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…