” and “Overnight Scenario,” plus “Lock It” and “Work the Walls.” Critics say today’s go-go bands have failed to deliver the same caliber of original tunes that the scene’s luminaries once did. That’s one reason Team Familiar, Floyd’s band since 2001, is taking part in Go-Go New Music Day. The first annual event kicked off today.

But while Go-Go New Music Day strives to smash perceptions that go-go has run out of ideas, its primary mission is to honor the genre’s founder, the late Chuck Brown. Floyd, who performed with Brown in the past, says he’s proud of Team Familiar’s role in maintaining the go-go innovator’s legacy.

To mark Go-Go New Music Day, Floyd’s band Team Familiar dropped a hard-edged track called “Straight to the Bar,” joining a range of other groups releasing new music, including The Chuck Brown Band, Be’la Dona, Backyard Band and Junkyard Band.

Team Familiar has long billed itself as a “grown and sexy” group, but “Straight to the Bar” reminds fans how versatile the ensemble — which features two members of The Chuck Brown Band and six expats from Rare Essence, including Floyd — really is. Uptempo, body-shaking numbers such as this one balance out their sultry R&B covers. Floyd says he’d like to record a whole album of originals, which the group hasn’t done since their early years, when they were still called 911. There’s just one problem.

“It seems to me a good while ago radio abandoned go-go,” Floyd says. “When you spend upwards of $15,000 to 20,000 in the studio and radio doesn’t support it, it’s very difficult to get the money back from it.”

Go-Go New Music Day doesn’t necessarily clear that roadblock — participating bands are releasing their new music digitally, and much of it isn’t available online yet — but the event draws attention to the fresh and vibrant sounds still emerging from the scene.

At a Team Familiar show, it doesn’t feel like go-go is in a rut. Onstage, vocalists Ms. Kim, Marquis “Quisy” Melvin and Frank “Scooby” Sirius hit the high notes, with Sirius and Melvin launching into the occasional falsetto battle between choreographed dance routines. A roar emerges from the back of the stage, as a grinning “Jammin’” Jeff Warren flicks his sticks on the trap drum set, Milton “Go Go Mickey” Freeman slaps the congas and Eric “Bojack” Butler wails on his timbales.

Floyd, meanwhile, seems as lively as he was in those ‘90s music videos, leading vocal chants, shouting out audience members and deftly guiding the band with hand gestures.

Floyd has a flair for the dramatic. In 2015, he organized an anniversary show for Team Familiar vocalist Ms. Kim, a 20-year veteran of the scene. She performed from a regal throne upholstered with red fabric. At Floyd’s own 30th anniversary gig at the Howard in 2013, band members rocked the grooves while situated on scaffolding above the stage, like Hollywood Squares.

“Donnell has always been that visual, let’s-be-extravagant-as-I-can type of theatrical guy,” says keyboardist Byron “BJ” Jackson. “He brought [shows] to life.”

But Floyd — whose busy schedule includes working a job at Verizon — believes in routine, too. He has a time-tested regimen onstage.

“Most places we play at, we play three sets. It’s a graduation type of deal,” he says. “We start off instrumentally with a nice, laid-back set. … Our second set we play a little more aggressive as people are getting their drinks and getting adjusted, and our third set is the most aggressive, as the audience has finished their drinks and they’re ready to party.”

This method helps Team Familiar fill local clubs every night from Wednesday through Sunday, whether they’re playing originals or current R&B hits. Meanwhile, it doesn’t sound like Floyd intends to abandon covers anytime soon. That would be going against tradition, he says.

“People were saying on the Internet that go-go has changed and is only now doing…cover tunes,” says Floyd. “But it seems like to me go-go has always had lots of cover tunes.” He points to Chuck Brown’s “Go-Go Swing” and “Run Joe,” both covers that the legend turned into signatures.

Despite criticism from some go-go fans and outsiders not keen on covers, the music still finds new ears and fervent appreciation, even from out-of-towners.

“I love D.C. people more than I can ever express, but I really enjoy watching people who haven’t grown up with go-go, enjoying go-go. This isn’t the normal, but they still think it’s great,” Floyd says. “Meaning, maybe we aren’t crazy to be still playing it after 35 or 40 years.”

A Go-Go New Music Day concert takes place at Howard Theatre May 14.

It sounds old fashioned, but Southern soul — in the voices and instrumentation of dance bands like Hardway — doesn’t imitate the past. “Southern Soul Rumpin” came out in 2008. The group combines synthesized sounds with soul and blues from the 1960s through the present day — not to mention risqué lyrics.

But that’s where Hardway Connection’s modernity ends. The band — which is opening for old-school D.C. singer Sir Joe Quarterman at Bethesda Blues and Jazz Jan. 31 — doesn’t make it easy to keep up with its saucy brand of R&B.

Southern Soul Rumpin, the group’s third and most recent album, is out of print. (Though the group still sells copies at shows and online.) Hardway rarely uses social media and its website doesn’t list any upcoming gigs. Yet that doesn’t seem to matter, because Hardway Connection is in high demand, according to Robert Owens, the group’s mild-mannered bandleader and guitarist.

The group has earned a loyal following on the Southern soul and beach-music circuits throughout the south, from Virginia to Texas. Their fans dance the shag, a swinging style with roots in classic R&B and rock ‘n’ roll. Hardway Connection’s 1999 album, It Must Be Love, proved to be a coastline hit.

The title song’s harmonies — delivered by gospel-rooted, powerhouse vocalists Jerome Mackall and Toni Love — attracted the attention of Carolina beach-music stations and promoters. Soon, the band was hearing from shaggers who wanted to bring them to the Southern coast.

Owens chuckles when he talks about getting nominated for a Cammy Award, the Grammy of the Carolina beach-music scene. Not knowing what beach music was, he says the band started listening to Beach Boys songs, figuring that’s what they’d get requests for.

Hardway Connection at Lamont’s in Pomonkey, Md. (Steve Kiviat/WAMU)

“When we got there, we learned it was just oldies-but-goodies set to a certain tempo,” Owens says. “It ain’t really nothing but hand-dancing. The beach-music stations play our music, but they speed it up or slow it down so you can shag to it. I was listening to one of our songs and I said, ‘Is that us or someone else?’ They had slowed Jerome’s voice down.”

But like a lot of current Southern soul artists, Hardway likes to get a little raunchy, writing songs brimming with double entendres and tales of cheating partners. On “Too Short (Peeping/Train),” Hardway transforms a Roy C song into a medley, adding lyrics about a woman who leaves Owens because of his, uh, physical inadequacy. That number helped establish Hardway’s Southern soul bona fides.

“Down south where we play, 22-year-olds come and see us. Black and white in the Carolinas. All the young ones will be right into it and calling out our songs,” Owens says.

In the D.C. area, Hardway plays many Sundays to a largely older audience at Lamont’s, south of National Harbor in Pomonkey, Maryland. They’ve also started alternating Sunday gigs at Cocoa’s Authentic Caribbean Jerk restaurant in Lexington Park, Maryland, in addition to various private events.

Currently a sextet that sometimes adds extra percussion, Hardway Connection hopes to self-release a new album by April. That project has been in the works for two years.

“It’s half-finished,” Owens says. “We’ve been so busy on the road on weekends.”

But while Hardway Connection has found success in a niche community, Owens doesn’t feel pressure to tailor their music to certain audiences.

“When I started doing it, I didn’t even know it was Southern soul,” Owens says. “I just did what I feel.”

Hardway Connection plays Jan. 31 at Bethesda Blues and Jazz, Feb. 14 and 21 at Lamont’s and Feb. 20 at Anacostia Community Museum.

The group had creative differences, says frontman Massama Dogo. “Other guys in the band wanted to do more of a Fela [Kuti] thing,” he says, referring to the Nigerian Afrobeat star. But Dogo wanted to play bouncier rhythms from Togo, his native country.

Plus, everybody in the band was sick of playing small venues. “If we could play bigger clubs,” Dogo says, “it would give the band and the fans more energy.”

The band duked it out in a tense meeting earlier this year. By its end, a surprising thing had happened: Elikeh had written a new song.

That track is called “The Conversation,” and it opens Elikeh’s new EP, Kondona, out Nov. 20 on Ropeadope. Friday, the group celebrates its release at D.C.’s Rock & Roll Hotel.

Dogo may be unenthused about playing yet another intimate venue, but if he is, he doesn’t let on. He says the group is taking other steps to keep their mojo working.

“What we want do now is to focus more on the style of the music than what we are talking about,” he says.

That’s a big step for a songwriter whose lyrics — often in the Togo languages Ewe and Mina, but occasionally in French and English — have tackled substantive issues in the past. The son of a government minister, Dogo has warbled about political corruption and the late South African leader Nelson Mandela.

Elikeh is a multinational band that includes a Nigerian lead guitarist, a Ghanaian percussionist and a bassist, keyboardist, drummer and horn players from the U.S. The group started as a solo project for Dogo, who came to D.C. in 2000 and recruited local players to record Nyade, his first album as Elikeh. Elikeh became a true band later on, releasing Adje!Adje! in 2010 and following up with Between Two Worlds in 2012.

Stylistically, the group skews old-school: It draws from ’60s and ’70s West African rhythms including Togolese agbadja and kamou, Ghanaian highlife and Nigerian Afrobeat tinged with jazz and funk. Their slightly throwback style doesn’t woo many young African immigrants in the D.C. region, who dance to Auto-Tuned African pop at clubs like Fire Station 1.

“Some people do listen to that kind and us, but most of them do not,” Dogo says. “It goes with style. They don’t dress traditional African. We are a band who uses African cultural stuff and mixes it with who we are.”

Elikeh’s new material has a strong basis in Togolese culture. Kondona is named after a Togo initiation ceremony that welcomes young men into the adult part of the community. Dogo attended one in his home village this summer. While crafting the EP at House of Jam recording studio in Beltsville, Maryland, he also incorporated sounds from that ceremony, as well as drumming from percussionists he’d recorded back home.

“We kind of produce ourselves. We don’t have an engineer here who is familiar with agbadja Togo music, and that is the direction we want to go now,” Dogo says.

Dogo thinks that Elikeh has taken steps that will expand its audience as the group prepares to release a full-length on Ropeadope next year. He says that featuring Malian musician Vieux Farka Touré and Furthur guitarist John Kadlecik on Elikeh’s 2012 record helped them reach new people. The group also aims to find an agent who can help book gigs in new places — something other than small rock clubs.

“We have the dedication to doing the grassroots thing,” he says, “but if you do it too long, that’s where the frustration comes in.”

It seems like Elikeh’s near-breakup helped Dogo and his bandmates in the long run. But on “The Conversation,” the band tells the story of its turning point with music, not words.

“We didn’t think lyrics could represent what happened that day,” says Dogo, “so we thought about having a horn and a trumpet express that.”

Elikeh plays an EP release show Nov. 6 at Rock & Roll Hotel.

From the 1960s until his unexpected death in 1994, Danny Gatton’s speedy fingers peeled off rock, blues, jazz and country licks to a small but passionate local audience. He called his music community in Southeast D.C. and Maryland’s Prince George’s County the “Anacostia Delta,” comparing it to the Mississippi region that birthed Delta blues and rock ‘n’ roll.

Anacostia Delta is also the name of Bryan Reichhardt’s forthcoming documentary about Gatton, one of two in the making — and Saturday night, the filmmakers plan to capture a tribute to the fabled musician at the Birchmere in Alexandria, Virginia. Tickets to the event, called “Celebrating Danny Gatton and the Music of the Anacostia Delta,” have already sold out.

“The arc of the film is really around this concert we are having at the Birchmere,” says Reichhardt.

An Indiegogo campaign video for Anacostia Delta:

Gatton stunned the music community in 1994 when he was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on his Maryland farm. A Washington Post obituary captured reactions from both local and national musicians who “expressed shock about the silencing of a guitarist famous for his mind-boggling chops and blistering speed.” Gatton was 49.

As friends told the Post’s Richard Harrington, Gatton possessed an incredible talent, but he’d never truly capitalized on it. He remained a family man even after — as legend has it — John Fogerty offered him a job playing guitar in Creedence Clearwater Revival. Gatton didn’t like to travel, friends said, and he’d grappled with depression for decades. He preferred to stay near home, in the Anacostia Delta.

Born in 1945, Gatton grew up in D.C.’s Anacostia neighborhood and attended Ballou High School. In 1962 he and his family moved to Oxon Hill in Prince George’s County. A promising musician from a young age, Gatton played local gigs with artists from around town. Guitars weren’t his only passion: He loved old cars just as much.

Gatton had remarkable musical range. He recorded an album called New York Stories with noted jazz players Joshua Redman, Bobby Watson and Roy Hargrove. With his film, Reichhardt seems to want to capture how Gatton — like fellow Prince George’s County resident Roy Buchanan, named a top guitarist by Rolling Stone magazine — played with the greats, but still chose to stay at home.

“People knew [Gatton] here and celebrated guitar players knew him,” Reichhardt says, “but he was not in the popular mainstream.”

Gatton’s scene included the rockabilly, blues, jazz and country musicians who played honky tonks and dive bars across the Eastern Capital region. It’s a culture that Reichhardt has hoped to document for years.

“This is a film I have wanted to make since Danny was alive,” the filmmaker says.

Reichhardt says he’d discussed the idea of a documentary with Gatton before he died, but at the time he was “young and green,” and he didn’t follow through. When Gatton died, he attempted it again but didn’t finish. It wasn’t until he befriended Gatton’s bass player, John Previti — and was urged forward by writer Paul Glenshaw, with whom he’d worked on a 2009 film called Barnstorming — that he revisited the project. Reichhardt calls Previti “the spirit behind the film.”

“John has always wanted to do a film about the entire music scene that Danny came out of,” Reichhardt says. “That’s sort of the genesis of this project.”

Reichhardt fondly remembers his days seeing Gatton play live — and he aims to capture that feeling in his documentary. He and his brother used to see the guitarist regularly at Club Soda, now Atomic Billiards in D.C.’s Cleveland Park neighborhood.

“I would be in awe,” the director says. “Everyone would. It was impossible not to smile at what he was doing. It was just incredible how he would interpret songs… He’d do a funk version of a jazz standard, or a jazz version of a country standard. He was just phenomenal.”

Reichhardt aims to release Anacostia Delta in August 2016, around the same time as another Gatton documentary, The Humbler, is expected to come out. Director Virginia Quesada has been working on the biography film since 1989, five years before Gatton’s death. (Its title references Gatton’s nickname, which he earned for putting so many rival musicians to shame.)

An interview excerpt from The Humbler:

Reichhardt says Anacostia Delta will be more of an appreciation than a straight biography of Gatton. He’ll use footage from Saturday’s Birchmere concert — featuring musicians from Gatton’s universe, brought together by Previti — interspersed with interviews and footage of the guitarist. Bands in which Gatton performed, including The Fat Boys, Redneck Jazz Explosion and Funhouse, are planning to reunite for the show, with appearances from rockabilly guitar man Billy Hancock and octogenarian Frank Shegogue, whom some consider the D.C. region’s first rock ‘n’ roll guitarist.

Reichhardt wants Anacostia Delta to do for Danny Gatton and his community what the film Buena Vista Social Club did for Cuba’s forgotten artists. But there’s one problem: Gatton’s scene doesn’t necessarily have the same allure as the Cubans.

Younger viewers might view the Anacostia Delta scene as a bunch of over-the-hill roots rockers with a penchant for covers, unlike the Cuban artists living amid a U.S. embargo.

The director acknowledges that he has concerns. “I am worried,” Reichhardt says, “and the musicians are worried, too. Many of [Gatton’s] bandmates fear that his music will vanish. The fact that he was as great as he was and that this area as musical as it was will be forgotten.”

But Reichhardt has hope for what his film can accomplish. “Maybe we can create a renaissance for this musical scene,” he says.

Top photo: Still captured from the Anacostia Delta documentary.

“Celebrating Danny Gatton and the Music of the Anacostia Delta” takes place Sept. 26 at Birchmere. Tickets are sold out.

The Silver Spring photographer has been shooting photos and video of the contemporary go-go scene since 2010, and he captures conversations with D.C.-area musicians with a new web series called Locally Grown. Py’s videos live permanently on YouTube. His newest photo show, on the other hand, is one-night only.

Py plans to share and discuss some of his go-go images Monday, Aug. 17 at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in downtown D.C., just in time for the late Chuck Brown’s birthday. The godfather of go-go would have turned 79 on Aug. 22. One of Py’s images can be found at the Chuck Brown Memorial in D.C.’s Langdon neighborhood.

The photographer says his presentation will be more than just a random collection of band photos on a screen.

“The photo talk is really designed for people who are somewhat familiar with the go-go culture but haven’t really been into the go-go culture,” Py says in a phone call. “I talk about the music of go-go and how it is distinctive and unique to Washington D.C. How it is a big part of the culture for African-Americans who have grown up and lived in D.C.”

But he has his own side of the story to share, too. “I speak to my adventure in go-go and my work with many of the bands, especially my work with Chuck Brown,” Py says. “A very personal adventure.”

Capturing go-go

When Py calls his photography a personal adventure, that’s important. He’s spent time in places, and with people, who are crucial to the go-go scene. He hung out at clubs such as Tradewinds, the now-shuttered Maryland go-go hall. And he worked as one of Chuck Brown’s official photographers in the final year of Brown’s life.

In 2009, Py was just another local shooter who had photographed old-school D.C. rock acts like The Nighthawks and The Slickee Boys. Then in 2010 he saw Brown perform at the annual National Capital Barbecue Battle on Pennsylvania Avenue NW. He took some photos from the crowd and got hooked.

“So I started shooting [go-go groups] Bela’dona [and] Da Mixx Band, and worked my way up to Rare Essence,” Py says. “I kept sending my work to Chuck and [his manager] Tom Goldfogle, and within three months I was onstage with Chuck shooting his shows. I quit my job and pursued this for two years.”

Between the summer of 2010 to 2013, Py went out three or four nights a week and came home at 6 a.m., he says. He enjoyed crossover-friendly go-go gigs, but he tended to prefer the late-night shows that attracted genre devotees.

“It’s much more interesting when the audience is engaging at eye level with the band,” Py says, “and the lead talker is talking about those people’s lives and what is happening that week, and whose birthday it is, and the guy who just got out of jail after 20 years and gets to come onstage and dance with the band. You don’t see that at the Strathmore Hall show.”

Py’s presentation at the library, which he’s shown only twice before, will include images of gigs by The Backyard Band, Team Familiar (formerly Familiar Faces), Suttle Thoughts, Be’la Dona, Da Mixx Band and Rare Essence in addition to Chuck Brown.

But Py isn’t shooting as much as he once was. He still regularly hits Silver Spring’s Society Lounge to see Team Familiar play its Sunday gig there, but he’s slowed down his go-go photography. He’s working a day job again, for one — and he also found himself in an artistic rut.

“For the most part I stopped shooting go-go two years ago,” Py says. “You can’t shoot the same thing over and over again and still have it be creative.”

So Py has channeled his love of documentation into his YouTube show that serves a similar purpose: to record D.C.’s music culture.

Locally Grown

Py has a green thumb. “I have a very beautiful — I call it a ‘yarden,” he says. “It’s no longer a garden, it has taken over the entire yard.”

Sunday afternoons he invites musicians to his backyard jungle. He grills up a meal and switches on his video camera for a chat and a performance. “Grill, garden and grooves,” he calls it.

This summer Py is recording 10 to 12 programs of artists playing in his garden. Each show runs for 15 to 20 minutes and features local musicians from go-go and roots bands performing original material and answering Py’s questions. He handles the entire production, from setting up microphones to interviewing artists to editing tape. He likes it that way.

“I decided I didn’t want to wrestle with cell-phone photographers in clubs for a position to video,” Py says. Plus, he’d been inspired by NPR’s Tiny Desk concerts, a series of live performances filmed at the cluttered desk of All Songs Considered creator Bob Boilen.

Py has taped Locally Grown episodes with musicians including keyboardist Marcus Young from The Chuck Brown Band, Esther Haynes and Hokum Jazz, Frank “Scooby” Marshall (aka Frank Sirius) from Team Familiar and The Chuck Brown Band and guitarist Genevieve Konecnik (aka Genny Jam), formerly of Be’la Dona and now with Pebble to Pearl.

Py usually wears something outlandish on his show — a tie-dyed shirt or a loud thrift-store sports jacket — and his enormous, phallic microphone adds a goofy, public-access feel. Occasionally, Py’s dog Bebop will wander into the frame.

The photographer says he’s “extremely uncomfortable in front of that camera,” but he sticks with it. “As a kid, I wanted to be a game-show host. I grew up on The Gong Show.”

Py admits Locally Grown hasn’t racked up many views online, but he’s happy with the project, and he suspects his guests are, too.

When go-go artists join Py in his “yarden,” he asks them to play original music — not covers, which many go-go acts play live. He also sometimes asks them to collaborate with people they haven’t worked with before.

“A certain joy comes out,” Py says, when musicians are doing that kind of thing. Take Claudia “Kool Keys” Rogers from Be’la Dona and Salt-N-Pepa’s band. She’d only met bandleader and violinist Chelsey Green once, briefly, but their dual performance on Locally Grown felt authentic.

It was the kind of creative chemistry Py wants to capture on his program.

“I put [Rogers] in a situation that she was a bit uncomfortable with, but afterwards she thanked me,” Py says. “It allowed her to be an artist.”

Chip Py shares and discusses his go-go images Aug. 17 at 6:30 p.m. at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in downtown D.C. Free admission. The library also hosts a Chuck Brown tribute Aug. 22 at 1 p.m. The Chuck Brown Band plays a Chuck Brown Day concert Aug. 22 at the Chuck Brown Memorial in D.C.

But where to start? I recommend vocalist Susana Baca, a highlight on Thursday night. Baca first came to the attention of the English-speaking world in 1995, when The Talking Heads’ David Byrne put her songs on a compilation called The Soul of Black Peru. Her vocals and music could be described as pan-Latino, but it’s the steady patting from a cajón that makes Baca sound distinctly Afro-Peruvian.

Baca, who has served as Peru’s minister of culture, has recorded with Puerto Rican reggaeton act Calle 13 and started a music school. She’s planning to record her next album in Cuba — a collaboration with singer Argelia Fragoso — but her last record was called Afrodiaspora, and attendees can expect her Folklife appearance to reflect that.

Los Wembler’s De Iquitos (Smithsonian)

Family band Los Wembler’s de Iquitos, another Folklife highlight, is the brainchild of Iquito native Samuel Sanchez who, in 1968, decided it was time for local dance music to go electric. He enlisted his five sons, borrowed a band name from the U.K.’s Wembley Stadium and developed a sound rooted in local dance rhythms and various South American, North American and British sounds the clan heard on AM radio.

Los Wembler’s de Iquitos — which includes a few members outside the family — nonchalantly dispense joyous rhythms that may at first sound like standard Latin dance-band fare. But bend an ear toward guitarist and songwriter Elmer Alberto Sanchez, and his ‘60s California beach feel exposes how hybrid this band’s sound can be. Los Wembler’s stayed busy during the 1970s and ‘80s, waned slightly, and recently made a comeback on the heels of a chicha revival.

The band’s many appearances at Folklife (schedule information below), the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage (July 3) and U Street club Tropicalia (July 10) are a boon for D.C. music fans; the band’s only other gig on this trip takes place in Brooklyn July 9.

Other Peruvian performers worth seeing include Tutuma, an Afro-Peruvian band featuring violin and guitar with three percussionists who tap dance and strut with dashes of hip-hop and carnival flair; as well as percussionist Alex Acuña, who is bound to trot out an array of drums during his Friday night showing.

Susana Baca performs Thursday, July 2 at 7 p.m. on the Ralph Rinzler Concert Stage. Los Wembler’s de Iquitos perform twice a day on La Juerga stage through July 4, at the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage July 3 and Tropicalia July 10. Tutuma performs twice a day on La Juerga stage through July 4 and once July 5. Alex Acuña performs Friday, July 3 at 7 p.m. on the Ralph Rinzler Concert Stage. The Smithsonian Folklife Festival resumes today and runs through Sunday, July 5.

“Obviously, at first, music and libraries seems like a head-scratcher because libraries are quiet,” says local promoter, artist manager and record-label owner Jim Thomson. But for the past six months, Thomson has been helping change expectations about what goes on inside D.C.’s public libraries.

On behalf of scrappy theater nonprofit Capital Fringe, Thomson has been programming “Fringe Music in the Library,” one of two series bringing live music to the D.C. Public Library system. The other series is strictly punk rock, presented by the library’s D.C. Punk Archive. DCPL has been hosting those noisy gigs since October 2014 to help promote its growing collection of D.C. punk ephemera. The latest show takes place downtown tonight — with D.C. bands Give, Puff Pieces and The Maneuvers — then Friday it’s back to Thomson, who’s bringing in D.C.’s CooLots under the Capital Fringe banner.

For the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library — D.C.’s central library downtown — these shows help it build a reputation as a cultural center. It’s a rebranding for a facility that’s been dogged by systemwide budget cuts and criticism of its Brutalist architecture. (The District is planning to overhaul MLK Library in two years and add an auditorium.) DCPL has also had to confront complaints from residents who openly — many would say crudely — gripe about homeless residents who utilize the library’s amenities. Then there’s the bigger picture: Libraries all over the world are facing questions about their role in the 21st century. Could it be prudent to focus on libraries not just as information warehouses, but cultural beacons?

“One of our primary goals is to establish the library as a go-to place for local culture.” —Linnea Hegarty, executive director of the D.C. Public Library Foundation

Linnea Hegarty, the executive director of the D.C. Public Library Foundation, seems to think so. She says the foundation covers the costs of both D.C. Public Library concert series — including fees to the bands — and says they’re now funded through 2016. “One of our primary goals is to establish the library as a go-to place for local culture,” Hegarty writes via email.

Capital Fringe is best known for its annual performing-arts event, the Fringe Festival. But last year, under Julianne Brienza’s leadership, the organization hired Thomson to take over music-booking at the festival, then asked him to handle the eclectic library shows she had set into motion. Those events overlapped with the D.C. Punk Archive’s basement shows, which Martin Luther King Jr. Library music librarian Maggie Gilmore says were “designed to increase attention to and support of the D.C. Punk Archive,” its ongoing effort to document the District’s three-chord rock scene.

Michele Casto, one of the librarians who helped get the D.C. Punk Archive off the ground, says DCPL wants to show that the punk archive isn’t just about long-gone history.

“Having shows that feature current local bands helps reiterate the point that the archive is 1976 to the present, that we’re documenting local music that’s happening now not just local music of the past,” Casto writes in an email.

The punk gigs also aim to support the next generation of D.C. musicians. “For every show, we’ve tried to include a band that’s either just getting started, or that consists of kids — i.e. bands that might have a hard time getting a gig in a club,” Casto writes. “This gives them a place to get experience performing.”

The punk shows take place every other month and have included raucous performances from Joy Buttons, Hemlines, Flamers and Priests. Under Thomson, the Fringe gigs have dabbled in punk, too — roping in punk provocateur Ian Svenonius multiple times — but they’ve prized diversity, bringing in the rarely seen soul singer George Smallwood, Afropop vocalist Anna Mwalagho, jazz/poetry act Heroes Are Gang Leaders and the Ethiopian Jazz Quartet with Feedel Band‘s Araya Woldemichael.

“I hope that the citizens will come in and get inspired by seeing an Ethiopian jazz quintet and go, ‘Wow,'” Thomson says.

Some younger residents, it seems, have already found that inspiration. When guitarist Anthony Pirog performed at the downtown library with his surf band, The El Reys, librarians projected the film Endless Summer while kids bopped around. They were “dancing and bouncing around wildly, full of excitement for the music,” Gilmore emails. “That put a smile on everyone’s face.”

Now, if only more people would come to the shows.

Woldemichael guesses that at his recent library gig, “50 percent of them were curious folks and the rest were my friends, family members and fans.” Thomson acknowledges that a recent performance at the Benning Road library only brought a handful of people. “The branch libraries are a little more challenging to get attendance,” he says. “Mainly location, location, location. It’s hard to get interest in it, or to publicize it.”

The promoter hopes that momentum will build over time. “I know from when you are working with regular venues, you don’t get a slam dunk in the beginning, always,” he says. “You have to plant a seed and let it have a chance to germinate. We are really in a very early stage.”

Meanwhile, artists seem appreciative of the series’ benevolent mission — even if the room doesn’t fill up.

“Heroes Are Gang Leaders really felt that this performance [at Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library] was a special opportunity to reach out to and interact with longtime D.C. residents, amidst the city’s advanced stages of gentrification, displacement and widespread oppression of many Washingtonians,” band member Luke Stewart writes in an email.

Plus, it gives residents a chance to absorb culture — for free — that they wouldn’t normally come across, Thomson says. In a way, that’s the role of a library in the first place.

“For me, the side benefit is to go into libraries that are in parts of the city that are not part of my everyday life,” the promoter says. “It helps you interact with the city. I like to see these different things that makes the city as an organism come to life.”

Give, Puff Pieces and The Maneuvers play the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library at 6 p.m. June 11. The CooLots play at noon on June 12. For a complete schedule of Capital Fringe concerts at D.C.’s libraries, consult this calendar. The Punk Archive basement shows are usually publicized on the D.C. Public Library’s Facebook page.

Top photo courtesy of Jim Thomson

This year Hammond — who goes by Kato — turns 50. After that Rare Essence gig, he went on to sing and play guitar in go-go bands Pure Elegance and Little Benny and the Masters and rap in Proper Utensils. In 1996 he founded the website that would become a news source for the go-go community: Take Me Out to the Go-Go. It’s still active today.

Today, Hammond releases his self-published memoir, called, of course, Take Me Out To The Go-Go. It’s different from go-go books like The Beat by Kip Lornell and Charles Stephenson and Go-Go Live by Natalie Hopkinson, which take a historical view of D.C.’s homegrown music. Hammond’s volume is instead a personal tale, exploring his life story and the hold that go-go has had over him for nearly four decades.

The memoir doesn’t discuss go-go like it has been in the media, either. There is little discussion of go-go clubs getting shut down, how white locals perceived Mayor Marion Barry — whose tenure coincided with the explosion of go-go music — or D.C.’s erstwhile reputation as America’s murder capital. Readers also don’t get full character studies of the stars of go-go, or details of how shows at Club LeBaron in Palmer Park compared to those at the Black Hole on Georgia Avenue or the Panorama Room in Anacostia. Discussion of Hammond’s website and magazine gets lost at times, too.

But we do learn a lot about Hammond — how a mugger made off with his leather jacket, whose pocket held one of his favorite go-go tapes; how racism affected him when he got wrongly blamed for theft in the Army. He writes about how he, as a teen, stole his lunches at school to save money for the $5 admission to Friday go-go gigs at Howard Theatre, where he looked down from the balcony, studying all aspects of Rare Essence’s presentation.

While the level of detail in his book — like his lists of seemingly every bandmate in all of his bands — may mostly be of interest to fanatics, he also offers glimpses of how Chuck Brown, Trouble Funk and E.U. differed from each other musically despite their common genre, and he conveys the deep sense of satisfaction he felt the one time he played a big go-go bill at Maryland’s Capital Centre.

In advance of the book’s release, Kato Hammond spoke to me on the phone. We talked about how go-go interfered with his love life, the pain he felt getting kicked out of go-go bands and his days at D.C.’s Duke Ellington School of the Arts, where he met other students who would go on to be prominent go-go musicians.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Bandwidth: When did you start writing the book?

Kato Hammond

Kato Hammond: I had started it right at the time [go-go trumpeter and vocalist] Little Benny passed away [in 2010]. Because Benny used to always talk about writing his book, writing his book, writing his book. But he was always so busy, he never got around to writing it. He talked to Tahira Chloe Mahdi [a local writer and broadcaster also known as “99”] about getting together and her writing it for him. But it never happened.

I got more serious about it in the past six months. My goal was to have it finished by the end of the year. To make time for it. You’re a writer, you got to make time for it and not procrastinate and talk yourself out of it. Another thing was I turn 50 this year. I got kids who are older now. Two of them have kids. I just wanted them to know my story. I promised them. There’s stuff in it they don’t even know. They just knew daddy played music.

In the book you describe how, as a kid, you learned guitar in part from sitting in a small apartment room, closely watching a musician you knew as Littlejohn — from The Jaguars — perform.

That was pre-go-go. Even to this day it affects how I listen to music. Littlejohn would practice as if he was onstage. He’d have his microphone stand set up in his room. Before that I would just practice with my guitar sitting in my lap.

“I remember my cousin used to have his girlfriend hold the tape recorder [up to the speaker] while he was partying [at the go-go]. Then they would argue about that, with her complaining it wasn’t fair.”

It was interesting that you discovered that Rare Essence’s impressive choreographed dance steps back then were taught to them by the D.C.-based Bren-Carr dancers.

I just happened to later on find that out. Meanwhile with Benny, he’d go back to them to work on steps. I don’t remember whether I put it in the book, but when Benny was at that first Capital Centre go-go show — I wasn’t with him then — he was playing “Cat in the Hat” and he had four girls come out in cat outfits and [do] choreographed steps. That was them, the Bren-Carr dancers.

So going back earlier, in 1979, there was no problem with you bringing in a tape recorder to Club LeBaron?

Back then they didn’t stop you from bringing in a tape recorder to a go-go. Back then it was normal. Early tapes then were made by people just putting their big boomboxes up by the speakers and recording. I don’t know the detailed history of PA tapes, but I think that is when they decided to start taping shows from the PA board and stop allowing people to do it. Some people were dancing, some people watched the band and some people were recording. I remember my cousin used to have his girlfriend hold the tape recorder while he was partying. Then they would argue about that, with her complaining it wasn’t fair.

Hearing about you and all the teenagers getting jobs as musicians and other positions as part of Mayor Barry’s D.C. Summer Youth Program jobs had me thinking Baltimore needs something like that.

Exactly. I was talking with someone about Baltimore and they were saying, “Kato, you don’t realize how fortunate you guys had it.” I said, “You have a point.” But I think we were at the age that it was new at the time. We just had to remember to sign up before it was too late.

During your brief time at Duke Ellington School of the Arts, you met go-go musicians like Donnell Floyd and others.

I met and knew all of them then. I didn’t want to make the book just Donnell’s story. I don’t know if I put it in the book, but I remember in 10th grade, the rumor was that Donnell was in Rare Essence, but I didn’t see him with them. It turns out he was first just practicing with them and then he later joined them onstage.

Was it hard — with your family potentially reading this — that you write about and convey your guilt about stealing a car with your buddies and leaving the woman in tears?

I put that in to show what kind of trouble youth can get into when they don’t have an outlet. If I had not met the girlfriend who went to Duke Ellington School, if I hadn’t known the girl at Bowie High who told me about the playwriting contest that brought me up to New York, that was all like a whole different new world. I was trying to show that youth don’t know what’s out there because they have never seen or experienced it.

The car thing was a spur-of-the-moment, dumb thing. I don’t fault the mother of that youth [hitting him and keeping him out of rioting] in Baltimore. With the youth, it’s that peer thing and not realizing the seriousness of it. I think that situation later — when I got robbed — was probably my get-back for what I did earlier.

“Every relationship I was in ended because of go-go. My marriage ended because of TMOTTGoGo.”

You briefly mentioned after returning from the Army becoming a father and getting sole custody of your daughter Krystina, and your aunt June helped take care of her.

That was a whole story in itself, but I didn’t put it in the book. She’s 27 now.

How did you decide what non-go-go stuff to put in the book and what to omit?

I knew I did not want to put her in there. Even later on, you notice I talk about different girlfriends… I mention my marriage, but not her name. I consciously tried not to talk about the details of my family life. I wanted to touch on a constant thing with me, [which] was that every relationship I was in ended because of go-go. My marriage ended because of TMOTTGoGo. I wasn’t actively in a band anymore, but all my time was spent on TMOTT stuff. Her complaint was I was on the computer too much. I can’t win.

Getting kicked out of Pure Elegance and Little Benny and the Masters, and being told to switch to rap and not play guitar with Proper Utensils, must not have been easy.

I was crushed with the Pure Elegance thing. I was blindsided by both [dismissals]. With the Benny thing, I am real, real close with one of Benny’s sisters. I didn’t put it in there. When I put in there about living with Jacques [Johnson, a guitarist], one of Benny’s sisters lived with us, too. We weren’t a couple, we just shared an apartment. I was real close with Benny’s family. But I didn’t want to put that part in there.

“Egos were very big in go-go.”

When you went to see Benny perform onstage again a few weeks later, weren’t you worried Benny would tell you to leave?

Benny was never a bad guy. That wasn’t the kind of thing he would say. I was still close to his family and there wasn’t any animosity to it, although I was hurt by it. I wasn’t surprised the next guitarist [he had] didn’t work out. Sometimes you make the choice — do you want the best person in the world or the most dedicated? I would go with the most dedicated because they can get better. The best person might have too much of an ego. Egos were very big in go-go. The Pure Elegance thing was worse because we went to Bowie High together, and then we worked together in the day at the same job. So I was probably more thrown off by that then the other.

You said the TMOTTGoGo chatboard in the early years, before current social media, had lots of commenters. Do you miss that?

No, I don’t really miss it. Those people you see now on the Facebook go-go groups are the exact same people you would see then on the boards. We have known each other so long. There are people on those boards who have gotten married and had kids. The other thing is that back then, the Internet was fresh and new, and anything that anyone said on it got blamed on me.

Kato Hammond’s memoir, Take Me Out to the Go-Go, is available now on Amazon.