Marc Cary came up playing in go-go bands in DC during the 1980s, when he was a founding member of the Hi Integrity Band. He played alongside leading lights of the city, people like Iceberg Slim and Meshell Ndegeocello. Meanwhile, he showed amazing amounts of natural talent early on, and a number of the city’s jazz musicians took him under their wing. When Dizzy Gillespie heard a teenage Cary play in the Blues Alley youth band one day, he told the kid he should move to New York.

The youngster eventually took the trumpet legend’s advice, leaving UDC in 1990 to chase a career in New York. He soon fell in with jazz icons Arthur Taylor and Betty Carter and Abbey Lincoln, and he toured and recorded with young lions like Roy Hargrove. He spent 12 years in Abbey Lincoln’s band, all the while producing beats and records for major hip-hop artists such as Q-Tip out of his Harlem apartment. In 1999, Cary became the first person to win BET’s “Best New Artist” award—he was celebrated as a master jazz pianist who also could blend the pocket of go-go and the folk music of places like India and Mali. His album that year, Rhodes Ahead, Vol. 1, was an ahead-of-its-time mashup of go-go, house music, jazz and much more.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of Marc’s first CD as a leader, and the 15th anniversary of Rhodes Ahead. In the intervening time he’s developed an international reputation and won prizes on both sides of the Atlantic (his latest album was “Album of the Year” according to Paris’s jazz radio station, for example). He returns to his hometown of DC this week to play three concerts—the culmination of those three nights is on Friday, when he reunites his Rhodes Ahead band for a special outdoor show just off U Street, at the lot at 945 Florida Ave. NW. Expect Iceberg Slim, D. Floyd and other go-go luminaries who are close to Marc to be in attendance.

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