Kate Masters

It’s fitting, in a way, that Freddie Long is closing this year’s Alive @ 5 season, because there might be no other musician to speak as highly of Frederick as Freddie Long.

“Ever since I started music, it’s a community that’s always had my back,” said the 34-year-old musician. “The Frederick family always has my back, and we always have a good time.”

He grew up outside the city, in Ijamsville, when that part of Frederick County was still mostly cows and the newly opened Urbana High School. Long had “your typical proverbial suburban childhood,” he said in a house down Windsor Road, where he grew up playing the piano. Well, his house had a piano inside it, and Long remembers plunking on its ivory keys and making up little songs when he was only four or five years old. But when his parents asked him if he wanted to take piano lessons, he always said no, until his mother and father finally sold the piano.

“Then, like a week later, I was like, ‘Actually, I do want the lessons,’” Long said good-naturedly. “So I started playing the keyboards when I was around 11.”

Thus began an archetypal musical journey complete with a middle school band that inspired girls to come up to him in the lunchroom. There was the sudden realization that, hey, this whole “musician” thing was pretty cool. Long took “a bunch of music lessons in high school,” he said, then went off to Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pennsylvania to major in music recording technology with a minor — believe it or not, he said — in physics.

“Physics always interested me and I was always pretty good at math, that side of things,” Long said. “And with the music recording degree, a lot of physics classes were already woven in. So, if you took a few extra classes, like nuclear and atomic physics — which sounds scary, and it is — then it wasn’t too hard to get the minor.”

During the roughly hour and 50 minute drive back to Frederick on trips home from school, Long would listen to popular artists of the day, which — in the early 2000s — happened to be a lot of sensitive singer-songwriters. “Hey There Delilah” by the Plain White T’s was released in 2005, and an artist named Edwin McCain had a song called “I’ll Be,” which — though not exactly contemporary, given its 1998 release date — was played over and over and over again on shows like “American Idol.”

Long had been writing his own songs all through college, and had a “solid stock of tunes,” he said, by the time he graduated. He moved back to beautiful, bucolic Frederick and started working part-time in promotions at Key 103, where his boss — a lovely, supportive woman named Jessica Smith — told him the radio station was sponsoring a stage for In The Street. She knew Long played music. Did he and his band want to perform?

“And I was like, ‘Absolutely,’” Long said. “‘I definitely have a band.’”

He had roughly two months to make his little white lie a reality, and so he turned to Craigslist, a virtual repository for local musical talent. In just a couple of weeks, he found and auditioned a full lineup, including drummer Ken Deater, who’s played with The Freddie Long Band for more than 13 years now. Their first show was a success, Long said, and in 2007, the group recorded its debut album, “Strangers and Friends,” which was nominated for three Washington Area Music Awards.

Since then, Long has played around Frederick a lot. One look at his Facebook calendar shows a pretty exhaustive touring schedule, with local shows almost every couple days. He even has a show scheduled immediately after his Alive @ 5 performance on Thursday, just down the street at Shuckin’ Shack. He says it’s a surprisingly uplifting place to perform.

“I like to hang out after my set and just have a beer,” Long said. “It’s funny. Even with all this divisiveness in our country now, there’s no better feeling than walking down from the [Carroll Creek] amphitheater and hanging out with people in the community. It gives you hope.”

He left Frederick once, in 2011, but it didn’t last long. It was at a point of his life when his music was beginning to move beyond the confines of his small home city. Not long after Long’s band recorded its second album, “Shotgun With the Devil,” they were selected to record a new version of the theme song “Shake Your Keys” (played every third inning at Frederick Keys games). In 2010, several of the band’s songs from “Strangers and Friends” wound up being used in Golden Tee, a nationally popular arcade game. The same year, Long and his bandmates opened for bands including Bad Company and Blue Oyster Cult at the Frederick Fairgrounds.

So, in 2011, he was “offered the opportunity,” Long said, “to work with a fairly well-known recording artist at the time.” He declined to say who, but the idea was that he would move down to Nashville to write and perform with the artist, eventually recording an album together.

He moved to Tennessee, but just a few weeks after he arrived, the artist — according to Long’s memory — was offered a lucrative opportunity elsewhere. Long stayed in the city and tried to make it work, but was quickly buffeted by the realities of living and working in one of the most competitive music capitals in America. Sure, he played a handful of times at Nashville’s famous Bluebird Cafe. Once he even performed at the Hard Rock Cafe with Charlie Morgan, a drummer for Elton John, Kate Bush, and Pete Townshend, along with other famous musicians.

Morgan was incredibly welcoming, Long said, and once invited him and a friend — Freddie Long Band guitarist Chris Bell — over to his house in Nashville. Even with those small successes, though, living in the city just wasn’t working.

“Back in Frederick, I performed full-time,” Long said. “But in Nashville, you’re kind of a small fish in a big pond, so I would literally have to go back to Frederick on weekends to make enough money to keep paying my rent. It got to the point where I was like, ‘OK, what am I doing here?’”

So, a year later, he moved back. He lives in Brunswick now, but he still does shows at his usual spots — bars like Bushwaller’s and Shuckin’ Shack. He’s back to being a big fish in a small pond. Just a few weeks ago, he was at Ace Hardware store and heard one of his old jingles, a commercial job for Tri-County Pumps, a local plumbing company. He had recorded it years and years ago with his friend, Phil Briggs, the former morning host at 106.9 The Eagle. But even after his stint in Nashville, Long said, there it was, playing over the airwaves in Frederick County. He didn’t even know the company was still using the song.

“It’s probably one of my biggest hits,” Long said. “When it came on in the store, I was like, ‘That’s wild.’ But that’s why I love it here. I feel extremely fortunate. I feel extremely fortunate to be a full-time musician in Frederick County, Maryland, and to be in a community that has allowed me to do what I love.”

Larry Goren grew up in Pikesville, and he’s spent the last 40 years playing music in the area. He’s well aware that there are plenty of cover bands in Baltimore, and good ones, too — groups that practice every week and turn out tight covers of the same classic rock songs.

So, about a year after he founded his latest band, Midnite Run, who will perform at Alive @ Five tonight along Carroll Creek, the rhythm guitarist gathered his bandmates together and asked them a simple question.

“I said, ‘OK, we’ve been together for almost a year, so what can Midnite Run do that’s going to set Midnite Run apart from everyone else?’” Goren said. “Because there are phenomenal cover bands who play all the time, and I don’t want us to just want to be one of them.”

It seemed like Goren already had an idea, but the rest of the band was immediately enthusiastic, said lead guitarist Jim Frattali. Why not center the group around a cause, and use performances as a vehicle for fundraising? Goren chose veterans, a group that seemed near and dear to both him and his bandmates. His own father was a Marine Corps veteran. Bassist Erik Kaniecki had served in the Navy. Frattali’s father and grandfather were veterans of World War II and World War I, respectively. Vocalist Aaron Fuller’s grandfather served in World War II and Korea, and his fiancée’s son served with the Marines in Afghanistan. On and on and on.

“It’s similar to something like cancer,” Frattali said. “Everyone knows someone who has cancer, and everyone knows someone who’s a veteran or a first responder.”

It was a gradual transition for the band, who started collecting money at bars and clubs before moving on to more ambitious projects. In 2014, Goren organized the group’s first Veterans Benefit Concert, held at the MECU Pavilion in downtown Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. For three of the four years, the headliner has been the progressive rock group Crack the Sky, but Jefferson Starship performed in 2017, Fuller said. The concerts eventually became so successful that Goren founded an independent nonprofit, Music Healing Heroes, which donates the proceeds to K9s For Warriors and The Baltimore Station, a residential treatment program for homeless veterans.

Goren estimates that his nonprofit has donated more than $10,000 to veterans’ groups, and the band still collects donations at smaller performances (including their upcoming Alive @ 5 concert). They’ve reached out to other charities, as well, such as the Brain Injury Association of America — an advocacy group that aims to increase quality-of-life for victims of traumatic brain injury. Conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have resulted in greater numbers of veterans with TBI, and the Department of Defense estimates that 22 percent of combat casualties in those areas are brain injuries. Given Goren’s avid focus on veterans, the partnership makes sense.

“My dad’s a veteran, I have friends who are veterans, my bass player’s a veteran — it’s just always been in my life,” Goren said. “But people just don’t understand how important their role is in our everyday lives. How much we owe to the military, this institution that protects us every day.”

For fellow band members, like Fratelli, Midnite Run’s philanthropic focus has also been a source of personal satisfaction. Fratelli already had plenty of respect for veterans — he grew up listening to World War II stories from his father, who landed on the beaches of Normandy just a few days after the D-Day invasion, and his mother, who grew up in Italy during the war. But it’s still a special feeling when the band raises thousands of dollars for charity, or meets veterans in person at some of their shows.

Just a few weeks ago, the band played a concert at The Baltimore Station and met a homeless veteran who said he had been suffering with emotional problems since returning home from Iraq. At one of the Veterans Benefit Concerts, Fratelli met another soldier who received a service dog through K9s for Warriors. Both men thanked the band personally for their performances.

“Ultimately, that’s the best feeling,” Fratelli said. “That’s the most rewarding part of it. It isn’t being able to say, ‘Oh, we gave money.’ What really makes you feel good is when you actually meet someone who you’re helping and they tell you their story. Or they say, ‘Thanks, we really like your music and appreciate what you’re doing.’ That’s indescribable. It makes you feel good.”

Students at the Frederick Rock School don’t usually start bands with their instructors. But Kimmie Smith wasn’t a typical student. She followed her daughter, now 21, to the school almost 10 years ago, fulfilling a longtime dream to start and sing in a band.

And not just any band. Smith wanted to start a country band — the type of music she had grown up listening to in Monrovia.

“Country was just always what I loved,” Smith said. “And what I liked to sing. Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Mary Chapin Carpenter — they were all big inspirations.”

She formed Southern Charm outside the Rock School with input from Ricky Slezak, a drumming instructor there.

“I had the idea and Ricky was like, ‘Oh, I’ve always wanted to be in a country band,’” Smith said, laughing. “He really didn’t. Ricky just loved being in bands.”

His enthusiasm still encouraged her, though, and she decided to focus on contemporary covers from artists like Shania Twain and the Dixie Chicks. The band’s country roots were tempered, at least a little bit, by other members, including Slezak and guitarist John Turcotte. Neither had much of a background in country music, but they added a rock-n-roll sensibility to covers of AC/DC and the Eagles.

“So, we like to say we’re a little bit country and a little bit rock and a whole lotta charm,” Smith said. “It’s a fun mix.”

Over the years, members of the band have come and gone, but the current lineup was finalized about nine months ago with the addition of bassist Dave Clements, a Frederick native. Another crucial member is Lauren Carnahan, a Boonsboro resident who found out about the band through Jason Perry, a singer and guitarist with the cover band Drunk Naked Pirates.

Carnahan also grew up listening to country music and followed in her mother’s footsteps as a singer. She had cameoed with other groups in the past, but it was clear from her very first rehearsal with Southern Charm that she was meant to join the band, Smith said. When the two vocalists sat down together at Turcotte’s house in Mount Airy, their harmonies almost instantly transformed Southern Charm’s sound.

“I was like, ‘Oh my God, you’re going to stay with us, right?’” Smith said.

“I think it makes us greater than the sum of our parts,” Turcotte added. “And it’s so different to have not just one, but two, female vocalists.”

Another asset for the band is Turcotte’s basement recording studio, a renovation he completed at the suggestion, and with the support of, his wife, Erika (“She’s like the sixth member of the band,” Carnahan said). The group meets there for rehearsal almost every Tuesday and used the space to record an original album last year.

Even when they don’t end up practicing, the studio is where the band meets for impromptu pizza parties and YouTube listening sessions. The fact that they’re all friends, Smith said, has helped the group stick together since their early days playing smaller venues, including the Blue Sky Bar in Mount Airy. She and Turcotte thought it was a huge accomplishment when the band first booked a performance at Champion Billiards, one of the biggest stages in Frederick. Since then, Southern Charm has moved onto even bigger events.

Nearly 1,000 people attended the band’s Alive @ 5 performance two years ago, according to Carnahan. And they played in front of 2,000 people last year at Sunfest, an Ocean City music festival.

“I was extremely nervous,” Smith said. “I never imagined, when I first started the band, that I’d be singing in front of so many people.”

Carnahan couldn’t be at Sunfest that day, and it made Smith realize how much she depended on her bandmate for both harmonization and support. In fact, she added, the whole band leans on one another. That was never clearer than when Southern Charm played a recent show at Red Eye’s Dock Bar on Kent Island, and Smith came down with a case of viral pharyngitis (a sore throat, essentially, but a total voice-killer).

Smith made it onstage, but she quickly realized her voice was nearly shot. Luckily, Carnahan was there to sing their normal harmonies solo, and Turcotte even filled in with a song by Joe Walsh. No one in the audience seemed to realize that one of the band’s two singers was performing without her voice.

“I was just thinking, ‘I love you people,’” Smith said. “I think we all kind of realized how much we depend on each other.”

Meyer Schlossenberg, the drummer for the band Vertigo Red, knows what it’s like to almost make it big. When he was around 22, just out of college, he auditioned for Thee Katatonix, a well-known Baltimore band that had just finished up a tour in England.

“They were kind of grunge before grunge was big,” Schlossenberg said, and landing a job as the band’s new drummer felt like hitting the jackpot.

“That was incredible for me,” he continued. “It’s something that every young musician aspires to. But then once you get that role, it’s not just sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. It’s not all glamour. It’s a serious commitment.”

For the next four years, he toured with the band all over the mid-Atlantic, hitting major venues like Hammerjack’s in Baltimore (the same stage where Guns N’ Roses made its local debut). And about a decade after Schlossenberg joined Thee Katatonix, his current bandmate, Glen Forsbacka, had his own brush with fame.

In Forsbacka’s case, he joined a southern rock group called Four Day Creep, which he said was successful enough to be offered a recording contract from Arista Records. The band didn’t end up signing the contract, but his experience with the music industry left Forsbacka jaded at best.

“I’ll put it this way,” he said. “After that band broke up, I didn’t pick up the bass for two years because I was so disgruntled. And then when I did, I said I was only going to do it for the fun of it, not for the money of it.”

Schlossenberg went through his own troubles when he left Thee Katatonix to get married — a life decision that wasn’t exactly compatible with a competitive touring schedule, he said. But he and Forsbacka still bring a professional mindset to Vertigo Red, their latest venture with two long-time bandmates.

The cover band formed after Schlossenberg and Forsbacka left a band called Soul Easy with guitarists Deno Photinakis and Ken Leclercq. The four men decided to form a new, contemporary cover band with a female vocalist — someone who could handle a versatile range of songs. Enter Briana Marcantoni, the band’s lead vocalist, who finalized the lineup in 2015. As for the name Vertigo Red? Well, Schlossenberg said, it was the only moniker that stuck out of more than a hundred options.

“There are people who think it comes from a book or the Alfred Hitchcock movie, but that’s not the case,” he explained. “I kept suggesting Vertigo and as we kept narrowing the list down, it was one of the only ones that remained. And we added the ‘Red’ to make it more original.”

About half the band’s five members are married with children, but Vertigo Red still plays around 55 to 60 shows a year, according to Schlossenberg. And even though their schedules are different, everyone has the same level of commitment, added Leclercq.

When the band meets in Annapolis for rehearsals, everyone is expected to already know their parts. They’ve even made improvements to their setlist minutes before taking the stage.

“We had a show the weekend after Aretha Franklin passed, and we literally learned ‘Respect’ behind the bar at Looney’s Pub in Bel Air.” Leclercq said. “Because we knew the audience would respond, and we wanted to pay our respects.”

Their hard work has been met with several major bookings, including SunFest in Ocean City and two NFL pregame shows scheduled for later this fall, Schlossenberg said. It’s enough that even he’s satisfied.

Almost.

“I’m the guy in Vertigo Red that, yeah, I want the most out of music and I always will,” he said. “I’m always wanting to push for more travel, I’m always wanting to do originals. But when you stop and think, there’s a lot of bands that want to get to where we are.”

When J.B. Dunn and Kimbrey Havens first met in 2014, he was already a fixture on the Frederick music scene. She had just moved to town a few months ago, and started heading to open mic nights at Cafe Nola to scope out the local talent.

“When we met, it was only my second night out ever in Frederick,” Havens said. “And I didn’t actually want to perform. I just wanted to see what kind of artists were there, and what kind of music they were playing.”

Still, Dunn was impressed. A Damascus native, he began playing bars in Frederick at the age of 15, back when underage musicians could still perform at places like Bushwaller’s if they came early enough and brought a parent or guardian. At the time, Dunn said, his parents thought he was ready to branch out from their local church — his usual performance venue — so his dad would march him into bars and watch him play guitar, sitting there with his arms folded.

As he got older, Dunn only got more involved in the local scene. After a stint at the now-defunct Life Bible College in Christianburg, Virginia (he and the administration “mutually decided” that it would better if he parted ways with the school, Dunn said), he moved back to Frederick and started a band called The Secondhand Ramblers with his friend, Scott Blecman (once a co-worker at the Pizza Hut in Mount Airy). He was also booking bands for Cafe Nola at the time he met Havens, whose tactics immediately caught his attention.

“I knew what she was doing, and that impressed me right away,” Dunn said of Havens. “I was really impressed that she was playing the long game. So I encouraged her to come back the next week and bring an instrument ‘cause I wanted to know how good she was, at that point. I was playing the same game she was.”

Havens, for her part, took Dunn up on his offer. The next week, she brought her guitar to another open mic night at The Cellar Door, launching an unofficial “solo partnership” with Dunn. For a few months, she said, the two musicians played the same shows and open mic nights, occasionally collaborating but mostly focusing on their own material. Musically, their styles weren’t dramatically different. Havens had performed in a bluegrass ensemble at her alma mater, Denison University, and still drew from traditional bluegrass and folk artists. Dunn, she said, was playing “J.B. stuff” — the kind of pop and rock Americana he played with The Secondhand Ramblers.

“I feel like for a while, one of us would book a show and just bring the other one on,” Dunn added. “That was kind of it. It wasn’t necessarily my first inclination to say, ‘Yeah, I want to start a whole new project together.’”

Sometime in 2015, though, the inevitable happened — the two started a band together. It was Havens’ dad, a co-owner of her Walkersville-based doggie day care business, who came up with the name Israel Creek, a feeder stream into the Monocacy River.

“I think we were trying to find a name that was sort of earthy and indicative of where we’re from,” Dunn said. “And Kimbrey’s dad just threw it out there because Israel Creek literally crosses the property that their business is on.”

Havens played mandolin for the band and Dunn played guitar and they both shared vocals, a smaller, simpler sound that worked for gigs at coffee shops and wineries. But after a year, they started thinking about expanding their lineup for larger events. Blecman, Dunn’s long-time collaborator, had wanted to join Israel Creek “basically as soon as I came to him and told him, ‘Hey, I’m playing in this string band,’” Dunn said. Dunn was hesitant at first, but he and Havens wanted an upright bass player, and Blecman was looking for an excuse to buy the instrument.

“I think it kind of gave me the last push I needed to pick one up,” said Blecman, who also plays electric bass for The Secondhand Ramblers.

Around the same time, Dunn and Havens met Brian Murray, who introduced himself during an open mic night at Bushwaller’s on Christmas Eve.

“I think he was just trying to hit on Kimbrey, but he offered to play the fiddle for us,” Dunn said with a smirk.

Murray and Havens started dating a few months later after another chance meeting at Cafe Nola. A few months after that, Murray officially joined Israel Creek, and the two are now married with a five-month-old son.

“I think it’s been a good situation for us,” Havens said. “I’ve been in other bands where there are very strict rules about dating other members, so I can see why it would be an issue, but it never was for us.”

Dunn described Israel Creek’s sound as “neo-folk,” but the band has recently been working to distinguish themselves from The Secondhand Ramblers and delve deeper into traditional bluegrass, according to Havens. She’s introduced songs from artists like Alison Krauss into the band’s set list, and they also play a handful of original titles that she, Dunn and Blecman have all written independently.

Right now, the band plays about one gig a month, a pace that’s comfortable for Havens and Murray — currently occupied by their five-month-old — and for Blecman, who’s getting married in just a couple weeks. Dunn expects the band to maintain those performances even after he moves to Portland, Oregon, for “an extended stay” at the end of the year.

“I absolutely fell in love with that town,” he said. “It’s everything I ever wanted. But one of the best decisions I’ve ever made is to surround myself with people I genuinely trust as far as playing music, and outside of being a band, we’re all friends. So, the band wouldn’t dissolve any more than our friendships would.”

Straight Up Tribal doesn’t practice. Their songs don’t have set lyrics. And the band was formed from a drum circle at the University of Maryland – Baltimore County that eventually took on a life of its own. It’s all very on-brand for a group that describes itself with terms like “grassroots rhythm” and “revolutionary tunes.”

“We played around with the title ‘world funk,’ but I like to think we’re even more open than that,” said 32-year-old frontman Abhik Saha. “It’s like an improvisational funk/rock/reggae sound with a little bit of an operatic flair.”

Like three quarters of the band’s current lineup, Saha joined Straight Up Tribal before the group had a formal name. At first, it was just a drum circle founded by Steven McAlpine, a UMBC instructor who joined the faculty in 2006.

McAlpine, 57, had played percussion since third grade and wanted to foster an “out-of-classroom” space, he said. And he was interested in the communality of drumming, as well as its flexibility. Years ago, he auditioned for Stomp, a performance group that uses ordinary objects to create percussive beats. In 2000, he attended the Rocky Mountain Folks Festival and was invited to perform onstage with his friend, Paul Reisler, on the hammer dulcimer. McAlpine didn’t have his drum kit, but he improvised by foraging for a five-gallon water drum and bringing it onstage.

“That’s the moment I realized these everyday objects can be viable musical instruments,” he said. For his drum circle at UMBC, he brought along extra djembes — a traditional African drum — and invited all sorts of performers to join in: bucket drummers, singers, even dancers and hula-hoopers.

Trey Kulp, the band’s guitarist, was one of the first UMBC students to join the drum circle when McAlpine set up outside the school’s University Center. But the impromptu performances gained more of a structure when Saha joined the drum circle and began singing over the beats, improvising the words every time he joined in.

“I had no idea Abhik was such a talented improviser,” McAlpine said. Saha, for his part, said his parents were classically trained as Indian musicians, a tradition that incorporates a wide degree of extemporaneous performance.

“So, I grew up with my parents singing and making music,” Saha said. “For me, I would say that it has a lot to do with meditation and mindfulness. In the sense that I believe we’re all capable of making up incredible things on the spot, we just have to get out of our own way and allow it to come out of us.”

Kulp even credits Saha with coming up with the name for the band.

“It kind of came out of a joke because Abhik would start yelling out ‘Straight up tribal!’ in between songs,” Kulp said. “And I was like, ‘Dude, that’s our name.’”

Straight Up Tribal solidified in 2010 when Stephen Mitchell — Kulp’s friend and former classmate at Gov. Thomas Johnson High School in Frederick — joined the band as a bass player. For four years, the group had a regular monthly gig at Teavolve, a café and lounge in Baltimore. They’ve also performed in Frederick, on First Saturdays in front of the Velvet Lounge, and at several previous Alive @ 5 concerts.

For McAlpine, though, the group’s most meaningful performances have been at events that reflect their own values and beliefs. In 2011, the band performed at the Occupy D.C. demonstration in McPherson Square. And in 2015, Straight Up Tribal performed at Artscape in Baltimore as part of an exhibit made entirely out of recycled plastic and discarded materials. McAlpine crafted two drum tables and a kit made entirely from found objects for the performance — and still uses the recycled kit for 95 percent of the band’s performances.

“The band really exists to raise awareness, so it’s thinking about where we want to perform,” he said. “It’s not about the money. It’s about connecting with people and co-creating the world we want to live in.”

The band also still relies on improvisation. According to Kulp, most of their songs have a few set chord progressions and an overall theme, but the rhythm and lyrics still change from performance to performance.

“I think it brings a rawness to the shows,” he added. “The moment is special because it’s different every time.”

It was around 2007 when Neil Reedy and Gonzalo Bernal joined their first band together, a salsa group called Movimiento. Bernal had just moved from Venezuela to the United States, and Reedy had recently moved from Philadelphia to the D.C. area. The two lived in Northern Virginia, and Reedy would occasionally give Bernal a ride home after band practice.

On the way back, the two sometimes discussed music (as musicians do). Reedy, a trumpet and tin whistle player, decided to play Bernal a sample of Irish music one day in the car.

“I thought, ‘Well, he’s from Venezuela, so maybe he hasn’t heard of it before,’” Reedy said. “But he was very familiar with it.”

So familiar, in fact, that Bernal threw Reedy a curveball. “I said, ‘I know a Panamanian musician who did a cover of ‘Danny Boy’ in salsa,’” Bernal said. “I think his brain totally twisted. Then I said, ‘Would you like to start making music together?’”

Movimiento eventually disbanded, but the two came together to form La Unica, one of the area’s only Irish-salsa bands. Or, at least, that’s one way the group describes itself.

“We’ve been fighting on how to describe our sound forever,” Reedy said. “It sounds cliché to say we can’t be defined, but it’s true that we incorporate a bunch of different elements.”

“Celtic-Caribbean” is the latest descriptor adopted by Cory Padin, the lead guitarist for the band. He joined the group in 2011 after spotting an ad recruiting a guitarist for “La Unica Irish Band,” a cultural amalgamation that caught his attention.

Padin had been playing the guitar since he was 11 years old, graduating from the Buffalo Academy of Visual and Performing Arts in New York and attending Berklee College of Music in Boston for a year before switching to business school. But like most of the band’s other members, he had stuck with more traditional genres — jazz, funk, R&B, and soul — before auditioning for La Unica.

“I think I kind of wanted something different,” Padin said. “Something completely unique. But Irish music was completely different for me. I had no foundation in it.”

Still, Bernal viewed Padin as a bit of a miracle. The band’s original drummer and guitarist had left a few months earlier, and they still didn’t have a bassist. He and Reedy were limping along, struggling to keep La Unica alive. Bernal put out countless Craigslist ads, he said, but no one responded. Finally, Reedy suggested he try writing an ad in Spanish and seeing what happened.

“And this crazy kid responded to the post in broken Spanish,” Bernal said with a laugh. “That was Cory.”

Padin eventually helped recruit Matt Tredwell, the band’s current drummer, and TJ Turqman, its current bassist. Bernal also described Padin as the band’s “musical director,” an informal title that mostly involves juggling ideas from each of the four members and uniting musical styles in a way that doesn’t feel clunky.

That’s surprisingly easy to do with Latin and Irish music, Padin said, genres that tend to share a 3/4 time signature. It’s not as easy when the band incorporates songs by other artists. One of its most popular covers is “Wake Me Up” by Avicii, a song they’ve adapted to include the fiddle and tin whistle. Most of the band’s other cover songs include just as many modifications. The goal, Padin added, is to adapt the music so that it’s almost unrecognizable from the original.

“We kind of try to breathe new life into it,” he said. “I think that makes it more musically interesting, and it’s something the crowd can connect with.”

Luckily, the band is blessed with a roster of performers who can play a variety of different instruments. Reedy plays the trumpet and tin whistle along with the bodhrán, a traditional Irish frame drum. Bernal is an accomplished vocalist and relearned the violin after being classically trained on the instrument in his native Venezuela.

The band is also looking forward to its tenth anniversary in 2019.

At this point, Bernal said, the group is so close that he once offered to donate a kidney to Reedy while his bandmate was dealing with an extended illness.

“We’re brothers now,” Bernal said. “We trust each other. Really, it’s like a marriage. The trick is to keep things fun.”

Scott Ambush is the only Alive @ 5 performer this summer — so far — to have his own Wikipedia page. But he also got his start in music, like so many others, in a garage band at the age of 12.

Also comprised of Tommy Onley and Bryon and Kenny Parker — three of Ambush’s neighbors in Urbana — the band was called Blue Moon in direct reference to a shirt worn by one of its founding members.

“We were trying to think of a name for the band and one of the guys had a T-shirt on that was blue and had a crescent moon on it,” Ambush said. “So, that’s what he called it.”

Ambush wanted to be drummer, but — in true 12-year-old fashion — Tommy had already called dibs on the role.

In hindsight, Ambush’s obligatory move to bassist might have been a stroke of destiny for the young performer. Now in his 50s, he’s best known as the bassist for the jazz fusion band Spyro Gyra, a nearly 30-year career marked by five Grammy nominations and tours in more than 70 countries. His devotion to the instrument is so intense that he now crafts his own guitars; his current bass features an ash body with a maple burl top and carbon fiber neck.

Ambush was not the isolated musician of his family. His mother, before moving to Maryland, toured as a gospel singer in Georgia and later sang at several churches in the Frederick area. His uncle was also an amateur musician around town. But Ambush took it further than his relatives. Even Blue Moon toured locally, including gigs at the Fort Detrick officers’ club.

Ambush played in his high school jazz band and formed a local R&B group, playing along with records to improve his own performance. His tastes also evolved. As a young teenager, he played all rock and roll — Jimi Hendrix, Alice Cooper, Deep Purple. But by the time he was 16, his cousin, Allen, a pianist, had turned him onto jazz.

The first group he remembers listening to is Return to Forever, a jazz fusion band founded in the 1970s. Then Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five,” the highest-selling jazz single of all time, was instrumental in his development. When he was still in high school, jazz and fusion groups would sometimes perform at La Paz — back at its old location on Market Space — and Ambush would mingle with the players. At the time, jazz was something totally different for him — a way of removing the constraints of other genres.

“With a few exceptions, it was the music that was most freeing for a bassist,” Ambush said. “It’s more advanced harmonically and there’s more room for improvisation. In other types of music, the bass was really a support instrument. So, jazz was the best way to express yourself.”

That musical exploration continued into Ambush’s tenure at the University of Maryland, where he studied psychology and frequently escaped to perform with groups in D.C. Soon, he was spending more time playing music than going to class, and he left school when he was around 20 years old.

“I’m sure my parents would have preferred if I had finished my degree,” Ambush said. “But they tried to be as supportive as they could. I think with kids, you realize that if they’re motivated in that way, they’ll do it no matter what.”

Ambush was motivated to make it as a professional musician. One of the first groups he joined in D.C. was called The Rhythm Method (later changed to just The Method, he hastily added), a jazz-pop-fusion band he first saw at La Paz. In 1989, he had his first audition with Spyro Gyra, already a Grammy-nominated band.

He didn’t get in on the first round. At the time, Ambush said, the band had a heavily Latin-inspired sound and went with a bass player from Puerto Rico. But in 1992, he was invited for a second audition and became the full-time bassist for the band, beating out 19 other contenders.

Twenty-six years later, the band still plays 60 to 70 shows a year all over the world. Ambush just recently got back from a trip to Johannesburg, South Africa, where the band took a 19-hour flight only to discover that their scheduled appearance at a music festival had been canceled.

“The entire festival was canceled after we got there,” Ambush said. “There were permitting issues, and political issues with getting permits, and the whole thing had been scrapped by the time we touched down.”

It wasn’t the worst setback Ambush ever experienced on tour — he once boarded a flight from JFK to Tokyo that hit a flock of birds shortly after departing and ended up circling the air for hours, dumping fuel. And he certainly has no plans to leave the band.

But it might be nice, Ambush admitted, to eventually ease off travel and spend more time at home. He plays around Frederick a few times a year, but it’s often just outside the city — in D.C. or venues in Virginia. Spyro Gyra has performed at the Weinberg, but 5 p.m. tonight at Carroll Creek Amphitheater is Ambush’s first performance for Alive @ 5.

He’s changing things up a bit for the venue, focusing on original compositions and reimagined hits like “Happy” by Pharrell. But even after all these years as a musician, performing in Frederick still gives him some anxiety.

“I think it does give me just a little bit of angst,” Ambush said. “Sometimes the people who are closest to you are the ones you want to impress the most.”

Across the Pond is a Celtic band without a single member from Scotland or Ireland. It doesn’t need one. Somehow, the music managed to unite a Navy veteran, a former chemist, and a full-time guitar instructor who got his start in a country rock group called Hired Guns.

Sure, band leader Dan Diviney can trace his Irish ancestry back to the 1700s, when his forefathers emigrated to central Pennsylvania to work as lumberjacks and coal miners. But he had no background in Celtic music — the first instrument he ever played was a tin whistle his mother bought for him at the end of his six-year career as a Navy meteorologist.

That was in 1980, but it wasn’t until 1989 that he picked up the whistle for the first time. In the middle of relocating his family from Nebraska to Pittsburgh, he went to see Makem and Clancy, an Irish folk duo famous for songs like “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda.” Watching the men play, Diviney said, something clicked.

“Even though I’m a native-born American, the music comes out of 800 years of oppression,” he said. “It’s addictive. So, for the last 15 to 20 years, that’s been the primary focus of my life.”

He started playing whistles and bodhran, an Irish drum, at seisiuns — jam sessions for traditional Irish music. That’s how he met Mike Morrison, a full-time performer and guitar instructor. In the past, Morrison had played in a country band called Latigo Smith, which later evolved into Hired Guns. But his interest in Celtic music stemmed back to his childhood on a farm near Dillsburg, Pennsylvania, where he grew up listening to bluegrass and old-time Appalachian music.

“That type of music has a lot of its roots in Scotch-Irish music,” Morrison said. “The immigrants who who came and settled in the Appalachian Mountains were mostly Irish and Scottish, and they brought their music with them.”

By 2004, Morrison and Diviney had formed their first Irish band, Cormorant’s Fancy (the cormorant, Diviney said, is a large, black waterbird common on the Irish coasts). The group had Morrison on the guitar, flute, and mandolin, and Diviney on the drums and whistles, but no fiddler — an essential instrument in traditional Celtic music. That’s something Chuck Krepley noticed when he saw the band in 2007 at the historic Fairfield Inn in Fairfield, Pennsylvania.

At that point, Krepley — a former chemist — had nearly 30 years of experience on the violin. He had started his musical career as a bluegrass banjoist, but took up the fiddle to add an extra layer of authenticity to his French and Indian War re-enactment group.

“We played a group of Scottish highlanders from the 1700s who were serving with the British Army,” Krepley said. “Historically, banjos weren’t around in the 1750s, but fiddles were.”

In 2007, he was also halfway through a two-year apprenticeship with Bluett Bros. Violins, a handmade instrument store in York. Diviney and Morrison auditioned him for the band, and the dynamic clicked.

Three years later, Cormorant’s Fancy disbanded and rebranded as Across the Pond, Diviney said. He, Morrison, and Krepley are still the band’s primary three members, and they play about 90 shows a year from North Carolina to Montreal.

Weddings and Celtic festivals are some of their primary gigs, naturally, but the band books a surprisingly diverse range of performances. Diviney said they’ve played a corporate event in Manhattan for Captify, a fast-growing British tech company. Back in March, the romance novelist Nora Roberts — a famous resident of Boonsboro — hired the band to play a traditional evening cèilidh at her home.

“Celtic music is sort of a niche market for a niche audience,” Krepley said. “But I think because of the energy we put into performances, we attract fans who wouldn’t ordinarily be interested. Celtic music can be haunting, it it can be ethereal, it can be powerful and driving, and it just has an authenticity that I think immediately appeals to people.”

Diviney might be the band’s leader behind the scenes, but Morrison is the “quarterback” onstage, Diviney said. That’s largely because the band doesn’t play with a traditional setlist. They’ve worked out a repertoire that ranges from the contemporary — songs written in the past century — to traditional Gaelic ballads written over a thousand years ago. Morrison goes onstage with a loose list of songs, but mostly depends on audience feedback to decide what the band will play next.

“I like the ability to be able to let the show take on its own life,” he said. “And if something is really working during a show, I want to keep that vibe going for a little bit.”

The band’s Alive @ 5 performance tonight will also include Emily Warren, an 18-year-old step dancer trained at the Broesler School of Irish Dance in Baltimore. By the time she was two years old, Warren said she was watching taped “Riverdance” performances every day at home.

Her parents initially tried enrolling her in ballet — the classes were much closer to her home in Gettysburg — but quickly realized her affection for both forms of dance was not equally distributed.

“I was not having it,” Warren said. Her parents enrolled her at the Coyle School of Irish Dance near Philadelphia — an hour-and-15-minute drive from her house — and later transferred her to Broesler, a nearly two-hour drive away. But the commute paid off. She’s now an open champion in Irish dance and tours regularly with Across the Pond.

“I think it really adds to the performance value,” Warren said. “I’m really big on pulling people up from the audience. And it’s traditional. When you go to a bar or pub in Ireland to see a band, nine times out of 10, they’ll have an Irish dancer with them.”